I was making dosas today morning and serving them hot to the L&M. Just the way he liked it. On to his second dosa, he told me.

“There’s something wrong with the chammanthi!”

Chammanthi, by the way, is almost like a chutney, minus all the water you add to give it a running consistency. When you make chammanthi, you just grind the fresh coconut, salt, dried red chillies, onions, tamarind or whatever the ingredients are for any particular chammanthi, with practically no water (or very little water), roll it into the shape of a ball and serve. Take my word for it, it is yum.

My cook cum helper makes a mean chammanthi of which we are huge fans. So what could have gone wrong, I wondered.

“Is that so?” I asked in surprise.

“Not that it’s bad or anything.” The L&M clarified, “but it’s not like it is usually made…”

Hmm…

Did she add some new ingredient? What came to my mind immediately was cumin. Not that cumin itself is essentially bad. Kerala cooking gives cumin seeds pride of place. But in chammanthi, some people use it, others don’t. We fall in the latter category.

Ages back, when I was pregnant with the Second Born, the lady who helped with the kitchen work added cumin to the coconut chammanthi she made, and I was like, “What? Why did you add cumin seeds?!!” Nonplussed, she answered that that was how they made it at her place.

I was still new to the scene and not familiar with the cumin version of the chammanthi those days, so that was kind of my introduction to it. Since I didn’t care for it too much, I requested that she omit the cumin in future preparations of chammanthi.

“I think it has too much of something,” volunteered the L&M, bringing me back to the present. “Too much of chillies I think.”

Hmm… That was possible. I am always having to remind the cook to go easy on the red chillies, or green for that matter. Anyway, I decided to taste a bit of the not-the-usual-chammanthi and get to the bottom of things myself.

When I did, what hit my senses was not the heat of chillies as I expected, but the sourness of tamarind, too-bleddy-much of it.

“Ewww… It’s too sour!” I exclaimed.

“Anyway,” I said turning to the L&M, “Thank heavens you joined the army. You would never have made it as a Chef in your life, you know!”

“Huh. What…? Why ever not?”

“You don’t even know the difference between too spicy and too sour. How could you ever have been a Chef?”

He had no answer to that.

©️ Shail Mohan 2024