Idli

If there is one dish that has come to define what South Indian cuisine is all about, it is Idli, the quintessential breakfast table staple. This dish comprises fluffy rice cakes that are served with a side of fermented lentil soup called Sambar, and coconut chutney.

Surprisingly though, Idli may not have been born in the Indian subcontinent at all. Noted food historian KT Achaya believes that this ubiquitous dish may have had its roots in Indonesia.

He backs his statement in A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food, by referring to a 7th-century AD Chinese explorer named Xuan Zang, who found out that steaming vessels weren’t used by Indians at the time. According to Acharya, the rice cakes from Indonesia named Kedli may have been the precursor to Idli as we know it now. Bura, another Indonesian dish made of rice, cut into rectangles and consumed with desiccated ground coconut, bears an uncanny resemblance to Idli.

The theories surrounding the creation of Idli are too many to count. But another possible precursor to Idli may have been Idada. These steamed rice cakes shaped like diamonds came to South India with Saurashtra silk weavers from Gujarat who migrated to Tamil Nadu around the 10th century AD. Like Idli, Idada also consisted of two primary ingredients—rice and urad dal.

In the 12th century AD, King Someshvara III’s manuscript Manasollasa referred to a certain dish called Iddarika that was made with Urad Dal as well. And in 920 AD, Sivakotyacharya’s Kannada language text Vaddaradhane suggested that the word 'idli' may have come from the term Iddalige. This dish was also made with black grams, but it appears rice was not used for any of these recipes.

The preparation of this dish is quite technical and needs years of practice for anyone to master. A batter is made by soaking urad dal and rice for a few hours, grinding them into a paste, and then letting it ferment overnight. Then salt is added to the batter. After this, the batter is poured into greased steamers in spoonfuls and steamed for a few minutes in boiling water. The consistency of the batter and how well it has been proofed determines how fluffy the rice cakes turn out.

A variation of Idli, Rava, made with coarse ground wheat, was invented by the popular brand MTR during World War II. The story goes that Mavalli Tiffin Rooms or MTR, the iconic restaurant chain from Bengaluru, replaced fermented rice with ground semolina to make their version of Idli because the war had resulted in an acute shortage of supply of rice in the state.