It was at the age of 18, when I started student life in the US, that I first turned to reading poetry regularly—or, to be more honest, what seemed to me like poetry. On Sundays, or in the long, cold evenings of Pennsylvania, far away from my home in Chennai, I’d curl up on a couch with the first volume of Samaithu Parand simply read. I quote a particularly moving excerpt below:
Kitchen confidential: (from top) Priya Ramkumar, Meenakshi Ammal’s granddaughter-in-law, carries on the Samaithu Par radition; Ammal’s home; the original, hand-written book. Hemant Mishra / Mint
“Beat the softly cooked dhal with a spoon, mixing well with water. Add to boiling rasam. Boil for a minute or two. Add either water or dhal.-cooked water to make 4 cups of rasam.Wait till rasambubbles up. Remove from fire. Season with mustard and chillies. Garnish with curry leaves and coriander leaves.”
Like the best of poetry, Samaithu Par’s recipes are simple, direct and instantly evocative. On a couple of occasions, I have fallen asleep with the imagined smell of bubbling rasam in my nostrils. For close to 50 years now, the three volumes of Samaithu Par (Cook and See) have been manufacturing such phantom aromas in generations of south Indians exiled from their home kitchens—and then guiding them painlessly into manufacturing the actual dishes behind those aromas.
Samaithu Par, which grandly bills itself as “A comprehensive treatise on traditional South Indian vegetarian cooking”, was written and published in Tamil in 1961, by a housewife called S. Meenakshi Ammal. Her ovoid, sepia photograph still adorns the books’ jackets, and four-and-a-half decades after she passed away, the books continue to be faithfully updated, improved and published (in six languages) by her family.
S. Meenakshi Ammal Publications operates out of an antique house in Mylapore, a house that Ammal bought in the early 1960s for Rs10,000 with the proceeds from her books. “She exhausted all her funds in that one purchase,” says Priya Ramkumar. “Then she had to save more money to buy things like fans and lights, one by one.”
Ramkumar is Ammal’s granddaughter-in-law—the wife of her grandson, Ramkumar Shankar. As the de facto manager of S. Meenakshi Ammal Publications, she is a repository of information on the doyenne of south Indian cooking. When the books’ old Tamil volume measurements such as azhakku and padi had to be brought into the modern metric world, it was Ramkumar who sat in her kitchen to patiently work out the equivalents. In the godown at Samaithu Par House—holding “Rs5-6 lakh worth of books at the moment”—Ramkumar narrates the story of Samaithu Par.