Last year, I shared my tale of woe – a bid to impress non-tamil colleagues through my knowledge of the ‘idli’ and it’s hoary past gone horribly wrong. Let alone south Indian, I found idlis were not even Indian! Read more here.
I had to salvage my wrecked ego, reinstate my culinary identity and restore my former glory in the cultural gastronomic milieu. In short, I was desperate for an un-suck button as the office-food-guy. After months of searching, the finding happened!
The Pongal is the quintessential Tamil dish, with a festival named after it. It is the one dish that is soaked liberally in cow ghee, tamil mythology and undeniable historicity, not necessarily in that order.
Starting at the Beginning
Archaeologically, it all began in 10,000 BC. When parts of the world were still in the Stone Age, escaping mammoths, the people of the Indus Valley civilization began farming rice in the step fields near Kashmir. But even before that, wild rice was eaten by these people.
Five thousand years later, in south India, some genius of a cook ‘accidentally’ boiled rice and Moong dal together, to create the Pongal. This was such a hit that much later, around 200 BC, the ‘Indravizhya’ festival celebrated at Poombuhar came to be called ‘Pongal’.
Archaeology is Boring. How About Some Mythology
The story goes, on what would later be the third day of Pongal, Lord Shiva said to his steed, “Nandi! Go down to earth. And instruct the humans to take an oil bath daily, and eat once a month.”
But confused with the multiple instructions, Nandi said, “Eat daily and take an oil bath once a month!”
Angered, Lord Shiva sent Nandi to earth to help men grow more food. And because of Nandi’s arrival, Pongal, became a festival.
Why the Recipe’s a Big D(e)AL
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Despite most civilisations across the world being familiar with rice and lentils and boiling, no one, anywhere else on the planet thought of the simple five-step Pongal recipe, except the Tamils!
In Ancient Greece, there was a Pongal-like dish, which originated after Alexander’s invasions in India, in May, 327 BC, which was the last time his soldiers fought in the subcontinent and the first time they saw rice. In the Greek recipe, rice, lentils and beans were boiled together and finally doused in red wine. Today, the Greeks have done away with rice and use red wine vinegar.
The Travelling Pongal
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Just as the Pongal begins its circuitous travel around the gut, causing a mild numbing of the senses, it travelled across the country and around the world.
And as Indian food and medicine culturally influenced Greece, Rome, the far East and later European countries, it took along with it the Pongal, which today holds more aliases and visas than James Bond. And yet, despite the similarities, there’s still nothing quite like it.
(Vikram Venkateswaran is a freelance writer, TV producer and media consultant. Headings, titles and captions are his kryptonite. He lives in Madurai and is occasionally struck by the feeling that the city likes him back.)
(This story was first published on 14 January 2016 and has been reposted from The Quint’s archives on the occasion of Pongal.)
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