MOPLAH FOOD

ENTE KERALAM, Chennai
6th to 27th Jan 2008, Lunch & Dinner

No celebration is complete without food. To give the people in Chennai a chance to experience the flavours of the Moplah community, we are collaborating with a popular restaurant in the city to hold a food festival.

The Malayalam speaking Muslims of Kerala, more particularly in the northern districts known as Malabar, are known as Moplahs. Their ancestry goes back to the Arabs who had come to trade with Kerala, famed for its pepper and spices not to mention the ubiquitous coconut and its many byproducts.

Moplah cuisine has a great deal in common with food elsewhere in Kerala in its use of coconut and coconut oil, and in its dependence on rice as the staple item of food. But the strong Arab influence is evident in some of the dishes like Aleesa, a wholesome wheat and meat porridge, and the stuffed chicken. The famous Biryani was brought from samarkhand by the Moghuls and the indigenous Muslim rulers of Arcot and Mysore. The Moplah genius developed many variants of the biryani, some of which are spicy hot to suit local palates. There is a certain variety of dishes that is intrinsically Moplah — the Pathiri or rice chapati (probably the name is derived from Urdu/hindi word pathli, meaning thin), wafer thin rice dosais cooked over a tava and garnished with coconut milk, the neichoru, an exotic fried ghee rice, and the sweet Mutta Mala. literally translated, it is an “egg garland”, made from pure egg yolk and cooked in sugar syrup without a trace of oil or fat. The golden yellow egg noodle is spread thinly on a porcelain dish and surrounded by white creamish sweet pudding. The Moplah style of cooking is distinctly Yemeni. It is Muslim food but quite unlike the Mughlai cuisines of india from Hyderabad, Lucknow, Kashmir and even Delhi.

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