A Homecoming with Karthik’s Puli Rasam and Thuvaiyal

At Goya, celebrating home cooks and recipes have always been at the heart of our work. Through our series, #1000Kitchens, we document recipes from kitchens across the country, building a living library of heirloom recipes that have been in the family for 3 generations or more. In this edition, Anisha Oommen speaks to chef Karthikeyan Sugumaran of Goa’s Tamil table about puli rasam and thuvaiyal, dishes from his great grandmother.

This season’s stories are produced in partnership with the Samagata Foundation—a non-profit that champions meaningful projects.

“Shall we go sit at the bar?”

We follow Karthik and Sacha inside, leaving the humid Goa afternoon behind us. The cool red oxide floor gives way to black and white checkered tiles; a Tamil playlist drifts through the room. Candles flicker softly, casting playful shadows across Ravi Varma goddess in their shrines. The aroma of samrani fills the room.

“I wanted to evoke those old Iyer cafés with marble-topped tables and India Coffee House brass mugs. We waited a long time to build it just the way we had imagined,” says Karthik, who knew exactly the kind of place he was dreaming of. He gestures toward the limestone walls and fluted glass windows. “The throw of light is just different,” he adds, as if that explained everything.

We are at Tamil Table, a restaurant run by chef Karthikeyan Sugumaran. Karthik spent his early years at Dakshin, an award-winning south Indian restaurant in Chennai. He then ran a café in the courtyard of an old French house, in Pondicherry, his hometown, before moving to Goa. Here at Tamil Table, he cooks homestyle Tamil food. The papadams and spice mixes are made in house, by Karthik’s mother in Pondicherry, based on recipes she inherited from her grandmother.

“When we moved here in 2016, we were always searching for good South Indian food, but there were so few options,” explains Sacha, his partner. “And I grew up on my mum’s cooking…” Karthik begins.

Sacha catches his expression and picks up the thread. “The truth is, he missed the food he grew up with. That’s when it struck him—how meaningful it really was. We take these things for granted when they’re placed in front of us every day,” she reflects. “It’s only when you step away and look back that you think: Oh my god, what was that!”

Karthik began to reconstruct the flavours he had grown up with. Documentation started with mental notes — “And long phone calls with mum,” he adds. As he cooked, friends dropped by to eat. The flavours were clean, unexpected. “Soon, people were asking us to cater small gatherings,” recalls Sacha. “At the time, we were just cooking for people we loved. There was no rush to open a restaurant, no business plan. It all grew naturally, out of the need to cook.”

But the more people he fed, the more Karthik felt like cooking. A ripple effect, you could say. “It had a real romance to it,” he reflects. As if the joy somehow multiplied itself with each meal.

Today, in the restaurant kitchen, he is cooking a puli rasam and thuvaiyal, two of the simplest dishes, it could be argued, in his repertoire. They come to him from his great-grandmother, and represent a quiet sort of homecoming. “When I’d return home after travelling, mum would ask me, ‘What do you want to eat?’ I’d always say, ‘Make me puli rasam and karavadu.’”

Rice kept overnight with water, and thuvaiyal. “I’m coming home to eat rasam rice and karavadu. That means I’m home, and I’m safe.”

Not unlike a two-ingredient martini—when everything hangs in the balance, there’s nowhere to hide. Karthik begins with shallots and an aromatic aged tamarind. “My great-grandmother — we called her paati — was quite a character. She ran a bookshop for students in Chidambaram, and as a working woman, everything she cooked had to be quick. Quick, but always delicious. She could make the most incredible dishes from the most basic ingredients.”

Puli rasam is a very humble family recipe, made with just a few everyday ingredients: tamarind water, fresh coriander leaves — true to her practical culinary style. So simple, in fact, that it might easily be dismissed as “poor man’s food.”

“While my mum would serve at least ten to twelve dishes for a family meal, paati would make just two. But every dish was full of flavour, perfectly balanced.” He remembers her spending hardly any time in the kitchen. “You could never see what she was making. Paati would slip in and out; you could never catch her in the act.”

Karthik believes his mother learned her recipes from spending time with her grandmother. He recalls another favourite, teasingly called kili-potha sambar — sambar made with a pinch of everything. “It’s all in the hand —a pinch of curry leaves, a pinch of chilli, a pinch of dal.” A phrase more melodic in Tamil than its English equivalent: to “eyeball” a recipe.

During the monsoon, when it was too wet to venture out for fresh ingredients, meals were often served with dried meat — karavadu. It is also the season for tamarind. Dishes were cooked with tamarind to preserve flavours and avoid spoilage in the humid weather. Coconut, another beloved ingredient on the East Coast, is known to spoil quickly, especially in the humid monsoon months.

The tamarind at Tamil Table is deep and plummy, aged eight to twelve months, lending its complexity to fish curry and the restaurant’s signature mango-aubergine curry. “This is Tamil cooking,” Karthik says, “Prawns with drumstick and radish, tang of tamarind, richness of coconut oil. Fish curry with sesame oil for depth. And the next day… everything tastes even better, sharper, tangier, from the sweet warmth of the aged tamarind.”

KATHIK’S RECIPE FOR PULI RASAM

Ingredients

Sesame oil
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp broken urad dal
2 tsp toor dal
1 lemon sized ball of soaked in 3 cups of water for few hours. Strain and set aside the water
2 green chillies, split
1 tsp fenugreek seeds
1 sprig curry leaves
1-12 whole shallots, peeled
1 generous pinch, asafoetida
Rock salt, to taste
1 tsp turmeric powder
Coriander, for garnish

Method
Heat the oil in the wok, add in mustard seeds, urad and toor dals and fenugreek.
When it crackles, add in the chilli, curry leaves, and shallots.
Roast the ingredients on a high flame.
Salt generously.
Add turmeric powder, and then the tamarind water.
Add in the asafoetida and allow to simmer for 20 minutes.
Finish with fresh coriander leaves.

RECIPE FOR RIDGE GOURD THUVAIYAL

Ingredients

2 tbsp sesame oil
3 pcs whole asafoetida
10 cloves garlic
12 slices of ginger
2 dry red chilli, halved
Peels of 1 ridge gourd
Rock salt, to taste
1 handful peanuts
1 sprig curry leaves
2 red chillies
1 tsp toor dal and urad dal
1 pinch asafoetida powder

Method

Heat the sesame oil in a hot wok. Add in the asafoetida.
When it puffs up, add in the garlic cloves, ginger rounds, and broken red chilli.
Now add the ridge gourd peels.
Allow to cook and move into a blender. Be careful not to over-roast, as we want to preserve the vibrant green colour of the peels.
Add a fistful of peanuts.
Season with rock salt.
Blitz till it forms a paste.
Separately, prepare a tempering of curry leaves, red chilli, toor dal, chana dal and asafoetida.
Add the blitzed thuvaiyal in, and stir-fry for a minute.

Words any Anisha Oommen. Photographs by Nachiket Pimprikar. Art by Aparna Patidar.
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