The story of pachadi and how amma was mansplained in the kitchen

 

My mother makes a beetroot-pachadi that does not fit into a genre and is often just simply red

Athira Elssa Johnson

Born to a family that migrated from Kottayam, Kerala, on an ox-cart to a forest area in Kulathupuzha (Kollam, Kerala), amma’s family consisted of her mother (pennamma), grandmother (achi) and grandfather (appachan). 

The stories she narrates of her home in Kulathupuzha are filled with mystery, events, tragedy, wild animals, hopes, and many forest idioms.

 The shift from forest to village happened after she married my father, my dada — that’s where the story of her version of pachadi began.

Pachadi is a curry, also a salad, a side dish, a combination of yogurt and any vegetable — particularly beetroot or cucumber — cooked together and seasoned with smashed raw mustard.

My mother learned it from her mother, my penamma.

 Pennamma was a single mother, someone so sure and sorted, she knew she should stay back with her parents than stay at her husband’s place where she wasn’t comfortable; some people believed she knew witchcraft and their home was a coven. It was likely a coven of three witches and a warlock — appachan. I hope that is true.  

Today the home is no more,  and neither are pennamma, achi, and appachan. 

 Every time amma cooked pachadi in dada’s village home in Thirumudikunnu, Thrissur, which is eight hours from her home in Kulathupuzha — where the concept of pachadi is farfetched and unknown -– she was mansplained to a level where she thought that they perhaps knew pachadi better.

She first made pachadi for a guest — a Capuchin priest whom dada’s family wanted to impress with food.

 The priest was a vegetarian, and that wasn’t normal in a village where most Christian households welcomed guest with beef, chicken, and pork. If any vegetarian dish was served, it was probably for someone who was fasting. 

The priest was elated and asked about the pachadi chef. (Unlike in Kollam, pachadi is uncommon in Thrissur.) The men in the family, who were all dada’s relatives, had mixed feelings about it as they had to acknowledge a recipe from the ‘outside’; they always thought of amma as someone from a faraway forest.

The happy priest praised amma and offered his blessings for serving him a different and tasty dish that he hadn’t eaten until that day. Pachadi is very common in many parts of the world, though, the method and combinations differ. Amma has her own combinations of veggies she likes.

 I remember getting excited about the beetroot pachadi as it is red. The colour varies from red to pink depending on the ratio of beetroot and yoghurt. 

 Amma grows her own veggies for the pachadi and anything else she cooks. She can’t live without her plants; it was a way of life back in Kulathupuzha — they grow what they want to eat. That wasn’t possible at the house in Thrissur, yet she introduced her likes in ways she could. For instance, she made a big deal of Onam. It’s her favourite festival. When food is served on a plantain leaf — a lot of dishes served alongside rice — the pachadi would always shine bright red. 

The jealous men, who had no idea about pachadi until then, started murmuring about the dish, especially if there was a guest and they needed to offer a vegetarian dish. One day, one of the men tried to explain to amma the right way to cook pachadi, and she lost her cool. 

“First fix the way you make avial (a mixed vegetable curry made with coconut paste, popular in Kerala). You are supposed to add raw oil to the vegetables, not heated oil, and you add smashed raw mustard in pachadi, not burnt mustard. Fix your ways, I know what I am doing,” she recalled telling him off. 

 Amma had pachadi first at a wedding when she was a kid. It had a colour and taste that didn’t fit any genre. Amma does not want to term it as a side dish, or a main-course dish. She doesn’t call it a salad or a celebratory dish. She likes to play with the recipe, call it a red curry, and get excited about it like she did the first time she ate it.

Amma thinks every dish is original, as every time she cooks she makes changes to the original  recipe. According to her the tricky part of the pachadi recipe is adding smashed raw mustard and then, in the very next step, adding heated oil with mustard and other spices. 

Amma knows I don’t like mustard and said, “Yet you never even realise when I add it smashed raw. Maybe pachadi is special like that.” Amma moved back to Kulathupuzha in 2022, after 22+ years of being mansplained about pachadi and a lot of other things. 

 Asked how she feels about it, she said, “I was an independent working woman. I compromised on a lot of things. The least they could have done is respect me and my pachadi. But I am in a happy place now, growing my veggies, and rebuilding a home like before. Cooking comes second. I want to see them grow, the rest is later.”