The tastes of Telangana
The hunt for the third splendid Hyderabad food we knew nothing about
Red chillies being dry-roasted in R. Pramada Reddy's huge kitchens
I am determined to. I do know a
thing or two about Andhra food. I can tell a pulusu from a vepudu.
Depending on the accompaniments to a pulusu, I can tell if the chef
hails from Andhra or Rayalaseema. But my knowledge of the cuisine of
that third region of Andhra Pradesh is close to zero. That’s why I’m
talking to Praveen from Karimnagar, to Usha Rani from Nalgonda and to
anyone who can help me hunt down and devour Telangana cuisine in
Hyderabad, which is Telangana’s largest city. It proves a very difficult
task. But not impossible.
Telangana is a vast region
covering ten districts in the hardy Deccan countryside of north-central
Andhra Pradesh. I came to Hyderabad expecting to find a robust cuisine
that uses the produce of the plateau, from corn and peanuts to tamarind
and sugarcane. Before the agitation for a separate Telangana state
began, which has raged since the time of Andhra Pradesh’s inception,
Telangana was for long ruled by the Nizams of Hyderabad.So I expected to
find a cuisine which would reveal influences of Hyderabad’s globally
famous Asafjahi culinary traditions, just as Deccan ingredients like
mango and tamarind add tartness to Asafjahi food. After frustrating days
of trawling Google and learning very little, after calling scores of
Andhra restaurants which had recently hosted Telangana food festivals
and finding only one which had Telangana food on its regular menu, I
landed in Hyderabad with very few leads.
One name that Google did throw up
was R. Pramada Reddy. She has been making ‘sweets, hots and pickles’ the
traditional Telangana way in a quiet colony near Tank Bund, for over a
decade now. As a visible outpost of Telangana culture, Pramada has
gained quite a bit of media attention during the recently revived
Telangana agitation. She dismisses that identification with a smile, and
says she makes and sells Telangana items because her family and friends
encouraged her to. Pramada, and most of her workers, are from Khammam.
She stocks a huge array of snacks and sweets in her little shop on the
ground floor of her home. In her kitchen, the air is rich with the
aromas of frying spices and flour. Pramada points to the giant vats of
Telangana pickles and explains that though similar avakkai (mango),
chintakaya (tamarind) and nimakkaya (lime) pickles are made in Andhra
too, the Telangana style is to make pickles with boiled, and not cold
oil. And the allam-bellam (ginger-jaggery) pickle is unique to
Telangana.
Downstairs, she introduces me to
the world of Telangana snacks. First up is karijelu, akin to the
Maharashtrian karanji, which in Telangana can have a sweet stuffing, or a
savoury one of mutton or chicken kheema. Next come sakinalu and sarva
pindi, which she says are the most popular snacks in the region. Morning
is the time to eat sarva pindi, a rice flour disc thicker than a
paratha, flecked with chana dal, ginger, garlic, sesame seeds, curry
leaves and green chillies. It powers people through the day to what is
often their only other meal, dinner. Ajwain adds its aroma and roasted
sesame a deep crunch to every bite. I asked her where she would go if
she wanted to eat Telangana food in Hyderabad which she didn’t have to
make herself. She thought hard for a moment and said, “Habsiguda.” Any
more details? No, just Habsiguda. As I left, she handed me a bag of
sakinalu, karijelu and pally laddus to take home. She refused to accept
any payment. Pramada’s Sweets, Hots and Pickles–Traditional Telangana Spice–A missing taste in life is in House No. 70 (040-27613276; open 9am-9pm).
On to my next lead, a place suggested by Usha Rani in Tilak Nagar in New Nallakunta. Sri Lakshmi Telangana Pindi Vantalu (9392656368)
is run by Pradeep Rao’s family, who hail from Jagityal in Karimnagar.
The Raos also make sarva pindi and a green chilli-infused sakinalu
variety, ariselu, boondi laddu and bakshalu. I sample the lone sarva
pindi left over from the morning and pappu garelu, a fried snack of
moong dal balls mixed with onions, red and green chilli, curry leaves
and chana dal. If you wanted to eat Telangana food in Hyderabad outside
your home, where would you go, I ask the Raos. Habsiguda, they say.
Later that evening, I head to the only Andhra restaurant which emphatically declared on the phone that they served Telangana food. Horizon Restaurant is atop the Celebrations complex (66A/67, near Chiranjeevi Blood Bank, Road No. 1, Jubilee Hills; 40100888, 40175761-63). A lovely view of the city spread out below as a host of Telangana dishes were spread out on my table. I wanted to know just how these were different from Andhra food. The chef explained that many dishes are common to both cuisines, but that some ingredients change and the style of preparation differs. On the coast, a kodi vepudu may be made with an onion gravy, a paste of red Guntur chillies and coconut. In Telangana, tamarind, green chilli and spices would produce a much spicier dish. With just my first bite of the Telangana mamsam vepudu, my palate was aflame. Next up was a spicy chicken pulusu redolent with fennel, a soft natu kodi, or country chicken pulao, and Telangana chapa and mamsam vepudus. A pulusu is gravy and a vepudu is a reduction, which is why the latter is fiery hot. Soon, I was engulfed in that sweetly painful chilli high. The heat in Telangana food can make even Andhra food seem tame. But I was soothed with a few teaspoons of their Jewel of Nizam pudding, with custard poured over Hyderabad’s famous qubani ka meetha. I asked the chef where he would go to eat Telangana food if he didn’t want to make it himself. Habsiguda, he replied.
