Greetings Everyone!
Welcome to Ayah’s Kitchen Rediscovered.
This blog is an attempt by an enthusiastic cook and her sometimes enthusiastic apprentice nephew to bring their love of food and cooking to wannabe cooks who are daunted by the idea of entering the kitchen, much less experimenting with something more complex than making a cup of tea. We believe that cooking is fun, but what is even more incredible is making memories. So, along with the recipes from Ayah’s Kitchen, we bring you some of the memories from our family table too.
The Cast: Parvathi Muthiah, the enthusiastic cook; Vignesh Panchanatham, the apprentice; Muthiah Panchanatham, the photographer
The enthusiastic cook, namely me, was not always one! Though I hailed from a food loving family, my first involved forays into serious cooking was as an Indian grad student who arrived in America with a suitcase full of spices and very little idea how to use them, despite a degree in Hotel Management and a translated copy of Meenakshi Ammal’s Samaithu Paar (Cook and See). As a young Hotel Management student in Madras (now Chennai), I’d nearly failed my Cookery practicals because I didn’t know how to cook rice. And today, many years, three children and a few countries later, I still struggle to make that perfect cup of coffee… But I do love experimenting with food, cuisine no bar, and my husband and children are often subjected to my various experiments, some successes, some failures. After years in America and Australia, Singapore is currently home, and I have to say that one of the perks of living here is access to a variety of ingredients that I can experiment with – my two extremely jam-packed refrigerators stand witness to that!
Vignesh, born and brought up in America and now a Junior at Princeton University, was enticed into the kitchen purely because of his love for delectable baked goodies and a mother who loathed sweets. But what made him graduate from his love of baking fudgy brownies and lemon tarts to, in his words, the harder task of cooking, was his even greater love for his Ayah, his favorite grandmother. Of course, it helped that he was faced with the prospect of holidaying at home as a result of the pandemic.
Muthu, Vignesh’s brother, an amateur photographer, has been coerced into aiding with the project in return for first tasting rights. He is otherwise a high schooler and an athlete with aspirations of becoming a sports doctor. For more photographs by Muthu, click here.
All of us inherited our love for food from my parents, Vignesh and Muthu’s Ayah (grandmother) and Aiyah (grandfather). Ayah, apart from being fond mother, grandmother and Chef Extraordinaire, was known to the outside world as Valliammai Muthiah, wife of Madras’s Chronicler, S. Muthiah. Valli, the village belle from Kandanur, a tiny village in Chettinad, Tamil Nadu, was born fifth among seven children. She started her married life as a timid young girl, educated solely in Chettinad. Encouraged by Aiyah, Ayah, a Chemistry graduate by education (the precision of which helped her with her cooking is what she claimed) became a highly efficient Company Secretary who ran our lives and corrected our grammar. We often joked that she was his Pygmalion Experiment, his Fair Lady (learn about My Fair Lady, the film).
While Ayah specialised in food from the Chettinad region, she was equally well known as this woman in a sari who could turn out bakes and stews and Chinese dishes (Indianized, of course) with as much aplomb as she could Idlis and Dosais and Paniayarams. Already a good cook, albeit rather traditional, becoming a part of Aiyah’s highly anglicized family meant she was exposed to and enjoyed learning and experimenting with other cuisines. Meals at home were multi-cuisine. Just as Diwali meant Chicken Biryani and Milkmaid Chocolate Fudge, Christmas, apart from Roast Chicken, meant weeks spent baking Sri Lankan style Christmas Cakes and Coconut Macaroons to be gifted to her numerous friends and admirers. Even just a regular visit home meant said visitor would be plied with a hot cup of soup or moru (buttermilk) and freshly made snacks – oh no, plain old tea and coffee were meant for the ordinary, not for Valli!
Ayah would turn up in America / Australia every summer with a bagful of goodies for the children, ready to take over the kitchen and turn out some well-loved and much anticipated gourmet fare. Homemade podis, pickles and vatthals, not to mention her famed fruit cake, filled her bag, sometimes to the dismay of the Customs authorities. To her grandchildren, Ayah’s visits meant food, “pinchy toes” and story time – the best part of their growing years. To us, her two darling daughters and sons-in-law, who had resigned ourselves to a one-pot meal life overseas, Ayah’s visits meant a scramble to get the kitchen ready. Her varied repertoire meant that every spice and sauce she possibly could use had to be stocked up. Cooking oil had to be bought by the gallon and onions and, particularly, tomatoes by the kilo. Every pot and pan that was in storage had to come out in the open. Many a war ensued about our woefully under stocked kitchens! Just as we looked forward to the food, we dreaded the washing up that it involved… We’d take her for dinner at some of the best restaurants in the cities we lived in and while she savored and commented on every dish, she would come back home to a bowl of rasam or thayir sadam and pickle – “just for taste”, she would say!
Aiyah, the original well-travelled foodie that encouraged and benefited from Ayah’s love of cooking, was constantly hounding her to write her own cookbook. She had already had a few recipes published with Namaste, the Welcomgroup’s inhouse magazine from yesteryear and had been called in to consult with numerous Chettinad restaurants that had started mushrooming in what was then Madras. However, working full-time in conjunction with being an adoring grandmother of 5 ABCDs (American / Australian born confused Desis) meant that she kept procrastinating and neither the book nor the recipes got written.
Now, 10 years after its original conception, in honor of our parents / grandparents, we bring to you Ayah’s Kitchen Rediscovered – a collection of stories and recipes from the Muthiah household, some remembered, some researched. Every household has a different version of the traditional favorites, recipes handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth, recipes that very often rely on feel and taste and kai alavu (literally means hand measurement, another way of saying a pinch of this and pinch of that). The recipes in our posts are just our version of the memories we have of Ayah. We hope you enjoy our stories as much as you do the recipes.
Much love,
Parvathi, Vignesh and Muthu
Read more about Ayah, Valliammai Muthiah, here.
Read more about Aiyah, S. Muthiah here.
To learn more about Chettinad heritage, you could purchase The Chettiar Heritage, a coffee table book co-authored by Aiyah here.
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