How a 50s Food Writer Championed Kerala's Cuisine, One Column at a Time
Mrs KM Mathew captured a collective culinary memory with food that had remained confined to Kerala’s regionally distinct kitchens: sticky, sweet jackfruit ada, prawn pappas, beef pattichu varathathu. Nikhita Venugopal studies the story of her columns, while exploring the parallel history of how women’s magazines and periodicals changed the way that Indian recipes and culinary traditions were passed on.
In the summer of 1953, a small cooking column first appeared in one of Kerala’s most well-read newspapers. While the state is revered for its lush culinary tradition, food was rarely given pride of place in the serious broadsheets of post-Independent India. But tucked between news reports, the six-inch piece held a recipe along with a byline — Mrs. Annamma Mathew. For the next five decades, Mathew, more widely known as Mrs. K.M. Mathew, documented hundreds of recipes for duck roast, cheera thoran and much more in the pages of Malayala Manorama, and later, the Malayalam women’s magazine Vanitha. Mathew’s work transformed her into a celebrated chronicler of Kerala food and an influential figure who anchored recipes from the state and beyond in writing.
Nearly two decades after her death, Mathew’s recipes still find their way into kitchens of Malayali families looking for reliable favourites from the rich cuisine, and frequently as a guide for new homecooks. Food history and its documentation in India is far from exhaustive, but Mathew was part of a movement that ushered in a shift from an oral sharing of recipes within families to a written collection that broadened access to the state’s food. Though much of India’s vast culinary knowledge still remains confined to the kitchen or lost to time, Mathew sought to champion Kerala cuisine, one column at a time.
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She was born on March 22, 1922 in Polavaram in the Godavari district of coastal Andhra Pradesh. Her childhood was spent in motion, largely within Tamil Nadu, with her father George Philip, a civil surgeon in the Madras Presidency, and her mother Sosamma. Kerala was little more than an annual trip for the young girl, and growing up in a Malayali Christian household didn’t do much to stop her from absorbing the Tamil culture that surrounded her. The state, the lyrical intonations of its language and the people around her gave Mathew a deep, life-long connection. She would go on to study at The American College in Madurai before marriage would lead her away.
Mathew was around 20 years old when she received a letter from a potential suitor, a man who would become her husband of 61 years. KM Mathew was a descendent of the high-profile Kandathil family that started the Malayala Manorama Company in 1888, a business that would go on to publish a host of magazines and periodicals along with the Malayalam daily. KM Mathew’s uncle Unnoonnichayan had already visited Mathew in Lalgudi, Tamil Nadu. KM Mathew sent her a letter along with a photograph of himself. She responded, telling him that he could call her Annie, as her friends and father did. On September 7, 1942, the two married at St Thomas Orthodox Church in Alappuzha.
The first years of their marriage were spent in Chikmagalur in Karnataka, where KM Mathew was tasked with managing a coffee estate owned by his family. Mathew soon turned to hobbies, to keep herself occupied on the estate. From a young age, she had harboured a love of singing and playing the violin. Household staff meant that she was not encouraged to enter the kitchen at the estate, or in the years before, at her parents' home. Despite a lack of hands-on experience, a simple appreciation of food had long been seeded by her father, who would turn to cooking in his free time. “He inspired in me an abiding interest in the art of cooking and taught me the magic of flavours,” Mathew wrote in her final cookbook, Flavours of the Spice Coast.
But a loneliness had set over Mathew, and she longed for the vibrant trappings of a big city. In a book about his wife published after her death, KM Mathew described this as, “The angst of an artist who could not find the right avenue for her creative expression.”
In 1947, five years into their marriage, the family packed up and moved to erstwhile Bombay, where KM Mathew would handle sales for the company’s rubber products. It was in Bombay that Mathew’s long-held interest in food and cooking finally manifested. She enrolled in cooking classes conducted by a Parsi woman named Mrs. Dastur and the couple ate at as many affordable Bombay eateries as they could. Once her love of food became apparent to the family, her father-in-law and then-editor K.C. Mammen Mappillai asked if she’d like to write something for the newspaper. He suggested the title Panchakavidhi, which translates to “method of cooking.”
In India, where the documentation of recipes has long relied on an oral tradition passed down from generation to generation, it wasn’t until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that cookbooks primarily for Anglo-Indian women began to appear more commonly, and later, more regionalised cookbooks. These were slim volumes, about the length and width of a novel. Recipes were instructional, direct, printed in simple typeface, and there was little notion of photos.
“The custodians of culinary heritage were either individual women or communities,” food writer and historian Rushina Munshaw Ghildiyal tells me. “Books at that time were written to tell you how to do things. Not why you did those things in a certain way.”
Mathew’s first column appeared in the paper on May 30, 1953, with recipes for doughnuts and Goan prawn curry. The column found a place in the weekend edition of the paper, and Mathew’s process for putting it together became an exercise in diligence. While in Bombay, she would write the recipes in English, and KM Mathew would translate them into Malayalam. She vetted recipes passed through friends and family, and experimented on dishes she made at home or discovered in restaurants. Her husband, and later her children and grandchildren, were the first to taste her creations. She would order as much as she could at restaurants in India and abroad, spoke to chefs and noted down ingredients before attempting to recreate the dish in her kitchen. Her writing would later move to Vanitha magazine, for which Mathew served as founding editor-in-chief. She traveled across the state to people’s homes to understand and record the breadth of Kerala’s cuisine. Recipes were tested again and again and again, before they were written, for if anything went wrong, she knew the blame would fall on the largely female readers following her instructions.
