The many surprises in Madurai’s cuisine

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It’s not a Monday, but it’s certainly meaty, as Madurai meals are likely to be. I discover, however, that there is much more to the Madurai food story: urban migration has played a big role in shaping its cuisine, and the city—sprawling, ugly, heavily industrial—contains complex layers shaped by caste, migration and culture.

The evening starts and ends with two beverages associated with the city. While the endnote is provided by Madurai’s famous jigarthanda, that thick, goopy concoction made with milk, almond gum, sugar and nannari syrup that some say was brought to the city by Mughal traders, it begins with a far more wholesome drink, paruthi paal, at a pushcart in the heart of the city. In the middle of the pushcart is a large brass vessel, into which the gentleman running the cart dips a brass mug to draw out a thick, brown liquid, which he then pours into small steel glasses. The drink seems to be popular with people returning from the office, who throng around inhaling the rich, cardamom-y aroma emanating from the smoking hot liquid, a concoction of the “milk" extracted from cotton seeds—a regional practice predating the popularity of the various nut and seed milks we pour into our coffees today —and a variety of spices along with sugar. It tastes very slightly like hot, strong tea with a nutty and slightly vegetal after-taste—not unpleasant, and certainly unique.

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The food tour is organised by the Madurai-based Foodies Day Out, founded in 2011 by a quartet of food-mad friends who wanted to showcase their city’s varied and distinctive cuisine, and our guide today is Soundar, a trained chef who now works at a restaurant in Jaipur, but is back in his home-town for a break. Migration seems to be a quiet theme this evening: the next place Soundar takes us to is a streetside pushcart run by a Tamil Saurashtrian couple belonging to a community whose cuisine has evolved distinctly and separately from the rest of the city’s. The Saurashtrians, who migrated from Gujarat to southern India almost a millennium ago, settling down around Madurai, Salem and Thanjavur, are largely vegetarian, and the couple is frying up a local delicacy: keerai vadais, or crisp vadas made by mixing leaves from the mullu murangai, or Indian coral tree, in a thick batter. The result is hot, crunchy vadais that taste very different from the far more common masala vadais or medu vadas.

From here on, though, the tour takes a strictly non-vegetarian turn: our next stop is the simply named Madurai Bun Parotta Kadai (kadai is ‘shop’ in Tamil), whose owner K. Karuppanan is said to have invented the fluffy, bun-shaped parotta made by twisting stretchy dough in the air, shaping it like a bun, and frying it in hot oil. It is served with a number of meaty gravies and stir-fries, from the Mutton Mutta Kari (mutton chunks fried with eggs) and Kudal Fry (goat intestines tossed in a peppery gravy) to simple, coconut-infused mutton and chicken curries. The kadai also makes Mutton Kari Dosa, another Madurai speciality, but Soundar hustles us out to our next stop—the OG Kari Dosa place, Konar Kadai, established in 1943. The owners of the restaurant—which has several branches now—used to be butchers, and would fry up the leftover meat with masalas at the end of the day and put it on top of a dosa, and ended up inventing a brand new dish.

I’d imagined Konar’s Kari Dosa to be like a masala dosa with a meaty filling, but I couldn’t be more wrong—it’s a solid, square, layered dish made by stuffing a soft dosa base with meat and scrambled eggs, topping it up with crisply fried keema, and serving it hot wrapped in a banana leaf. In texture and shape, it reminds me of Kolkata’s kabiraji cutlet, which is a fish, chicken or mutton patty dipped in an egg batter and deep fried. “A lot of restaurants make the Kari Dosa today... it has become a generic dish, but Konar’s stands out because they are the original inventors of the dish and the meat is still cooked by the ladies of the family in a centralised kitchen. The dosa is only assembled at the restaurant," Praveena Mukunthan, one of the founders of Foodies Day Out, tells me later.

Madurai is known for its “messes" that serve a large variety of meaty gravies, and lunch the next day is at Amma Mess, one of the oldest in the city, where the spread includes pigeon and rabbit curries, brain fry, trotter soup and crab omelette (the famous bone marrow omelette has, alas, run out). Dinner is at a Burma Idiyappa Kadai—tiny, hole-in-the-wall joints with the same name that serve pretty much only one dish: steaming hot string hoppers topped with coconut milk. Intrigued by the name, I dig into its history, and though not well-documented, the dish seems to have originated among the Burmese Indians who were repatriated from Myanmar, then Burma, following the 1962 military coup, to cities like Chennai, Tiruchirappalli and Madurai.

Something in the city’s food-obsessed culture, its hearty acceptance of new dishes, and perhaps the migrants’ own longing for khow suey led to the evolution of this dish, which can, by a stretch, compared to the Burmese soupy noodles made using a coconut milk broth. That’s Madurai’s food culture in a nutshell—expansive, inclusive, and shaped by waves of migration to this landlocked, industrialised Tamil city, where a famous deity resides, sometimes almost an afterthought.

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