BackCoconut and the great chutney conundrum
By trial and error you can achieve a consistency that you find satisfying. It will never be a coconut chutney, but it comes close
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With the dawn, came the chutney.
For years, that was my routine. I woke up, stumbled out of bed and, often, without brushing my teeth, did two things: put my wife’s tea on the stove and put the chutney ingredients into the food processor.
I still put the tea on the stove. That is part of a premarital compact, which I rarely violate. The chutney is no longer a part of my morning bleariness because the version with coconut is no longer a part of our lives. Earlier this year, some cardiac niggles led to the abjuring of some foodstuff, coconut included. Out went the fish curry, out went the chutney. Although there are some who insist on the goodness and harmlessness of coconut in food, I prefer to follow conventional medical wisdom, which says consume it only occasionally.
Removing chutney from my diet was up there with removing red meat. I was so used to my morning dosa and chutney. I liked making the chutney, plunging in the coconut, the coriander, chillies and ginger, then squeezing in the lime juice, adjusting the salt, flooding it with water, holding the top down and giving it a great whirl. It was magical, watching the individual ingredients merge into a lush, liquid green chutney. I liked dipping my finger in to feel the tang of the lime, the fire of the chillies, the freshness of the coriander, a symphony brought together in the concert house of the coconut.
But I struggled with chutney. I had never made any chutney other than the one I knew and loved so well. Under my mother’s creative eye, the substitutes rolled out in both our homes. Our part-time cook, Ambika, tried a couple. My mother’s cook, Laxmi, tried many options, guided by my mother. The coconut was replaced with many things: onion, peanut, chana dal. Some were all right, some were not. Some actually looked like coconut chutney but tasted nothing like it.
Our dosas at home also changed, but that was only an improvement. From white-rice dosas we moved to ragi dosas, the batter made at home with ragi flour and soaked urad dal. All of us love the brown colour and rich texture, and I like the challenge of laying out dosas from a batter that appears to change subtly every day.
But the chutneys with the ragi dosas never seemed to be right. They varied between coarse, not tangy enough, bitter, sweet and, oh, just wrong. I didn’t care about the colour: bright red, dull green, muddy brown—it just wasn’t the lime green that so woke me up every day, kick-started my senses and made me smile as the morning breeze rustled through the rain trees outside and the maulvi started his azaan.
When I stopped making the morning chutney, things changed. I became grumpier and not a little disoriented. My routine was kaput. I realized I could no longer eat chutney made by someone else.
So, I went to my mother, the mistress of chutneys.
She was the woman who introduced me two decades ago to the family’s basic coconut chutney, a nerve-stirring but simple mix of coconut, ginger, green chillies, coriander and lime.
Since that was now out of my life, I think she somehow thought it was incumbent on her to find a replacement. I am happy to report that after all those attempts, much nit-picking and suspicious sniffing by her son, she was successful.
Of course, I do not like to say that the new chutney is as good as the old one. It may be, but the effervescence of coconut was either real or so strongly imagined as to be true in my mind. In the event, the new chutney is very good and has even started looking like the old one. Last week, I saw the new chutney on the dining table and irritably said, “Coconut chutney?"
My mother replied sharply, “It is not. How would I make coconut chutney?"
And it wasn’t of course. I guess the method of manufacture is now so refined that the chutney is ground long enough to create a grainy but airy texture. Lightness is something a chutney must aspire to. It must float down your food pipe not drop through like lead. When you scoop up a chutney with a dosa, it must feel almost weightless. If it weighs down your fingers, something is likely to be wrong.
This lightness is easy to achieve in a coconut chutney, once you learn how to add just enough water and grind it to airiness. It is much harder to do when peanut, onion or dal replace the coconut. But by trial and error you can achieve a consistency that you find satisfying. It will never be a coconut chutney, but it comes close.
Not-coconut green chutney
Ingredients
150g roasted groundnut or roasted gram (chana dal)
3-4 green chillies
coriander, a small bunch
1 medium onion, cut into small pieces
Juice of one lime
Salt to taste
Method
Grind all the ingredients, adding water to get the consistency you require. Serve with dosa.
This is a column on easy, inventive cooking from a male perspective. Samar Halarnkar also writes the fortnightly science column Frontier Mail for Mint and is the author of the book The Married Man’s Guide to Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures.
Also Read | Samar’s previous Lounge columns
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