For years and years, my father’s summertime visits to us in Pondicherry were wildly fruity affairs. He never, ever came empty-handed; there were always Grand Sweets snacks for the boys so plentiful I would complain about all that plastic packaging and bar him from bringing more. So would arrive gigantic jackfruits purchased for songs on the road into town, all the varieties of mango Appa could find (he had a soft spot for Imam Pasands), and malapazham or virupakshi bananas from the hills. His way of spending time with his grandsons was to extend an hour in the cutting of fruit, feeding, talking, entertaining, and feeling pleased-as-plum that he could pull of such feats. The grandsons played along gamingly, though they knew exactly what he was up to every time, and they never complained, at least not until their role in this threatened to go unacknowledged, at which point they’d whisper to me and I’d cut them short: “shhhhhh.” Grandparents must be allowed their fictions as much as little boys their swashbuckling fantasies.
Then, because Appa knew about my eternal busy-ness and wanted to save me from too much time in the kitchen, he would invariably bring fresh sevai or rice noodles made by some mami in Chennai, and his own home-made summer special, the mampazha pulisseri. “That’s at least one meal you don’t have to worry about,” he would say, and this time neither I nor his grandsons would complain.
So, summers for us meant thatha, fruits, sevai, pulisseri.
Barring the aberrations that were the pandemic locked-down summers, this is the first “normal” year without him and all his customary treats. To think of it, the year we made sevai with red rice and using my own thatha’s old sevai nazhi, we called Appa: you can’t come this year, Appa, we said, but we made sevai and pulisseri and wished you were here, too.
We still do.
The pulisseri belongs amidst other thair (yogurt-based) curries that communities the southern states specialize in. But while typical mor-kuzhambus, mor-kootans, and kalans (on the Tamil-Palaghat sides of me) and (on the Telugu sides of me) majjiga pulusus are made with vegetables plus thicker coconut-green chilli-masala pastes that are then thinned out with sour buttermilk, the pulisseri is a fruity preparation that uses yogurt proper. Aparna over at My Diverse Kitchen even has a pulisseri recipe that uses nendrapazham–the larger variety of banana that’s typically used to make chips–and although she says the pulisseri is a thinner preparation than a kalan, in our house there might have been no difference at all. Appa called what he made a pulisseri, and that it remained forever more.
To summarise, combining insights from Aparna’s posts (here and here) along with my own, these are the key curd-based preparations of the south:
- Morkootan or mor-kuzhambu: made with vegetables such as ash gourd and okra, a spice paste that certainly includes coconut, buttermilk and a tempering. Kuzhambus and kootus are usually thickened preparations, but the thickening comes from the dals usually included in the spice mixture.
- Kalan: can be very similar to a pulisseri in the use of green chilli-coconut-jeera pastes, but can also make use of black pepper for spice.
- Pulisseri: typically uses fruits like ripe plantains, mangoes or pineapple. Fruit can be left whole or mashed. These are combined with red or green chillies made into a paste with coconut and jeera, and the whole thing is mixed with curd and tempered. Can be a thicker or a thinner preparation, to suit the tastes of the eaters.
- Majjiga Pulusu (or majjige huli in Kannada): the pulusu is by definition a thin gravy, and if there’s thickening at all it comes by way of added spices or the use of either rice or chick pea flour (besan). Fish, meats, vegetables stay whole and relatively discreet in this stew. Tamarind is the souring of choice, but the “majjiga” qualifier indicates the use of thinned sour curd or, better, buttermilk. It’s very close to the moru-rasam or buttermilk rasam of Tamil cuisine.
Then to think even further cross-regionally–back when Sheetal had her posts about the Gujarati fajeto going [here, here and here] specifically distinguishing it from besan-wala kadhi, the question running through my mind was: how is this different from that other great mango-curd dish from the south, the pulissery? A lot of the difference is saunth or dry ginger (in fajeto) vs. fresh coconut (in pulisseri), but there’s more. The fajeto is a dish of economy and value, made from water used to wash mango peels because nothing about the kesar mangoes that are used to make aamras or mango juice and their inimitable saffron colors and flavors can be wasted. It’s odd that the dish is called “fajeto,” which means fiasco–possibly hearkening to the difficulty of extracting sufficient taste from the already squeezed mango peels or the humbleness of the dish. But I’m guessing.
