For those of you who apart from slurping up good food also enjoy watching the steel blur of a sharp knife dicing onions,love the flip-flop of a caramel custard being turned out on a serving plate,a visit to a kitchen in the traditional homes found in Kerala is highly recommended. The kitchen I mention is not your modular-at-the-touch-of -a-button beauty. It is not the kind with cabinets to hide the gas cylinder or with a dish drying rack,but a kitchen where the smells and flavours of the days cooking cling on soot covered walls. The vegetables used in this kitchen have been grown in the backyard. This is the birthplace of the secret recipe to that mean meen curry and the mellow mor curry.
This kitchen is mostly at the far end of an ancestral home,you have to walk past photographs of over 5 generations of grand fathers,grand mothers and grand aunts staring down at you from the huge living room walls. The high ceilings,the rooms lined with dusty books and the long corridors are part of the tour.
Nothing goes to waste in the land of coconuts where with the sound of the native tongue,the chatter of the maid servant doling out gossip,the plop of the spoon in the mutton stew and the sizzle of the prawns in the pan. The kitchen walls have heard it all.
