How lunch changes with Chennai’s seasons
More buttermilk in April, more pepper rasam in November: the small changes we make through the year.
Six in the morning in the Gandhi Nagar kitchen
Rice at seven, tasting at ten and carriers out by half past eleven: a working morning, hour by hour.
Our kitchen in Gandhi Nagar is quiet at 5.45 am. Revathi arrives first, switches on the lights and checks the vegetables that came in at five from the market. Today it is beans, pumpkin, ash gourd and a crate of drumsticks.
By 6 am the four cooks are in. Two start on cutting at the long steel table, about 35 kg of vegetables for 450 lunches. Kumar soaks and grinds the masala for the day’s kuzhambu on the wet grinder, and Pushpa starts the toor dal in two large pressure cookers. The no onion, no garlic batch for our satvik plan is cooked first, on its own burner, before anything with onion is opened.
The rice goes on at 7 am in big aluminium vessels on the long stove, never earlier, so that it is still warm and soft at lunch. Sambar and rasam are on by eight. The poriyals are tempered last, around nine, so the vegetables stay bright and slightly firm. At ten, Revathi and one of the cooks taste every dish with rice. If the rasam is too sour or the sambar is thin, it is fixed now, not after complaints.
Packing starts at 10.15. Carriers are lined up by route on numbered shelves, and each one is filled in the same order: rice, then curd, then the poriyals and the sealed tumbler of sambar. The first riders leave at 11.30 for the OMR offices, which are furthest away, and the Adyar route goes last at 11.50.