Thankfully, my friend Manju Latha
Kalanidhi knew exactly which famous Telangana outlet in Habsiguda they
were all talking about, and I followed her the next morning to Nacharam,
near Habsiguda. We walk into the small shopping centre where, at Sri Devi Swagruha Foods,
Vangapalli Savitri and her family have been serving the best Telangana
snacks you can find in Hyderabad, for the past 27 years.
V. Savitri has acquired such a
reputation in Hyderabad and beyond that she is now famous as ‘Sakinalu’
Savitramma. It was important to her, she said, to identify her food as
Telangana in the name of her outlet, to differentiate it from the scores
of places serving Andhra bhojanam. There are definite taste
differences, she says. For instance, Telangana food uses a lot of
sesame, which in coastal Andhra is believed to be too heaty. Whereas in
Telangana, they believe that heating foods like sesame lead to cooling
because they make you sweat. She sells upto 180 kilos of snacks, sweets
and pickles every day, which for her begins at 5am. But she gets even
busier during wedding season and the major festivals of Sankranti in
January and Bonalu in August-September. She gives me a taste of a
popular Telangana sweet, pheni, a painstakingly made, light, flaky,
layered, fried maida pastry covered in powdered sugar. She also offers a
Telangana ariselu, rich with sesame.
Then come the snacks and her son
Ramesh Rao tells me why the sarva pindi, sakinalu and other snacks that
are mainstays in Telangana are harder than usual. “So that people will
eat less,” says Ramesh. Eating less, so important in a land where there
is never enough food to go around. It’s the
same reason why Telangana food is so supremely spicy. It discourages one
from eating too much. Sri Devi is in the Sai Durga Complex, opposite
HMT Nagar, Nacharam (65178508, 27178508). I pack some Telangana mango,
tamarind and ginger pickle to take home. Savitramma hands me a huge bag
of sarva pindi, sakinalu, garelu, karijelu and many kinds of laddus. She
refuses to accept any payment.
I munch
her snacks on the drive from Hyderabad into rural Telangana, to a space
that is placing itself very firmly at the forefront of reclaiming a
Telangana identity through its food. The small town of Zaheerabad in
Medak district is a couple of hours westward from Hyderabad. Once you
reach, watch out for the Deccan Development Society’s organic millets
shop on your right. A café with a sign saying ‘Authentic Telangana
Cuisine’ is in the same lane, a few yards ahead of the shop. Within the
DDS’ Café Ethnic (08451-275632; 6am-10pm), I
had an unforgettable meal prepared with the traditional millets grown in
Telangana—jonna (jowar, or sorghum), taida (ragi, or finger millet),
korra (kangani, or foxtail millet), saama (kutki, or little millet) and
sajja (barley, or pearl millet). Lunch comprised bowls of sour tamarind
gravy, korra pysham and kandipappu (tuvar dal), gongura with peanuts and
chana dal, a mudapappu sambhar, a jonna pelala laddu and crisp sajja
murukkulus, and all of this eaten with a sajja roti and korra khichdi.
V. Srinivas Reddy, manager of Café Ethnic, tells me that it’s a meal
made from the millets that the DDS is trying hard to reintroduce in
Telangana. For breakfast here they prepare both the idli, vada and dosa
eaten in Andhra alongside taida ambuli, the traditional Telangana
breakfast porridge. But the difference is that here idlis are made of
korra, dosas of taida and vadas of saama.
All of these millets have been
eaten in Telangana until the last generation, when rice took their
place. All have more protein, fibre, iron and calcium than rice, and
require far less water for irrigation. So why is DDS having to
reintroduce millets to Telangana? This is a question that K. Srinivas,
editor of Telugu daily Andhra Jyothi,
would later answer in Hyderabad. “The difference in Andhra and
Telangana cuisine,” he says, “is chiefly the difference between the
cuisine of an irrigated and non-irrigated land. Rice and wheat, crops of
the irrigated land, enjoy a hegemony over other grains due to a
colonial mindset. NTR introduced rice in the Public Distribution System
at two rupees per kilo in Andhra Pradesh. Millets are not in the PDS,
making them more expensive. So Telangana cuisine is in danger of dying
out. This is why DDS is trying to get millets included in the PDS.”