Mathew’s first cookbook — Pachakala — was published a few years after her first column, following which she published a total of 27 cookbooks, five of which were in English, according to her family, but most have become hard to track down. Some dealt with specific culinary subjects — Arogya Pachakam for recipes towards a healthy lifestyle, and Aadhunika Pachakam for “modern” recipes such as sandwiches and salads.
Kerala Cookery, one of her most well-known books in English, walked homecooks through dozens of recipes for fish avial, roe cake, egg roast, savory tapioca and pickled gooseberry chutney. Illustrations and hints were included for assistance: “The head, tail and the soft underside (stomach) are best for the ‘red fish curry’ or ‘vevichathu.’”
Chef Regi Mathew, who has devoted years of research to traditional Kerala food for his restaurant Kappa Chakka Kandhari, has turned to Mathew’s cookbooks as a way to cross-check his own recipes and the method he follows. A recipe for fish moilee had him questioning the addition of tomatoes to the preparation, and he sought Mathew’s book to clarify if she had added tomatoes as well. (She had).
Her last cookbook, Flavours of the Spice Coast, was published a year before her death in 2003. It’s a compilation of some of the most enduring recipes from the state’s regionally distinct kitchens: sticky, sweet jackfruit ada, steamed in wrapped bay leaves; prawn pappas simmered in thick coconut milk and the sour tang of kokum; beef pattichu varathathu, patiently stewed till tender. Glossy pages and studio-quality photos point to its recency, but a terseness in tone from her early recipes persists. A handful of recipes offer a variation on the original: Kaalan, in which plantains are slowly simmered in a curd-and-coconut based curry, “can also be made with pineapple instead of banana.”
Newly-married women heading to new homes would receive stacks of Mathew’s books — as well as cookbooks from another eminent Kerala author Mrs. BF Varughese — to hold their hands through erissery, Trivandrum chicken fry, and meen pollichathu. When Sunitha Abraham got married more than four decades ago, she received her own collection and a Prestige pressure cooker from Mathew herself, who attended the wedding. “You can’t call your mother and ask her what to do,” she said.
Sheba Martin now lives in Irinjalakuda in Kerala, but recalls Mathew’s cabbage thoran recipe as the first thing she cooked after moving to Chennai with her husband. It was one of many times through the years that she turned to Mathew’s books to guide her. “That’s all thanks to Mrs. K.M. Mathew. No one else.”
Seven years after arriving in Bombay, it came time for Mathew to leave. She could not contain her anguish as they moved away from the city she loved so much to Kottayam in Kerala, where she would spend the rest of her days. But her grief would not last forever. Kottayam wasn’t just home to her work in journalism, but a place where she forged her own path as an activist and eventually started the Kasturba Social Welfare Centre for women. Years later, when her husband asked if she would like to go back to living in Bombay, KM Mathew wrote that she did not hesitate in her response: “Kill me if you like, but I will not leave Kottayam.”
The acceleration of internal, and later global, migration in post-colonial India led to a sense of displacement that called for two kinds of cooking: one of their new home, and the other of where they had come from. Despite this – and though Matthew’s cookbooks found their following among novice cooks – they, and others of the time, assume that the reader has a level of familiarity with the food they’re presenting. Modern cookbooks on the other hand present readers with unfamiliar cuisines by offering broad introductions to places you may never visit.
Radhika Parameswaran, the associate dean, at the Media School of Indiana University, Bloomington, calls this “the voice of the insider,” which reinforced the patriarchal expectation of a woman’s culinary competence. Parameswaran recalls how her own mother was belittled for being unable to cook well, and how that was falsely tied to her ability as a parent.
Food writing in India has come a long way since Mathew published her first column all those years ago. There’s an effort toward understanding the context around food and the community who creates it, beyond a simple list of ingredients. The presence of an oral tradition is not the only challenge encountered in documenting Indian food history, but an individualized perspective on one's local, household or community knowledge has made it harder to create a consolidated history. Ghildiyal explained that it’s only a handful of women with access to education and resources, who have been able to cross the barrier of the kitchen. “Ninety percent of food knowledge in India is in the home kitchen, and it hasn’t been written down,” she said.
In Kerala, a large family home became Mathew’s domain, along with a staff of household workers to assist in her culinary pursuits. In Flavours of the Spice Coast, she called two of these men, P.N. Vasu and Sylvester D’Souza, “the finest chefs in the world.” Her grandson Rohan Mammen recalled feasts laid on the table at her home, with childhood favourites like a decadently slow-cooked black halwa, or chilled puddings made with tender coconut water and toasted coconut shavings. In her later years, memories of her in the kitchen aren’t of cooking, but managing the household, proffering cookbooks turned to specific page numbers for meals to be cooked that day and inspecting the space for cleanliness at night before heading to bed. Mathew is said to have been able to list the ingredients in a dish solely by taste, and if she did not believe a dish was prepared as written, she would make her displeasure known. She kept an unwavering schedule, waking up before sunrise to play her music or write down recipes.
Mathew died on July 10, 2003 at the age of 81. Through the weekly act of writing, Mathew offered readers a glimpse into her own passion for cooking and the dedication required to search for food beyond the four walls of a kitchen. For her, cooking wasn’t just a craft to be shared, but one that required writing and rewriting, testing and re-testing, again and again and again.
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