India is Snacklandia

Murukku underway in Tamil Nadu

    Some places do snacks really well. Thailand is one, Sumatra another. And then there is India, a country in a Snack Class all its own. In Tamil Nadu we found the snacks so copious, so varied, so readily available that we could have foregone proper meals and subsisted on snacks alone for days.

    For me, food is "snack" if it's portable and can be eaten with one hand. My ideal snack is also liquor friendly; extra points if it's crispy. Unsauced samosa and vadai, bhajii and bonda qualify as snacks. So do lighter bites -- like the myriad wafers, crisps and crunchies made at two old family-owned snacks workshops we visited in Karaikudi, a small town in Chettinad.

At least eight crisp snacks sold from a stall in Tamil Nadu

    "Forty or so years ago every household would have made their own snacks. Nowadays no one has time for that, so we do it for them," said the manager of Soundaram's, our first snack stop. Snacks are ubiquitous in Tamil Nadu life she told us, adding that when she was young her mother always set out one sweet and one savory snack for her to eat when she returned home from school.

    By Sunday mid-morning production was already well underway at the 15 year-old workshop, which is housed in a family home. Snack making happens out back on a large thatch-roofed patio, whilie a small room next to the home's entrance does double duty as storeroom and showroom. When we arrived stacks of plastic-packaged snacks teetered atop folding tables, with more piled knee deep on the floor. While we were there customers streamed into the house and left carrying two, five and even twenty bags of snacks. By the time we departed two hours later the workshop's inventory was nearly depleted.

    The Day of Rest is a big one for snacks.

   

    Before heading out to the workshop we sat down to taste. The photo above shows just some of Soundaram's product, all of which are deep-fried and most of which are made with one or another variety of dal and/or rice flour. Before traveling to Tamil Nadu I was familiar mainly with the spicy deep-fried coils called murukku (named for their shape, for murukku means "twisted" in Tamil), which are sold in Penang's Little India in the days leading up to Deepavali. But I had no idea that the Indian snacks repertoire was so vast.

    Mavurundai (next to the cup of chai) are crumbly Mexican wedding cookie-reminiscent balls of moong dal (yellow mung beans), ghee and sugar, sweet but not saccharine. Kai murukku (moving clockwise from the balls) are pleasantly thick unspiced coils of ground rice mixed with toasted split urad dal (back lentil), while seepu seedai (so named because of their ridges -- seepu means "comb"), are light and crispy with a texture recalling the American corn crisp Bugles.

    Blossom-shaped achu murukku (achu for "sweet") are sugary and a little bit sticky and probably the most substantial snack of the bunch. Manakolam taste toasty and a bit like American-Chinese chop suey noodles. Seed-like seedai are plain and extra crunchy, almost hard, while the beautiful ridged coil called kaara murukku has a wee bite from powdered chilies. My two favorite Tamil Nadu snacks are up top: lovely layered athirasam sweetened with jaggery and scented with cardamom, and super spicy flattened disks called thattai.

    Soundaram's employs about 20 women ranging in age from 16 to their mid-twenties; on any given day half of the staff are out back toasting dal, mixing dough, kneading together palm and cane jaggeries for athirasam, sifting rice flour and deep-frying snacks.

    In one corner thattai, for which moong dal, bengal gram and rice flour are mixed with the pungent spice asafoetida, sea salt and powdered chili, were in process. The dough had been mixed earlier and left to rest briefly. Now two ladies worked together, one rolling walnut-sized pieces of dough into balls while the other pressed them into patties, which she then lightly perforated -- this to prevent the wafers from puffing up when they hit hot oil and to give extra crispiness.

  

    At Meiyammai Ramasamy, our second snack stop, workers fry their snacks the old-fashioned way, on big stone hearths fueled by wood. "We'll miss the flavor if we use gas," Meiyammai's owner told me. (She also added that gas is more expensive than wood.)

    Meiyammai's product line is not as vast as Soundaram's; in the workshop only murukku (opening photo) and athirasam were were in progress. As one woman used oiled fingertips to pat out thin rice flour and jaggery patties another placed a pinch of dough at the base of her hearth -- an offering to the elephant-headed Lord Ganesh. Then she slipped the uncooked athirasam into shimmering oil where they sunk, quickly resurfacd, puffed and browned.