The PDS battle is one I pray the
DDS wins. The trip to Zaheerabad is more than worth anyone’s time. You
can not only buy millets at their store, you’ll also get a free copy of
their cookbook of Telangana millet recipes. It has the most sharply
written foreword of any cookbook I’ve ever read and I quote “...it may
seem odd that someone is coming out with a book on traditional recipes.
That too recipes on jonna, sajja, korra, saama, which apparently have
the lowest status among food crops in comparison to preferred grains
such as rice and wheat”. Emphasis not mine.
Back in Hyderabad, I pick up P.
Venkatesh, who hails from Palamuru in Mahabubnagar district. On my
behalf, Usha Rani has asked him where he goes if wants to eat Telangana
food in Hyderabad without cooking it himself. He has answers. There’s
only standing space at Vijay Curry Point (9133555670;
10am-11pm), next to Sowmya Nursing Home on Ramnagar Road. While
Venkatesh speaks to the smiling lady behind the counter in rapidfire
Telugu, I am staring transfixed at what that counter holds—huge vessel
upon huge vessel of very spicy looking meat curries. What sort of
paradise is this! The lady’s name is Ratna Kumari, and at some point in
her high speed chat with Venkatesh, she hands me a folded newspaper for a
plate, along with a winning smile. One by one, she takes a large morsel
of meat from each vessel and places it on the newspaper. She says
something to him in Telugu and he tells me in English just what it is
I’m eating. This happens at great speed—two seconds from her Telugu word
to his English and one second for me to pop this morsel in my mouth. It
goes like this: Boti! Pop! Heart! Pop! Gizzard! Pop! Blood! Pop! Liver!
Pop! Chicken liver! Pop! Head! Pop! Chicken fry! Pop! Egg fry! Pop! Egg
curry! Pop!
Finally, I ask for a jonna roti
from the huge pile behind her head, and now I can chew it slowly and
start thinking again. Blood?! Let’s forget my first and last experience
with coagulated cuisine. I would pay any kind of money to eat everything
else on that counter again, at a more leisurely pace. The succulence of
the meat, the chewiness of the heart, the softness of the talakaya kura
(a curry made with meat from the head of goats or fish), the heat in
that chicken vepudu, the lingering flavours of dhania, methi,
tamarind... Ratna Kumari says to come back in the morning for
Telangana-style paya and come the next day to taste boti cooked with
gongura, or puntakura boti, made with both meat and vegetables. She will
not accept any payment for anything I’ve eaten. I know I will never
visit Hyderabad again without a trip to Vijay Curry Point.
We walk a few steps up the road
and turn left into a lane opposite the Universal store. Venkatesh reads
from a Telugu board outside a small shop: Narayana’s Curry House–Telangana Special (8106636665;
8am-11.30pm). Another rapid exchange of Telugu between him and the
sweet couple within and soon I’m eating a lovely kodi vepudu, soft
morsels of chicken liver and chicken with spinach. The vepudu, they tell
me proudly, is made without using even a drop of water, so one person
alone can finish a whole kilo of it if they wish. They too make
talakaya, boti, Telangana chepala pulusu with rohu fish, and endu
chapala and royallu, dishes made with dried prawns and dried fish that
are widely cooked in landlocked Telangana. They won’t accept any
payment. At this point, I think I can comfortably generalise that
Telangana people own a particularly big hearted sense of hospitality.
Roaming around the Charminar that
evening, it was hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that food of
such a high standard is not being readily marketed in all our metros,
not just Hyderabad. I had been told that in the dozens of restaurants
all around this great monument were many, many people of Telangana
origin serving the famous Hyderabadi biryani, who might also serve some
traditional Telangana bagara rice. I strolled the lanes around the
Charminar for a long while, but couldn’t find one. I walked further
towards the heavily guarded Mecca Masjid, a reminder that a culinary
struggle is perhaps the lesser among the many battles that rage in this
beautiful city.
I told Gandra Praveen Rao about
the Ramnagar curry points, and that it had been difficult for me to
fully experience Telangana food in his city. So many of the dishes he is
so passionate about, like matka gatka, golichchina mamsam and jelala
pulusu, I can only as yet imagine. I ask why he, a restaurateur, can’t
open a Telangana restaurant himself. “I don’t want to start a war over
food now,” he says with a laugh. Maybe he notices some disappointment,
because he then says he is going to open fifteen of them across Asia.
During my quest, I heard a number
of suggestions from Telangana people for why their food was so
inadequately represented in Hyderabad. Chief among these was that a
particular coastal community controlled most of Hyderabad’s restaurants
and looked down on Telangana cuisine as poor man’s food. There’s no way
of knowing whether this is the case. But I do believe it is possible to
take the revival of one’s own culture into one’s own hands. I can’t put
it better than that inimitable DDS cookbook: “...food is fundamental to
all our cultures. If we can retain our food culture, we can retain the
rest of our identity.” Until then, I hope that Telangana food is as
resilient as it is special.
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