While I made this the first time, Sveta watched a video. When I called her to come and eat she said 'What's this?'
'Rasam', I replied.
'What's rasam.' she continued.
'It's like sambar.' I offered as clarification.
'What? You made sambar? Why?'
'Now there's gratitude for you, Macbean.' I thought. Well, no. I didn't really think that. You see, there was a perfectly good explanation for Sveta's reaction and I knew that when she tried my rasam, she would like it. A few years ago Sveta and I, along with Oxana and her husband Steve, visited Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu. It's a very interesting place. It's a major Hindu pilgrimage destination and at any time of the year there are people from all over India who come to visit the many temples. The town is on an island, but a train goes all the way there, crossing the Indira Gandhi Bridge. The island is at the end of a large peninsula reaching out from the mainland into the Gulf of Mannar, towards Sri Lanka. Beyond the town the island has its own smaller peninsula extending for a further 15 kilometres and this is one of the things which makes the area so interesting to visit. Between the end of this peninsula and the island of Sri Lanka, there is a string of smaller islands and coral reefs called Adam's Bridge. Legend says that Rama used this bridge to follow and rescue his wife Sita who had been kidnapped. During our visit, we twice took a bus out to Danushkhodi, on the peninsula at the end of the road from Ramiswaram and the site of a huge tragedy in the 1950s when a storm covered the village with sand and killed almost everyone. Today the roof tops of several of the tallest buildings can be seen poking out of the ground. It's an eery place. None of the buildings were resettled and instead the present inhabitants live in bamboo and coconut leaf huts away from the ruined village.
Walking beyond Danushkhodi, the peninsula narrows and the thorn scrub thins out, eventually giving way to rough dune-grass. On the north side there is a line of shallow lagoons, very wide at first then narrowing to a hundred metres or so near the tip of the peninsula. This is where you can see flocks of Greater Flamingoes and, if you're very lucky, and we were, Spot-billed Pelicans. The water in the lagoons is shallow and warm and it's good to wade around watching sea creatures scattering ahead of you. The southern side of the peninsula, in contrast, has a steeply sloping beach against which enormously powerful breakers crash. It's a frightening place after the tranquility of the lagoons, but it's also exhilarating to smell the salt on the wind and experience the true strength of the sea.
And the sambar? That was served in every restaurant in Rameswaram three times a day, morning noon and night. In the morning it was poured over dosas, uthappams and iddlys, at lunch time over parothas and in the evening over huge mountains of stodgy steamed rice. The waiter would do a circuit of the tables carrying a large galvanised bucket of sambar which he would ladle onto your plate as soon as you looked the other way. It was mostly tamarind water, but sometimes you would find the green stalky bit of a tomato or the rib from a cabbage leaf on your plate - even a piece of potato peel. After three or four days Sveta could hardly face breakfast. She says the only thing worse than a dry uthappam for breakfast is an uthappam with sambar poured over it. I recommend a visit to Rameswaram and I would love to go back again, but if you decide to go, take the advice of someone who has been there already and carry a few packets of instant noodles in your rucksack.
I have since been reliably informed that sambar and rasam are actually different things, but at the time I cooked this dish I had been assuming that the different names were from different south Indian languages, but referred to the same sauce or gravy. Not so. It's good to learn new things, but what I still haven't figured out is whether the present recipe is for a rasam or a sambar. Maybe neither, since I invented it. One thing I can say for sure is that my sambar/rasam is better than the stuff in Rameswaram. I have another version which is made without coconut and I think that's also good. It utilises red lentils, which a reader informed me are are the main ingredient in a real sambar, but there's no tamarind in the list of ingredients, as I don't usually have that at home. After I posted that first recipe a reader wrote from India to say that sambar isn't really sambar unless it has tamarind in it. I asked my daughter to send some from India and her friend brought me a packet of tamarind paste and one of tamarind powder. I think this recipe is an improvement on the first one. But I still don't know what to call it.
There are a lot of ingredients here but some can be left out or others substituted. The coconut and tamarind are the main flavouring ingredients. The most difficult part of this recipe is crushing the raw, soaked chickpeas. I use a potato masher, but doing them bit by bit with a pestle and mortar works well and gives a finer consistency which will result in a quicker cooking time. Either way it is fairly heavy work. The peas don't need to be pulped. As long as there are no whole ones left, the overall cooking time will be from about half an hour to forty minutes maximum. If you have an electric grinder, of course, you won't need to sweat much.
1 cup dried chickpeas, soaked overnight and crushed
1 sweet pepper, any colour
1 carrot
1 onion
A small piece of root ginger
2 cloves of garlic
1 tsp. coriander seeds
A few black peppercorns
1/3 tsp. red chilli powder
2 cardamoms
1 heaped dessert spoon of tamarind paste or 2 heaped teaspoons of tamarind powder
1 teaspoon of tomato paste
1 cup of thick coconut milk
Vegetable oil
Salt
1 to 1.5 litres of water
Heat some oil in a pan and when it's hot, fry the chopped onion, chopped ginger and crushed coriander seeds and black peppercorns. When the onion becomes transparent, add the crushed chickpeas, chilli powder and whole cardamoms. Fry for a little longer until the chickpeas start to stick to the pan and toast, then add hot water. Chop the carrot and pepper, crush the garlic then add them to the pan with the tamarind and tomato paste. Bring to the boil then simmer until the chickpeas are soft. Add the coconut milk and salt to taste and simmer for a further few minutes. Serve with boiled rice and a few spicy vegetable dishes.