South Indian salad for summer
A few Tuesdays back I was sitting at a table in the middle of the Market, the grocery store-food hall occupying the first floor of the Twitter building, furiously scrolling through the contacts in my phone with one hand, a fork clutched in the other, hovering over an empty plate. I’d just finished wolfishly consuming a plate of food from the hot bar, which on this particular day had been prepared by Dosa, the South Indian restaurant with two locations in the city, and I needed answers.
I found the contact information for Anjan Mitra, Dosa’s co-owner, whom I’ve interviewed for various stories over the years. We haven’t talked in a long time, but I fired off a text message, begging him for the recipe for the corn poriyal — a kind of South Indian sweet corn salad — that I’d just polished off. “Please share!” I implored, before hitting send.
A week later I had the recipe in hand, and about six hours after that, with the finished dish on the stove, I welcomed the newest member of my culinary repertoire. I ought to point out that I have a lot of recipes for corn — I literally wrote the book on it, a single-subject cookbook published by Short Stack Editions a few years back — and I feel remorseful now that I didn’t know to include this recipe, which will forever more be a summer staple. Easy and quick to make, it would be great alongside grilled meat or fish, is equally good hot or at room temperature and, because it contains no dairy, could be toted to a picnic where it could sit out in the sun for a bit without suffering (take that, potato salad!). It’s also a friendly dish for a potluck since it’s both vegan and grain-free, but also wildly flavorful.
As Mitra explains it, South Indians are wild about corn, and the ingredient is eaten both on the cob and in salads throughout the region. This salad gets its flavor from a combination of spices that are common to Indian food, including mustard seeds, cumin seeds and whole dried red chiles. Fresh curry leaves — a completely underrated ingredient, and the one that will perhaps cause you the most aggravation to track down (try an Indian or Asian market, and freeze the surplus leaves for the next time) — lace the salad with their nutty, musky scent. A good knob of finely chopped fresh ginger, together with those dried chiles, gives the salad some spicy backbone, and chopped roasted cashews add texture. Off the heat, lime juice is stirred in, a tart contrast to the super-sweet corn, along with a generous handful of chopped cilantro.
In India, they might not serve this salad alongside hamburgers or hot dogs or barbecued pork ribs, but you should. And you can, because it’s your recipe now.