Never does the day dawn in Kerala villages without the sharp crack of a coconut in local homes. Malayalis do not underestimate the gastronomic potential of the coconut in our local cuisine. Combining tropical vegetables, seafood and meats with indigenous spices and abundant coconut Kerala has produced a delicious, bright and vividly varied cuisine. The sweet and meaty kernel of the coconut palm is an essential ingredient in traditional Kerala cooking -ninety nine percent of the dishes served with rice are made with at least some coconut. Several snacks are served with coconut chutney, and coconut and/or coconut milk is used in making many curries as well as sweets and desserts.

How many coconuts for today? That was the recurrent question of our cook every morning in my ancestral home. And that number of coconuts varied with the menu for the day. The coconuts are then cut open and busily scraped and used in different forms - freshly scraped coconut as garnish for thorans (sautéed vegetables) and as filling for idiappm, ground smooth with green chilies and ginger into fresh coconut chutney, coarsely pureed with cumin seeds for the quintessential Kerala dish aviyal, or the same ingredients pureed smoothly to make creamy kaalan, toasted along with hot chili peppers and other spices for several other curries- the list goes on.

When the choices for the day included oolan, stew or masalakari, all of them cooked in coconut milk, the number of coconuts to be broken increased proportionately. Coconut milk is extracted in varying strengths. There is the first extract or the thick creamy milk produced by squeezing the scraped coconut. It is generally used at the final stage of cooking. The second extract or thin milk is squeezed after adding some water to the coconut scrapings from which the first milk was already extracted. This slightly watery milk is used for the actual cooking of fish, meat or vegetables. The determined souls even attempt the third extract. And when it is festival time, there are creamy paayasams to be made, again with plenty of coconut milk. And the oil of choice in our cuisine of course is coconut oil. Oil extracted from copra, dried coconut, is used in seasoning and deep frying food. Plantain banana chips deep fried in coconut oil have a special taste of their own.

There would be at least one coconut palm, if not many more, in every back yard in Kerala’s tropical landscape. These palms are grown here not just for coconuts. To us the coconut palm’s usefulness is many-fold. An old saying goes - if you plant ten coconut palms when you can afford, there would be at least ten coconuts when the times are rough. The liquid inside the tender green coconut, coconut water, provides a refreshing drink. The leaves of the coconut palm are braided to make thatch roofs and for mats to sit or sleep on. The center veins of the leaves are bunched together to make very good whisk brooms. The trunk of the tree itself is used in building huts. Cups, spoons and ladles are made of coconut shell, which also doubles as fuel for wood burning stoves. The coconut residue after pressing out the oil is used as feed for milking cows. The fermented sap from the shoots that bear flowers gives an alcoholic drink - toddy....more>