In celebration of the flaky perfection of porotta
Raise your hand. Which one would a Malayali housewife like most — gold or husband? All hands go for gold. Raise your hand. Which one would a Malayali husband like the most — porotta or his better half? The quintessential, flaky Kerala flatbread wins hands down. Jokes apart, this classic from the small south Indian state, marketed as God’s Own Country, meets no dissenting voice, except from television health vigilantes.
What’s the big deal about porotta when the Kerala special has cousins all over the world known by different nomenclature: parantha, parauntha, prontha, parontay, palata, porotha, prata, forota and farata? There is even a place in town where more than 100 varieties of parathas are served. No exaggeration; you name it, they have it, including Chinese paratha and Schezwan paratha. Apart from hard work, what goes liberally into the Kerala porotta is virgin sentiment, which plays the differentiator.
One might wonder, having been one of the last posts of communism, how come Malayalis have not cooked up porottas in honour of two of the world’s long-serving Marxist autocrats and branded them as Putin Porotta and Xi Porotta? Walk into any Malabari restaurant and ask them how many varieties they serve, they would probably reply, “Porotta, porotta, porotta.” Apart from the new wheat porotta, a fad catching up with families in the UAE, thanks to various health programmes Kerala television channels are cooking up.
Though we hear parochial promos like Malabar porotta and Thalassery porotta, Kerala porottas are essentially the same, except for some variations in size. After a new cultural dimension modern times have brought to wedding parties, where rice and sambar are no more welcome, Kerala caterers have introduced a new breed called Coin Porotta, which is the size of a coaster, to make it economically viable. Barring that, there isn’t much innovation in the porotta scene in Kerala. In fact, it isn’t a bad idea to create a red porotta in honour of all the martyrs Kerala produces across party lines. Porotta is anyway known as the most oppressed class in gourmet society because of all the beatings and kneading it endures during its making.
As a child, I had the opportunity to have a bird’s eye view of porotta making from our first-floor family business. On the ground floor was a restaurant which had an openair extension during all local religious festivals. While we haplessly watched the show because of an in-house ban on the dish, revellers ploughed into moutains of porottas.
“No point howling. No porotta. And that’s an order,” Amma screamed. “But why?” “Hygiene. Look at the man making it,” she said, twisting my head downward at Kesavan, the porotta maker, whose headgear was fashioned from a cotton bath towel. Every five minutes, he untied the headgear and wiped the beads of sweat rolling down his face. He was like a body in an incinerator due to the heat of summer nights, the kerosene stoves next to him and fluorescent festival lights. It’s so inhuman for Amma to talk hygiene, I felt. I was too young to tell her wines were made in ancient Europe from juice obtained by stomping on grapes. I was too young to say the pav-bhaji guy in Mumbai has the same multipurpose towel hanging from his neck. The coconut vendor in Mumbai’s Sion suburb, the cane-juice maker in Chennai, the lassiwala in Allahabad, the
panipuri seller in Phule Market in Nepal’s Pokhara town and the kulfiwala in Delhi all had the towel as well as roughly the same amount of sweat to wipe off.
As I watched, Kesavan would first make the dough mixing the flour, salt and water. What follows next is a scene straight from a
kushti (wrestling) pit. Kesavan grapples with the moistened and oiled dough, kneading it as much as possible. He does not let the dough go till it is soft like clay. The dough is kept aside for at least for an hour before it is made into small balls which look like little ducklings on the banks of a Brahmaputra of oil. The sitting ducks are then stretched, coiled, stretched again and panfried in a thick sheet of oil till it is crispy outside and fluffy inside. Kesavan would have untied his towel several time during the proccess. Porotta making is an art which takes a lot of time and patience to master, and such
ustads are highly paid. Their rate is fixed per kilo of maida, not the number of porottas made. Today, the porotta making business in modern Kerala has been taken over by Bihari “immigrants”.
As I grew up, I realised Amma was just another Malayali woman who never gave the porotta the respect it deserved. Hygiene isn’t the only item on Amma’s chargesheet. Maida flour is unhealthy. She even called it white poison. The amount of oil it absorbs would clog the arteries, she added. I was too young to say so is the papad or the banana fry. Later in science classes we learnt that during the processing of maida from wheat, endosperm of the grain is removed from the germ and bran, which is very crucial for digestion. As all necessary nutrients are lost during the processing of maida, foods made from it use up nutrients from the body for absorption. As a result, our body gets depleted of vitamins and minerals. Maida also releases sugar into our bloodstream quickly. And because of the high glycemic index of maida, it spikes our sugar levels. To make matters worse, maida, which is originally yellowish in colour, is bleached with the chemical benzoyl peroxide. So what? Porotta is not the only bread made from maida. Pizza, burger, donuts, bread, samosas, noodles, momos, panipuri, pastas, all are made of the same “white poison”.
Some men argue women have an inherent dislike for porotta because it is perhaps the only hard-to-crack item that has failed them. If you plan a Thursday night party at home, this gaggle of people point out, women would typically say, “Buy some porotta. I will make chicken curry.” It’s a reply that privately satiates such men, who argue it’s a throwing up of hands. An admission that they would even try pizzas but not porotta. Being the last frontier for patriarchy in the kitchen, porotta has pride of place in the Malayali man’s life — along with a plate of steaming hot beef fry. In the olden days, porotta never made it to breakfast or lunch plates. It was an afternoon combo — of porotta, beef fry, tea, beedi and newspaper (Not necessarily in that order) — that lured customers to neighbourhood tea stalls. The vegetarians had it with sweetened coconut milk or vegetable kurma.
It’s this ambience that makes the dish delightful. Porotta to me is layers and layers of memories, with every flake wanting to tell a story. The scrumptious food, eaten on every religious occasion, is a warm tribute to Kerala’s culture of coexistence. Porotta might not belong to Kerala as the Hindustani word paratha is derived from Sanskrit. But no Arya-Dravidia battle is known to have been fought over porotta. It has only united millions of people across the world. One can only hope the warring political fronts in Kerala will not wake up to stake a claim!
Women have an inherent dislike for porotta. Being the last frontier for patriarchy in the kitchen, porotta has pride of place in the Malayali man’s life, along with a plate of steaming hot beef fry