An interesting article in the NYT's dining section on Malayalee food.   The author is quite literate on the history and culture of Kerala in addition to offering some great descriptions of my people's grub.   The writing and context are superb:

...For centuries, long before the steamship, long before the jet plane, venturesome traders rode the trade winds to Kerala. Romans, Phoenicians, Chinese, Arabs, Portuguese, Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Britons all came here, and so did Jewish merchants from Venice. St. Thomas the Apostle is said to have landed along this coast in A.D. 52, and Christopher Columbus was headed west in search of Kerala's fabled spices when he stumbled upon America.

A little food mixed with a little religion:

...Unlike many Indians, Malayalees eat beef, but they eat a lot more seafood — shrimp and crab and all sorts of ocean fish, notably seer, a mackerel with mild, firm flesh that looks like a miniature tuna.

Mrs. Paul showed us two fish preparations, the first of which, called molee, is a great favorite of the local Syrian Christians, as the descendants of early settlers from Baghdad and Nineveh call themselves. It is a must for wedding feasts and Christmas.

Mixed with a little communist / socialist-style development:

...Kerala is a poor place, with an annual gross domestic product per person of about $1,000, poor even by Indian standards, as poor as Cambodia and the Sudan. But it is also a striking example, as Akash Kapur argued in The Atlantic in 1998, of poor people living well. The Malayalees' houses and clothing may be simple, but their life expectancy is 72 years, close to the American average; the infant mortality rate is low; and population is under control.

And the Syrian Christian invasion:

...Syrian Christians — instantly recognizable by their biblical surnames, like Phillip, Thomas, Andrew, Peter and Paul — have shaped much that is distinctive about life in Kerala. "Christianity," wrote Arundhati Roy in her whirling, dreamlike novel, "The God of Small Things" (Random House, 1997), "arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag."

...Accounting for only a quarter of Kerala's 33 million people, the Syrian Christians are an energetic and ambitious group, entrepreneurial, philanthropic and devoted to higher education. They have had a large impact as well on the world of cuisine.

A visit to a street side food stall:

...But to taste Kerala's quintessential fast food, you must visit a dosa shop, preferably the Pai Brothers' open-air, pink-walled bare-bones stand in a garish alley off M. G. (for Mahatma Gandhi) Road in Ernakulam. Thirty-six types of sourdough crepes are listed on the blackboard. No. 21, say, has tomato, onion and masala (in this context, a spicy potato mixture), or No. 13, roasted onions. Watch the dosa-master spread the rice flour and lentil batter on a griddle with the back of his ladle, add the fillings and sprinkle it all lavishly with pepper.

Of course, a visit to these shops often requires an obligatory Pepto dessert  

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