Meet India's best-known Moplah cook

My grandmother had a question she often posed to us as children — do you eat to live, or do you live to eat? While we were wracking our brains pondering the difference, she would finish with a flourish, "I live to eat."

The truth of this statement was evident in her rather portly physique, but more importantly she instilled in us a love of food. Food became much more than mere nourishment, the preparation of a meal much more than a mere task that had to be completed. And the consumption thereof was also never just about feeding the body — eating was never the primary goal. Mealtimes at our grandmother's house were times for socialising. We caught up on events in each other's lives, we reconnected.

New tastes

As we grew up, we were exposed to other people's cooking, first in the extended family, then the wider community and, eventually, we experienced the cuisines of other societies around the world. The latter was greatly influenced by restaurants bringing distant cultures closer, making their cuisine more accessible.

Sure, our palates may have become more sophisticated, but the taste of home-cooked food somehow always comes out tops. Restaurants could never measure up.

Until now.

Enter Abida Rasheed. A full-time businesswoman, her love for food and cooking have driven her into the kitchen, where she prepares the food she grew up with.

Rasheed is said to be India's best-known Moplah cook. Moplah is a type of Malabari cuisine from the northern region of Kerala.

"I knew I had some talent," says Rasheed, who visited Dubai from her hometown of Kozhikode, or Calicut, last week to share this little-known style of cooking with food lovers here during the Moplah food festival at the Taj Palace Hotel's Handi restaurant.

"People always used to come to me to teach them, and I would do this in my own kitchen. Even friends would 25 years later tell me, ‘I remember that biryani you served me,' long after I had forgotten even making it," she chuckles.

"Then I got featured in the press more and more, and eventually people from other countries started contacting me, people from Japan, Sweden, England and the like.

"Cooking is my passion, it is what keeps me going. I share my knowledge with others, I don't keep it to myself."

Rasheed, who learnt her trade at home, has also been training other chefs for the past four years. But she still doesn't consider herself a professional.

"Even when I'm in a hotel's kitchen, I always make home-cooked food, cooked in the traditional way — the way my grandmother cooked, the way my mother cooked."

It is also the way Rasheed taught her three daughters to cook, and two of them are following in her footsteps, also cooking.

"Certain flavours you don't forget," she says, referring to that home-cooked taste that can't be beat. The best part about cooking? "Seeing how people enjoy my food," Rasheed says. "Their satisfaction and appreciation makes it all worthwhile."

The cuisine and the culture

"My food is authentic," explains cook Abida Rasheed. "It's simple cuisine made with common ingredients that are easy to come by.

"The food in Kerala is different to northern Indian food that's more common," she says.

"The key to Moplah cuisine is in the gravy," Rasheed explains. Once you have that, you can cook everything in it.

"We're also influenced by Arabian cuisine. Some of the Arab traders who came to India for spices — especially black pepper, which was known as black gold because it enhances every dish — settled there. They married local women and some of their culture, their food, blended into ours. To this day, Kerala is dependent on the Gulf region, with a lot of the men working here to support their families back home.

"There are also some influences from China, Portugal and France," Rasheed continues.

"We eat rice a lot, such as puttu (flaky steamed rice, served cylindrical). Of course, being on the coast, we eat a lot of fish. It doesn't have to be just expensive fish, use whatever is available.

"Some common spices include pepper, cardamom, and whatever else grows there."

Cooking with Rasheed

Cook Abida Rasheed tackles the vast expanse of a professional restaurant's kitchen like her own cooking space in her home.

On the gas stove a clay pot, stained from use, stands ready. "This is a pot I use at home," she tells us. "I brought it with me."

Rasheed demonstrates how to make chemeen mulakittahu, a prawn curry in a chilli-based gravy.

Cooking like a mother does, she measured ingredients with her eye, a little bit of this, a dash of that.

First, a little bit of coconut oil is heated. "Moplah cuisine is lighter than other forms of Indian food, because we don't use a lot of oil, ghee, creams and the like," she explains.

Chopped small onions go into the pot. "Of course, you can also use regular onions, but I like the flavour of these."

Freshly crushed garlic and chilli halved length-wise follow, along with mustard seeds, fenugreek seeds and tomato.

In a separate bowl, she mixes chilli powder ("more for the colour") and turmeric in water into a paste. "We don't add the masala directly to the pot, for it will burn."

Some curry leaves enter the pot and then the masala mixture is added. This is left to simmer uncovered. Then in goes tamarind pulp, a pinch of salt and a little water.

The prawns go in last and the dish is left to cook.

The result: Succulent prawns in beautifully blush-coloured gravy that's full of flavour, with the slightest bite. Neither my companion nor I could resist second (and third) helpings.

Chemeen mulakittahu

• 6 prawns
• 2 tbs onions, chopped
• 4 green chillies, sliced
• 1 cup tomato, sliced
• 2 sprigs of coriander leaves
• 2 tbs coconut oil
• 1 tsp mustard seeds
• 1/4 tsp fenugreek seeds
• 2 tsp chilli powder
• 1/4 tsp turmeric powder
• 1 tamarind pulp
• Salt to taste

Heat coconut oil then add mustard seeds, coriander leaves and fenugreek seeds. Add chopped onions and green chillies.

In another pan, sauté garlic and tomatoes. Mix chilli powder and turmeric powder to form a paste. Add this to the onion mixture. Add salt, tamarind pulp and water. Once gravy thickens, add prawns and top with coriander leaves.

Fish biryani

• 1kg fish (seer fish)
• 1kg onions
• 100g chillies
• 70g garlic
• 70g ginger
• 2 limes
• 1 cup coriander leaves
• 1 cup yoghurt
• Salt to taste
• 1kg rice
• 3 tsp ghee
• 1 cup oil
• 1 tsp turmeric powder
• 1/2kg tomato
• Cashew nuts, broken
• Raisins
• About 1kg rice
• 1l water

Slice onions thinly. Heat oil or a cup of dalda and half a cup of ghee. Fry 250g of onions until golden brown. Fry cashewnuts and raisins and keep aside. Apply turmeric powder with enough salt and little water. Heat two tablespoons of oil in a frying pan. Lightly fry the fish until half done and keep aside. In a heavy-bottomed vessel, heat three tablespoons of oil. Grind the remaining onion with half a cup water. Add this onion mixture to the hot oil. Crush ginger, garlic and chilli. Add this paste to the oil and stir. Add tomatoes, yoghurt and salt. Cook for some time until the water evaporates. Add the fried fish pieces, coriander leaves and two limes.

For the rice

Heat ghee in a non-stick vessel. Add half of a chopped onion. Add three cardamoms and three (three-inch) pieces cinnamon patta. Immediately add the washed rice (drained). Fry the rice till it becomes a cream coloured and a little crispy. Add boiled water (1:2 ratio) and salt, and cook on high flame till the water is absorbed by rice. Keep the rice covered for ten minutes. Sprinkle garam masala powder over the masala. Now add in the cooked rice in one layer. Add fried onion, nuts and raisins and a little garam masala powder. Finish in layers. Take a napkin (radius of the vessel), dampen it with water and a little bit of rosewater. Put the biryani on dum for one hour with light heat from top and bottom.