New Delhi | A new cookbook shares all-time top recipes of Kerala cuisine connoisseur K M Mathew to mark her 100th birth anniversary.
"Mrs K M Mathew's Finest Recipes" has been published by Penguin imprint Ebury Press 20 years after she died in 2003.
In the book's preface, her daughter Thangam Mammen writes that "simple good food" was Mathew's motto and all she wanted was for everyone to enjoy good food.
She says Mathew left for her more than a thousand recipes which she had collected, discovered or created.
"Amma had written her first cookery column on doughnuts, two years before I was born. It was published in the Malayala Manorama newspaper on May 30, 1953, along with her recipe for Goan prawn curry. These appeared under the name Mrs Annamma Mathew, and she became fairly well-known after a column on Mutton Bafath," Mammen writes.
"Her popularity multiplied after she started using the name Mrs KM Mathew. This lucky name change was her own idea and she hardly ever used the name Annamma anywhere again," she adds.
Mutton Bafath, one of Mathew's early recipes that made its debut in the cookery columns of Malayala Manorama, is among the more than 100 recipes that are included in the book.
There is also the recipe of New Year Chicken Roast, a creation of Mathew's father Dr George Philip who was ably assisted by his cook 'Gunner' Unni, who had served in the British Indian Army during World War II.
The book is divided into 10 chapters - Snacks, Breakfast Items, Egg Dishes, Meat Dishes, Seafood Dishes, Vegetable Dishes, Rice Dishes, Payasam and Puddings, Soups, and Jams, Pickles, Chutneys and Chutney Powders.
According to Mammen, her mother was familiar with the varied tastes of India. Mathew's parents were from Kerala but she was born and raised in faraway Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh, where her father was a doctor.
"He loved making chicken soup (he had made it even on the day he died, at the age of 93) and her mother loved cooking Kerala's Syrian-Christian dishes. The neighbourhood was redolent with the scents of Tamil and Telugu food," the book says.
After her marriage, Mathew and her husband moved to Chikmagalur where they lived in a coffee estate for a few years. She developed a love for Kannadiga delicacies there. Then they moved to Bombay, and this was where she learnt to cook a variety of local, north Indian and continental dishes.
Mathew authored 27 cookbooks, introducing an entire generation to the culinary culture of Kerala. She travelled across the length and breadth of Kerala, visiting homes and restaurants, noting down recipes, before going back home to experiment with dishes repeatedly until they were perfect.
Her books are a step-by-step approach to cooking and being simple, often gifted to newly-married couples.
"Her wedding gift to her acquaintances was invariably a bundle of her cookbooks. Even today, many people in India and abroad tell me that Amma's book 'Nadan Pachakarama' was like the Bible to them when they had just started their married life and were learning to cook," Mammen writes.
She says her mother did not even recommend any complex or elaborate recipes to her readers because, for her, simplicity and taste came before novelty. She even avoided using words like "foodie" and "cuisine".
Her first book came out in 1955 - "Pachaka Kala" ("The Art of Cooking") in Malayalam.
Food was sacred for Mathew and she never wasted it.
"If there was anything left over, she would make a delicious new dish out of it. She always taught us to respect food and forbade shop talk at the dinner table at our home in Roopkala, Kottayam, Kerala. All she wanted was for everyone to enjoy good food," Mammen writes.
Mathew, who was the founder editor of leading Malayalam magazine for women Vanitha, was far from secretive and took joy in sharing her recipes with everyone. In fact, sometimes she would send the recipe along with the food she sent to her friends and acquaintances and if they ever faced a problem cooking it, she would even send her trained cook to demonstrate the cooking procedure.
Mammen says her mother wrote her recipes early in the morning, after waking up at 3 am.
"No recipe made it to her column before she had tested it at least three times. My father always got the first chance to taste it and to give feedback. Amma made sure she bought all the ingredients herself and measured them precisely.
"In the early years, she would use cigarette tins as measuring cups and gradually she accumulated all the paraphernalia, including a mallet from abroad for tenderising the meat. When fair reviews of her books appeared in the press, she was ecstatic," the book says.
