Kappa Puzhukku

Kerala's mashed cassava, the boiled root crushed with a coarse paste of grated coconut, green chilli, and turmeric and finished with mustard seed and curry leaf spluttered in coconut oil

Origin: Thiruvananthapuram and Travancore, Kerala

From the journey of Cassava.

Cassava came to the Malabar Coast with Portuguese shipping in the seventeenth century and then did almost nothing for two hundred years, sitting in gardens as a curiosity whilst Kerala ate rice. What changed it was hunger. The famines that struck Travancore in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the collapse of the rice supply that came with them, pushed the royal house into promoting cassava deliberately as a substitute; Maharaja Vishakham Thirunal, who ruled in the 1880s and had a real interest in agriculture, is credited with the campaign that put it into every smallholding in the state. Within a generation Kerala went from not eating cassava to eating it daily, which is about as fast as a staple has ever changed anywhere. Malayalam calls the root kappa or maracheeni, tree tuber, and Indian English calls it tapioca, which is a confusion peculiar to the subcontinent: everywhere else that word means the extracted starch, and here it means the root itself. Kappa puzhukku is the everyday form. The peeled root is boiled until it collapses and then crushed, not puréed, with a coarse wet paste of grated coconut, green chilli, turmeric, garlic, and shallot, and finished with black mustard seed and curry leaf spluttered in hot coconut oil. Eaten with a fiery red meen curry of sardine or kingfish soured with kudampuli, the pairing known as kappa-meen is as close to a national dish as Kerala has. The plant also carried a distinct social meaning. It was the food of the labourer and the smallholder rather than of the landowning table, and its rise to affectionate respectability over the last half century has been a change in class as much as in taste.

Ingredients

Root

1 kg cassava (kappa), peeled, cored, and cut into 4 cm chunks
1.5 tsp fine salt
0.5 tsp ground turmeric

Coconut paste

120 g fresh grated coconut
4 green chillies
4 cloves garlic
3 shallots
0.5 tsp ground turmeric
0.5 tsp cumin seeds

Tempering

2 tbsp coconut oil
1 tsp black mustard seeds
2 sprigs curry leaves
3 dried red chillies, broken
2 shallots, thinly sliced

Method

Peel the cassava, taking off both the brown skin and the thick pink layer beneath, split each piece and pull out the woody central cord, then cut into chunks.
Put the chunks in a pan with the salt and the half teaspoon of turmeric, cover generously with water, and boil for twenty to twenty-five minutes until completely tender and beginning to fall apart. Drain well, reserving a little of the cooking water.
While it boils, pound or pulse the grated coconut, green chillies, garlic, shallots, turmeric, and cumin to a coarse, damp paste. Do not make it smooth.
Return the drained cassava to the warm pan, add the coconut paste, and crush everything together with a wooden spoon or a masher over a low heat for three or four minutes.
Heat the coconut oil in a small pan until it shimmers. Add the mustard seeds and wait for them to pop, then add the dried chillies, curry leaves, and sliced shallots and fry for a minute until the shallots colour and the leaves crackle.
Pour the tempering, oil and all, over the cassava and fold it through. Serve hot.

Notes

Frozen cassava chunks work well and remove the peeling, which is the tedious part of the job. In Indian English and in Kerala the root itself is called tapioca. Elsewhere in the world that word means the extracted starch, and the two are entirely different products. Kudampuli, Malabar tamarind, is what makes the accompanying fish curry taste Keralan rather than generically Indian, and it is sold dried by South Indian grocers. A vegetarian household serves this with a coconut and green chilli chutney or with plain yoghurt instead of the fish curry.

The Gastrographer

Name: Kappa Puzhukku
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 50 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Kerala
Ingredients: 1 kg cassava (kappa), peeled, cored, and cut into 4 cm chunks; 1.5 tsp fine salt; 0.5 tsp ground turmeric; 120 g fresh grated coconut; 4 green chillies; 4 cloves garlic; 3 shallots; 0.5 tsp ground turmeric; 0.5 tsp cumin seeds; 2 tbsp coconut oil; 1 tsp black mustard seeds; 2 sprigs curry leaves; 3 dried red chillies, broken; 2 shallots, thinly sliced

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Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route

Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control