The Hindu Business Line : Roadside saapad?

A heap of shredded cabbage and carrot that go into the rice or noodles in a huge cast-iron wok atop a high flame; coils of white dough waiting to be patted and fried into a parotha; idli and sambar, rice and fried fish; sandwiches with tomato and omelette — these are the visions conjured up when you mention Madras and street food in the same breath.

Thanks to concerns of safety and ventilation, these treats of the great outdoors could not be accommodated in the five-star interiors of Chennai’s Park Sheraton, which hosted the Madras Street Food festival as part of the city’s 370th anniversary celebrations. While it felt a bit unreal to be sampling street fare in the sanitised confines of a five-star hotel (especially as the street, the vendor and all attendant grime and grit often add their own flavour), the event did serve to inform about some less-known street food traditions.

Tamil Nadu’s historical connections to Myanmar are well-known, but did you know that you can find traces of these in the city’s Parry’s area and not Burma Bazaar? The mohinga soup, originally a fish broth with banana stem, rice and gram flour, flavoured with a host of ingredients ranging from fish sauce to garlic and ginger, and finished off with some crushed papdi, was, in this food festival, a vegetarian offering but delightful all the same. There was also the latto, a dish of noodles topped with boiled and sectioned eggs, a tomato-chilli paste, crunchy fried garlic and onions, and coriander, besides a few other things. It was mildly spicy and supremely fulfilling along with the mohinga.

The chicken curry accompanying the parotha looked decidedly five-star, the gravy all orange and silken smooth; the mochai kuzhambu (gravy with beans) tasted less refined. The thenga-pattani sundal was devoid of the sand from the Marina, but tasty nevertheless. There were thair vadai and pakoda too, a range of chaats — aloo tikki, channa, papdi chat, pani puri, and even a jalebi counter dispensing them freshly fried. As for the promised Anglo-Indian food from Perambur such as meat cutlets and pork vindaloo, we discovered there was more learning than food — I never knew, for instance, that beef curry was street food in Chennai, and that the recipe closely follows the one used in Anglo-Indian homes.

In fact, the food festival veered quite far from street food to showcase a few other little-known delights — the beetroot sambol, for instance, which had slices of beet and onion swimming in milk, and which, Sous Chef V.M. Sudharasan said, was a recipe obtained from an experienced home cook. Other classic recipes included a tasty brinjal poricha kuzhambu and a mullangi thurval (grated radish) curry. And, of course, the ubiquitous biriyani, which does a marvellous job of adapting itself to wherever it is served.

The Residency, the restaurant that hosted this food festival, was adorned with pictures and anecdotes about the city and its residents. And the waiters, Sudharasan pointed out, were dressed in club-style uniforms to reflect a culture that was popular in yesteryear Madras.