    I couldn't say whether or not the scent of wood smoke had anything to do with it, but I did prefer Meiyammai's athirasam over Soundaram's. Made with less jaggery than usual, it cooks up lighter and highly layered, with an extra flaky surface that almost floats off of the pastry. And there's nothing like eating a kai murukku warm out of the kadai.

    Like the shoppers at Soundaram's we left both workshops laden with bags of athirasam, murukku and thattai. With three more days of road travel ahead there would be plenty of time for snacking in the car.

Soundaram’s Chettinad Sweets and Snacks No. 62, M.G. Road 3^rd Cross, Soodamanipuram, Karaikudi. +90 456 565 0733

Meiyammai Ramasamy, No 3 Narayana Ambalam South Street, Kottaiyur

Comments

[Ana]

Interesting read, thanks! And Dave's photos are as always fantastic!

[Albert]

Did you trademark that?

[kristina]

beautiful and I wish I could taste all of those!!!

[Chris]

Love picking up muruku and other treats @ Little India in Pg. Have you read "a Hundred Foot Journey"? There is a recipe for onion bhajis in the back; have to try that one day when I feel like deep frying!

[Preeta Samarasan]

Hey Robyn! Lovely post. All these treats are actually equally common among Malaysian Indians of Tamil descent -- usually during the Deepavali season, but you can get them at other times as well. My late aunt used to make all these from scratch, but, as in India, few Malaysian Indians make them at home nowadays. Athirasam is my mum's favourite too ;-) . And of course the South Indian fried snacks are the ancestor of Malaysian "kacang puteh."

[Preeta Samarasan]

P.S. Maavu urundai is more commonly known by its other name, neyyi urundai, in Malaysia, but people should know both terms if you go looking for them in Penang. Those used to be my very favourite when I was a kid -- I've lost much of my sweet tooth now, but I might still be able to eat those out of nostalgia!

[Preeta Samarasan]

Eek, I'm feeling a bit neurotic posting a third comment here (especially after so many months not commenting!), but I'm clearly a little obsessed with this post ;-) . I just wanted to point out: while achu murukku are sweet, "achu" doesn't mean sweet. "Achu" is the mould or form used in the preparation of those murukku (you probably saw it?).

[Zoe Perrett (@TheSpiceScribe)]

Love this! Lucky to live near a store run by Iyers in North London so I can pick up some of these when the craving strikes (which, thanks to this post, it now! ;) )

[Lisa]

Wonderful post, to join your many many other wonderful posts. I usually don't comment, but have been following your blog faithfully and with great delight for years; your writing is consistently luminous and 1st class. Please keep writing - you are truly in a class of your own. And thank you, really, thank you, for your care with research, your thoughtful work, wonderful photos, outstanding writing.

[Robyn]

Lisa, thank you for the lovely comment -- it made my day!
I will continue writing, of course ... trying to balance book research and writing for the book and traveling with keeping up the blog has been a challenge but I'm trying to get back to it. EatingAsia will not fade away. At least for the foreseeable future, so please stay tuned.
:-)

[Caitlin]

Hi! Featured your post on Back to Spain ... http://back2spain.com/2014/10/29/costa-brava-travel-links/

Cheers!

[Homesick Malaysian]

Have been checking in continuously since this article August, still looking forward to an update soon. I've read many of the older articles you've written, especially about Kuala Lumpur & Penang, perhaps because I'm a Malaysian student in London, and it is not easy to finesse food memories in London's cold, grey autumn without your vivid writing & the lush photography on this blog. I guess in my clumsy way I'm trying to say thank you. I hope your travels are treating you well & that you continue writing :)

[Swisswife (anexpatwife)]

I LOVE this post. I have been to India several times, no where near as much as I'd like and your pictures brought some wonderful food memories back to me. Thank you for sharing.

[Robyn]

You're welcome Swisswife, and thanks for reading!

[Emy]

It's nice to discover new cultures, its permit to the reader learn more information about many things. And each country has their own distinction.

[Rekha rajan]

Lovely. I am from Tamil Nadu and it is always nice to see someone identify and appreciate the snacky nature of my people. Thanks!

[Robyn]

Thank you Rekha! It's always great to hear from folks who intimately know the foods I'm writing about. Tamil Nadu's snacks rule! :)