Tirunelveli Muscoth Halva

When you travel to Tirunelveli, Tiru-nel-veli, the land of sacred rice, a visit to Kuttralam will be either on your way in or out–not because it’s on the way, but because it is inevitable. When you get there, however, you’ll find to your dismay, something you have forgotten from your childhood: that the proper Indian way to engage with a water fall is to either visit the temple adjoining or to bathe in it. Ignore it or immerse yourself in it. No question of sitting and staring. No question of a hike to the top. No space to just sit and stare. Guardrails everywhere, your paths circumscribed.

Now you’ll have done these things in your childhood–visited the temple, bathed in the falls. Your grandfather would have taken you, and also your very beloved youngest aunt who never married and remained a girlish, ebullient soul even into her 70s. But now in your own middle-age, you want just a vantage point like a seat beside a window through which to look out, and it’s just not there.

Or so you think.

On the way back to the parking lot from the falls, you’ll pass by a sweet stall where there are banana chips being freshly made and the obligatory halvas: Tirunelveli halva, which is famous anywhere here even though its origin is in the Iruttukadai in Tirunelveli town itself–and some other halva-like confection the shopkeeper calls “muscoth.”

“Idukkum-adukkum yenna vidhyasam?” you’ll ask the shopkeeper. What’s the difference between this and that? They look so similar.

“Idu thengai paal vecchu chenjadu” comes the reply: This (muscoth halva) is made with coconut milk (while Tirunelveli halva is just samba godhumai/emmer wheat, palm jaggery, and ghee).

“Anda ‘muscoth’ peyar yeppidi vandudu?” you’ll ask a follow up question. How did it get the name “muscoth”?

The shopkeeper is unsure. It’s easier to give you prices and weights than answer ethnographic queries. “Muscoth na Muscat…” A community-based explanation: people coming from Muscat make this. The answer comes soon enough. Clearly, you’re not the first to ask.

It’s an unlikely explanation, however, easily debunked by a google search: the Muscat referent is more common than you think it will be, but “muscoth” refers to fresh coconut milk in Sinhalese. The dish was and is still popular in Sri Lanka, but one Mr. A. Joseph brought the idea of the sweetmeat back to a Thoothukudi district village called Mudalur–“the first town,” a Christian settlement founded in the area, in 1799–in the 1950s. There, he innovated and his sons sniffed opportunity, and so was born AJJ Sweets, now the “origin” of Muscoth just as the Iruttukadai is for Tirunelveli halva.

You won’t know a thing about such things, not AJJ Sweets, nor Joseph, nor Mudalur. You’ll know only that you came to Tirunelveli and you searched for halva and you found muscoth.

You will know, however, that Tirunelveli halva is made from the “milk” extracted from long-long soakings of samba godhumai or khapli wheat–the ancient grain known elsewhere as emmer, Triticum dicoccum, grown now only in pockets of Tamil Nadu which otherwise prefers rice–and generous amounts of ghee that make the resulting halva go “thala-thala,” which you suppose means wobbly or jiggly or shiny or all three. You will know also that the best sweetner for said Tirunelveli halva is panavellam/ panai vellam, or toddy palm jaggery, also called “karupatti” (which, I learned from Sudhakar of Vivasayee’s Life, is a conjugation of karuppu+katti, or ‘black block’; read his adventures in making karupatti on a Papanasam farm here). You’ve just learned that muscoth is made with fresh coconut milk. You’ve also made a karuppu kavuni (black rice) halva once before with coconut milk, though it lacked the stretchy-gooeyness of a good wheat halva.

All these facts will sit in your head like all these people who just found out they’re relatives, but are unsure of each other. They won’t come together until another clue strikes you as more important than you realized: the resting of the samba wheat milk in making Tirunelveli halva is in fact long enough to be a fermentation.

Ah-aa!

