Thalis celebrate Indian regionality on a single platter
A whole meal on a platter, thalis can be basic or extravagant — a canvas for two dishes or 40. Home comforts, says Maunika Gowardhan, can stem from something as simple as a thali with pickles, rice and hot, soupy dal drizzled with homemade ghee.
As the Newcastle, U.k.based chef and author writes in her second book, Thali (Hardie Grant – Chronicle Books, 2022), they’re a joyful celebration — but that doesn’t mean they have to be elaborate. Whether enjoying a bare-bones thali at home or savouring a lush 50-dish sadya (banquet) on travels to Kerala on India’s southwest coast, “joy comes from the smallest things to the most ostentatious things.”
Born and raised in Mumbai in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, Gowardhan recalls the Gujarati and Maharashtrian eating houses of her childhood — no-frills restaurants where thalis were served on communal tables.
“Can I tell you the best part of eating a thali? Especially in these places, it’s all-you-caneat,” Gowardhan says, laughing.
Each server oversees a different item: one chutneys, another breads and so on.
“(Your thali) will fill up and it will fill up and fill up and you start eating and you have sweet, sour, tangy, spicy, hot. All of that in every single mouthful and you keep wanting more and more and more.”
When it comes to having a thali at home — as Gowardhan’s family has done for every occasion and meal they’ve eaten — “what could be more joyous than just sitting around together?”
The key to putting a thali together is balance, Gowardhan explains: a dal, a stir-fried dish, a chicken curry, bread, rice, a pickle for astringency, a small, crispy fried snack and a sweet. Each bite, a complete experience.
You could cook just one dish from Thali and call it dinner. “But how many cuisines can give you this whole holistic experience of all these flavours brimming on your palate? Thali definitely does that.”
A platform for varied colours, cooking techniques, flavours and textures, thalis offer a window into the regionality of Indian food. Gowardhan illustrates this by including examples of Punjabi, Andhra, Bengali and Gujarati thalis along with menu suggestions drawing on dishes in the book.
In choosing these four regions, she covers the north, south, east and west of India, but could have gone much further with the book, Gowardhan says — had she the space. India is the world’s seventh-largest country; its diverse landscapes have helped shape a varied food culture. After nearly two decades of professional cooking, Gowardhan sees her focus on regionality as a constant. She travels to India two or three times a year, visiting communities and meeting families.
“I could go there 100 times over and I don’t think I’ll figure everything out,” she says. “The more I travel, the more I’m hungry to learn about it. Every 20 or 30 kilometres you travel in India, the food changes. That’s because the climate changes. That’s because the soil changes and with the soil changing, that means the crop changes. With the crop changing, that means you also have people using different techniques to preserve things.”
Through her travels, she’s gained a new understanding of her homeland. Some of the recipes in the book, such as Bengali pantua (sweet potato and cardamom dumplings in a sticky clove syrup) and Andhra paruppu payasam (sweet moong dal and cashew pudding with cardamom and jaggery, which Gowardhan makes monthly) are little known outside their home regions.
When she left Mumbai for Wales, where she studied business at Cardiff University, Gowardhan soon realized “regional cooking wasn’t really a thing” in the U.K.
She started hosting dinners for friends and colleagues, which grew into a private chef business. After graduation, she worked in the corporate sector for five years and cooked on the side. At a crossroads in her career, she saw an opportunity to focus on food full-time with her events, website and recipes app.
Growing up in Mumbai, her mother and grandmother were avid cooks. Money was tight and, as a result, her mother cooked frugally, she says, but “there was always that connection of food that held us together.”
Incorporating this sense of eating well into her profession years later was unexpected but looking back at the role food played in her upbringing, shouldn’t have been a surprise, she says. “I don’t think I realized it in my teens or even my 20s. But the more I stepped away from home and stepped away from what was familiar to me is when I craved the familiar in the most unfamiliar surroundings.”
In Mumbai, Gowardhan was exposed to a wealth of regional Indian foods. She had friends and neighbours who were Bengali, Gujarati, Keralan, Punjabi and Sindhi and part of her family is Marwadi, from the state of Rajasthan.
Every Sunday, she would visit a friend’s house for sai bhaji, “a quintessentially Sindhi meal” made with dal and green leafy vegetables. “I think I was very lucky in the fact that I grew up in a city where I was able to try all these things that translated into my memories of eating Indian food.”
Thalis are an integral part of so many communities across India, Gowardhan adds. In the book, she strove to give readers a sense of what the regions are, what they offer and the various cooking techniques: steaming, frying, deep-frying, pickling, simmering and slow cooking.