Ragi Mudde, Not Fully Acclimatized
In India, my first home away from home, I learned to eat food with exotic names like sambar and idli, masala dosai and chapatti. Everything was so spiced that it singed my tongue, stung my throat, smoldered in my stomach, glowed in my bowels and burned when it came out.
It didn't take long before I was acclimatized to the point where I stopped using cutlery and began eating with my right hand. I learned to take a shock of rice with my fingers, turn it this way and that to soak up some curry, and careful not to wet my palm, gathered the mixture into a ball, and flicked it into my mouth. I began to drink like a native too, tilting my head back and letting a stream of liquid trickle down my throat, never touching the rim of the cup or glass with my lips. I had not exactly gone native, but after having lived in India for almost three years, I felt that I still needed to prove to myself that I was truly acclimatized. So, looking for some kind of personal validation, I asked Mrs. Mani my cook, to serve “ragi mudde,” firm round balls the size of a tennis ball, made from the millet that gave good yields from the stony, dry fields of Kolar District, and was a nourishing staple in the local villages.
"What will people think of me if I feed you this,” she lamented in her Tamil blended Kannada. As if I hadn’t already done enough strange things, she shook her head and asked, “why would you eat this simple food when I can make you rice with mutton or chicken every day?”
She placed several balls of boiled millet in front of me on a tin plate and pretended not to watch, as I chewed and chewed. No matter how much curry I soaked those gooey balls in, they still tasted like brown lumps of coagulated dough, and no matter how much water I drank to wash them down, they still stuck to the roof of my mouth. For my unappreciative and untrained palate, ragi mudde’s firm, gluey consistency reminded me of the oatmeal from my childhood, that was left standing too long in the bottom of the pot, and that I sneaked into the trash bin when my mother wasn’t looking.
To Mrs. Mani’s satisfaction, I gave up after a few days and went back to eating her excellent meals. She never said, “I told you so,” and only gloated a little, if you don’t count her hearty laugh when she shared the story of my fiasco with her daughters, as they helped her prepare my favorite dish, chicken curry with rice and chapatti.
Mrs. Mani´s Chicken Curry
Mrs. Mani’s chicken curry wasn’t the same from time to time, but the basic ingredients were, and the result was always an explosion of flavor. I ‘ve made this dish countless times. I try to make it like she did, and this is about as close as I can come, considering her spices came from sacks at the village market, the chicken was slaughtered and plucked a few minutes before going into the pot, and she used tamarind for tartness instead of lemon.
Ingredients:
Peanut or coconut oil, or a neutral oil for frying
3 onions chopped
1 cinnamon stick
2 tablespoons of chopped ginger
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
Two chopped tomatoes or two spoonfuls of tomato paste
1 tsp. ground coriander seeds
1 tsp. ground cardamon seeds
1 tsp. ground cummin seeds
Ground cloves = 2
Ground chili pepper to taste – mild to hot
Juice of one lemon
2 dec. of yogurt
One half liter of water
1.5 – 2 kilos of chicken without the skin cut into pieces
Procedure:
Grind the spices in a mortar.
Heat the oil in a thick bottomed pot and sauté the onion, garlic, and ginger until the onion is golden. Put in the ground spices, fry for several more minutes and add the tomatoes and the cinnamon.
Put in the chicken, add half a liter of water and simmer the mixture while stirring, until the chicken is cooked, about ahalf hour. Stir in the yogurt and the lemon juice.
Serve with boiled rice.