All the usual recipes are so busy selling the “you can do this at home” line, they assume quick-quick is best-best. It’s not. This is a slow-food, most especially if you start from the whole samba wheat itself. That takes a day. You can save yourself some time and grinding and simply soak a good quality emmer wheat flour, but it still means starting the night before. In other words:

• Option 1: Soak wheat. Grind. Extract milk. Rest milk — start the morning before, grind in the evening to ferment overnight and extract milk in the morning.
• Option 2: Soak wheat flour. Extract milk. Rest milk — start the evening before, leave to soak and ferment overnight, extract milk in the morning.

You know that Mr. A. Joseph used white flour instead of wheat. You also know that muscoth halva uses no ghee. You choose to ignore these things. Coconut as a way of thinking calls to you. The nuttiness of samba godhumai cannot be replaced by characterless white flour. Yours will be a combination of Thoothukudi and Tirunelveli, two districts from the south. A Tirunelveli muscoth, rich with the earthiness of samba godhumai, the sweet-caramel-nuttiness of fresh coconut milk “muscoth,” all the added flavor and goodness that comes from a local karupatti and fresh home-made ghee.

Tirunelveli muscoth halva will need the following ingredients, along with some planning, a morning and a strong mixing arm:

• 1.5 cups samba godhumai flour/ 2 cups whole samba godhumai or emmer wheat.
• 4 cups water to soak flour/ plenty of water to soak the whole wheat, 4-5 cups soaking water to grind
• 2 coconuts, milked with about 6 cups/1.5L of water in batches to get all the flavor out.
• 1 cup of white sugar (can use less, but increase panavellam proportionally, and note that the halva color darkens more with more panavellam use; see notes on adjusting sugar below)
• 1 cup of panavellam/karupatti or toddy palm jaggery that was a little old and therefore melting and darkening, mixed with ½ cup water and heated lightly to prepare a syrup or a paakam.
• ¾-1 cup of fresh home-made ghee
• 4-5 cardamom pods, crushed into powder
• a generous amount of grated nutmeg

Once the wheat has been soaked (and ground) and fermented, it will look bubbly and smell fermented–sour. Whisk it well and extract the milk, coaxing it through cheesecloth without pushing through too many of the wheat solids. I found it easier by far to work with flour rather than whole wheat grains myself, but the latter is the more traditional way.

The full process is detailed in the recipe below, but some notes and pointers beforehand:

Keep a few implements handy as you get to the stove work. I find it easier to work with a whisk at early stages, before the mixture starts thickening and while the first additions of sugar are dissolving. I switch to a spatula once the mixture is thicker: it makes it easier to scrape the sides and bottom of the pan efficiently.

The mixture will darken significantly–depending on the age and quality of the panavellam you use, it may remain brown or turn close to black.

Notes on adjusting sugar: Adding a combination of sugar and panavellam controls color as well. If you prefer, you can use only jaggery or only sugar (though only sugar will produce a less-authentic and certainly less-distinctive taste). You can also reduce the quantum of sugar in this recipe, preferably by cutting down on the white though it gets added first and the better time to adjust for sweetness is when the panavella-paakam or syrup is going in.

It will also commence what I call a volcanic mudpot boil, the effects of which are exaggerated somewhat by the glutinous quality of the wheat itself, stretching and resisting the air that wants to escape. The bubbles are a sign of progress: smaller to begin, larger and more violent as the halva gets closer to readiness.

Ghee is the second variable, and for some the scarier. More is better, obviously. Less produces a perfectly enjoyable sweet, but more cake and less halva, as in the image below, to the right. A good wheat halva has a good stretchiness and jiggle to it. Good wheat, slow cooking, and a good amount of ghee are rather key to achieving that effect.

& just like that, without realizing it, you’ll have found your vantage point to Kuttralam falls: a Tirunelveli halva like no other because it’s got muscoth, and a way of remembering the time you went back there with your children and didn’t go to the temple and didn’t bathe but found something new that opened out a wide vista anyway.