Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [82]
Just before sunset, the captain anchors for the night in a calm lagoon bristling with majestic palms on nearby shores. The chef delivers our wine, the same Grover Vineyards blend we enjoyed in Mumbai at the Taj Mahal, and starts laying out dinner. The prawns shine and so do most of the many other dishes, including local versions of two salads more commonly associated with Thai cooking, one based on green papaya and the other on banana blossoms. Rajesh Khanna chunks the papaya, parboils the fruit, and then dresses it with a mixture of heated coconut oil and spices to serve at room temperature. It comes out tasting like a wonderful summer squash. With the banana blossoms, he cuts them smaller than you see in Thailand, and whips them together with Sadasivum’s hand-ground spice paste, cumin, freshly grated coconut, and lentils.
The stars of the table tonight, for our palates, are a chicken and fish duo. The chef massages the poultry parts over and under the skin with what he calls “chicken masala,” a blend in which we can clearly pick out the tang of red chile powder, black pepper, coconut vinegar, garlic, and turmeric. He fries the parts deftly, producing a result that would shame many good Southern American cooks. The fish is a freshwater pearl spot—“My favorite from the backwaters,” he tells us—that he rubs with spices, wraps in a banana leaf, and cooks on a griddle. “There’s that sour tang again, like at lunch,” Cheryl says. She asks Rajesh Khanna, “Is it cocuu this time, too?”
“Yes. You take the pulp out of the fruit, discarding the seeds, and dry it in the sun about a week, which turns it very dark. Then you hang it inside a fireplace to dry further and acquire a slight smoky flavor. I’ll bring you some of the paste to sample by itself.”
On tasting the paste, Cheryl calls it “Agreeably odd, like tamarind with lime and a hint of smoke.”
A mosquito net hangs over our bed, but we don’t really need it to keep away insects, which are not a problem at our anchorage. Another couple spending the night somewhere else in a houseboat complained bitterly to us the next day that mosquitoes practically devoured them. They could only escape the pests under the netting on their bed, where they had dinner and read. Apparently, not all captains are equally experienced in picking overnight stops.
Roosters on the shore wake us at daybreak, when the only things moving in the lagoon are several small fishing boats. The crew is already up, quietly preparing to take off. Back in the canals, people brush their teeth in the water in front of tidy stucco bungalows painted in pastel shades. All families have at least one dugout canoe, obviously the main form of transportation, and some demark their yards with fences of sticks or neat green hedges. A handmade sign on a log post in one channel declares in English, “A hearty welcome to backwater tourists in Snop Canal.”
The famous spices of Kerala, as well as tea, grow at higher elevations in the distant hills, far from sight. The chef brews some of the local tea for breakfast, and serves it along with coffee, fruit, toast, and tropical jam. He steams some starchy plantainlike bananas, but we also eat finger-size cousins just out of the peel. When he arrives with a platter of eggs scrambled with tomatoes, onions, and bits of fresh green chile, he says, “Onions and tomatoes are not traditional ingredients for us. We’ve only used them for a few decades now.”
Just before lunch, the crew drops us back on Vembanad Lake at Coconut Lagoon, another pretty CGH Earth inn. The trio of boatmen has treated us great and we part with warm farewells, but the new place looks fascinating, too. It’s laid out like a local village, with cottages and larger two-story residences spread across twenty-two acres, everything connected by footpaths and mini-canals. While staff members whisk