#1000Kitchens Recipe Drop: Prawn Curry with Eggplant & Boiled Eggs
“I am a Mala boy!” exclaims Sri Vamsi Matta multiple times during his solo performance, Come Eat With Me. It’s a simple statement of fact, it’s a robust assertion of identity, it’s also a milestone in the long, turbulent journey of the Dalit in taking open ownership of his caste.
While there is greater awareness of Dalit culture in the mainstream today, popular conceptions about the Dalit diet — rooted, perhaps, in the work of older thinkers such as Kancha Iliah Shepherd and Shahu Patole — centre it around beef, blood, entrails and offal.
“I get well-meaning, liberal, Savarna people coming up at my shows — I’ve done nearly 40 performances of Come Eat With Me — and telling me, ‘Oh, I thought you’d cook beef!’ I think these questions are as much about the age-old lens of brutalization and violence through which Dalits are perceived as it is about virtue-signalling that you are okay with beef,” says Vamsi. “But you also need to see [the evolution in Dalit food habits], when people migrated from their villages to towns and cities for education and employment, for a better life, they were scared of what their markers of untouchability would do. So they let go of them.”
“Beef was never a reality in my house,” he says. “As the son of two favourite children, I was the apple of my grandmothers’ eyes. My paternal grandmother Chakramma, she was a force of nature: She lost her husband early and brought up five children single-handedly. She was a great cook, and she would never let any visitor leave hungry. Narasapuram, where she lived in Andhra’s West Godavari district, is where the river meets the sea. So fish, prawns, dried fish were all part of her diet. When we went visiting, over Easter or Christmas, this is what she would feed me.”
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CHAKRAMMA GARI VANKAYA PACHIROYYALU
(Chakramma’s Brinjal and Prawn Curry)
Ingredients
500gm fresh prawns
250gm small-sized brinjals (eggplant), cubed
2 medium-sized tomatoes, chopped
2 medium-sized onions, chopped
3 or 4 green chilies, slit
Oil as needed
Salt and chilli powder to taste
1 tsp ginger-garlic paste
1 small lime-sized tamarind, soaked in hot water
A handful of coriander leaves
Boiled eggs, according to preference (ideally, one per person)
Method
Clean the prawns by rubbing them with turmeric and salt. Set aside for a while, then wash thoroughly to remove any raw smell.
In a kadhai or small wok, heat oil till smoking, add the onions and fry until golden brown. (Add a little salt to help the onions cook faster.)
Next, add the ginger-garlic paste and sauté until the raw smell disappears. Then add tomatoes and green chilies. (You can also add chopped drumstick with the tomatoes, if you like.)
Once the tomatoes are soft and cooked, add the brinjal. Reduce the flame to low, add salt, and let them cook. This is when you add washed prawns so as to not overcook them.
After the brinjal is cooked, add chili powder and enough water so that all the pieces are submerged, depending on the quantity of gravy you want. Once 90% of the curry is done, add tamarind extract. At this stage, you can add boiled eggs (these are optional).
Let the curry simmer for an additional 5-10 minutes on a low flame.
Before removing from the stove, taste and adjust salt and chili powder if needed. Finally, garnish with coriander leaves and serve.
Words by Sumana Mukherjee. Photos by Sanskriti Bist.
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