Recipes flavoured with memories
hef and Malabar food expert Abida Rasheed remembers the Ramzan seasons of her childhood and the first lessons in cooking that came with them. She, along with the other children in the family, were entrusted with an important task.
They had to curl the edges of the kozhi ada, a bitesized, deepfried crispy snack. “A large white sheet would be laid out and the children would sit around it. The grown ups would lay the puris with the chicken filling out on it and we had to carefully seal the edges by twisting the dough into a pattern,” says Abida. The snack has been a nombuthura (breaking the fast) staple since her childhood days. “They are about oneandahalf inch long and half inch in breadth and to me, they are an integral part of the nombuthura menu,” she adds. The other favourites that grace the nombuthura menu are the beef samosa and the evergreen favourite unnakkaya — a popular Malabari snack made of banana, grated coconut and sugar. “It is just two snacks, either made of rice or wheat flour dough — one with a filling of meat and the other, sweet. Here we call it erachi pandam and madhura
Cpandam,” Abida says. While the meat filling could be chicken or beef, the sweet fillings involve various combinations of egg, sugar and ghee.
The predawn meal, she says, is the Kochi Koya, a unique Malabari specialty dish made of plantain, coconut milk, shallots, ginger, lemon juice and sugar. “This is had with aval (rice flakes). It is filling, delicious and cools down the body,” says Abida. “This ancient dish is believed to have been brought to the Malabar by a Muslim man from Kochi and hence the name. But these are stories, we don’t know how it actually came to be,” she adds.
Another Kozhikode nombuthura special that is dearly looked forward to is the maas, tuna from Lakshwadeep. The dried fish is powdered and mixed raw with grated coconut, shallots, green chilli in chutney form. This is relished with nice pathiri. “The nombu seasons are nothing like what they were. Families have become fragmented with people having moved out to different countries. Earlier, the entire family came together during Ramzan and the cooking was done together. It is the traditional dishes that bring warm memories back,” says Abida.