The pulissery, on the other hand, is a dish that gives you the richness of the summer in the fullness of the mango. It relies much more heavily on mango pulp. True to its name, it shows you the mango’s sour-sweetness, enhancing the former with sour curd but leaving the mango sweetness to come through on its own. But it doesn’t marvel so much at the peel, which we learn from the fajeto has plenty of its own {cough} appeal. The pulissery can discard the peels or use varieties of mangoes with thin enough peels that the whole fruit gets added in, in chunks. The fajeto refuses to believe that the peels well and truly have given their all, and presses them for more, more, more.
In truth, I regard the pulisseri and fajeto as sisters of the same mother: both can be made from the same fruit, the one thicker, the other more a rasam (or, properly ausaman); both can be served at the same meal in that same birth order. An aamras alongside wouldn’t hurt either. After all, who can get enough of mangoes in this season?
I asked Appa his recipe for mampazha pulisseri every time we got mangoes and he wasn’t about to make a visit. He must have talked me through it a dozen times, patient with my habit of always entrusting it to memory and never writing it down. When I did, finally, he finished by saying that I needn’t even cook this dish if I didn’t want to, and that it could be eaten warm or cold. I don’t know now if this was his innovation or a common method. Just because these are the tropics, most meal dishes are well-cooked, though there are a handful that aren’t– the pacchi pulusu, for example, or other minimally boiled rasams. Even rawness is a taste, after all, that deserves a place in our main courses.
Well, Appa, innovation or no–that no-cook tip has served me well this year of miserable heat.
We tempered this year’s pulisseri with a few neem flowers, for good health and to keep in mind the bittersweetness of life’s richest and most beloved offerings.
No-Cook Mampazha Pulisseri or Mango Coconut Curd gravy
Ingredients
- 2 large and very ripe mangoes
- ½ coconut grated
- 1 cup of thick yogurt
- ¼ teaspoon turmeric powder
- Salt, to taste
- A little jaggery to balance the sourness of the mango, if necessary
To roast
- 1 teaspoon raw rice
- ½ teaspoon fenugreek or methi seeds
- 1 red chilli (or 1 whole green chilli–add that to the ingredients to grind)
To temper
- 1 tablespoon coconut oil
- 1 broken red chilli
- ½ teaspoon mustard seeds
- ½ teaspoon urad dal
- ½ teaspoon jeera or cumin seeds
- A pinch of hing
- A sprig of curry leaves
Instructions
- Choose good quality mangoes—they should be ripe, flavorful, and sweet. This dish relies heavily on the mango taste, so the better the mango, the better the pulisseri. [If your mangoes are on the raw-side-of-ripe, follow the cooked pulisseri method linked below]
- Peel and chop the flesh or extract pulp by hand. Set aside.
- Dry roast the rice, methi and red chilli (if you’re using the green, add it to the blended ingredients in the third step). Once the rice turns opaque, transfer to the jar of a blender and pulverise to a powder.
- Now add the green chilli and mango pieces/pulp to the rice-methi powder; pulse to combine.
- Add the coconut and pulse again.
- Add the turmeric, salt, and jaggery to taste, followed by the yogurt. You want the sweet of the mango to stand out, but with hints of chilli, the flavor of methi, and the tang of curd enhanced by salt.
- Transfer to a serving dish.
To temper
- Heat the oil in a small tempering pan to almost smoking point, and then add the spices in quick succession: red chilli, mustard, urad dal, jeera, hing, curry leaves.
- Once the curry leaves are crisp, pour this over the pulisseri.
- Serve at room temperature or refrigerate and serve cold—but always with warm sevai or hot rice.
