A dark rainy evening with gusty cold winds …. fabulous weather that calls for comfort food and mine is a piping hot gottu rasam sadam paired with fried neem flowers and pickled onions. A finger-licking meal… though many will raise their eyebrows at the poor table etiquette.
Delicious smell wafts through the house when this simple tangy homemade goodness boils in an eeya chombu, a traditional vessel that is used to prepare rasams. A special handcrafted cookware made of pure tin, which is a soft metal that lends itself to different shapes to form chombu ,vennaithazhi and an adukku. The chemistry between rasam and the eeyachombu remains a mystery still not ravelled over the years.
The golden rule while using this vessel which has a low melting point of 232degrees Celsius is to never keep it on the flame without filling it up with the rasam ingredients. My first tryst with this vessel was a total disaster. I was a trainee in my mother’s kitchen. The lesson was on rasam making. I brushed aside her help or instructions with a know-all attitude and set about with the preparation. I placed the eeya chombu on the stove just as we would place a kadai. As it was getting hot, I began to extract the tamarind juice. While I was just about to pour it
into the vessel all that I saw was a gaping hole with tiny silver beads running down from the kitchen platform. ‘Ammaaaaa ‘a panicky yell that culminated into a life lesson twinned with culinary training.
Gottu rasam recipe:
Ingredients for Gottu Rasam:
- Tamarind 1 lemon size
- Rasam powder 1 tsp
- Asafoetida 1.2 tsp
- Curry leaves few
- Coriander leaves chopped 2 tbsp
- Ghee 1 tsp
- Mustard seeds 1 tsp
- Cumin/jeera 1 tsp
- Red chilly 6
- Salt as required
Preparation Method:
- Extract the tamarind in 1 litre of water.
- Pour it into the eeya chombu.
- Add 1/4 tsp of asafoetida,2 broken red chilly and the rasam powder. Add the required salt and bring to boil.
- Heat ghee in a tempering pan. Splutter mustard, cumin, red chilly, curry leaves, and asafoetida. Pour the tempering over the frothy rasam and switch off the flame.
- Add the coriander and cover the chombu. Serve hot with Rice.
- Do not store the rasam in the eeya chombu beyond 3 hours.
Note: FRIED NEEM FLOWERS.
Take a teaspoon of ghee. Heat it and add the dry neem flowers. Roast till the flowers turn black.
