The many surprises in Madurai’s cuisine

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In his travelogue If it’s Monday it Must be Madurai: A Conducted Tour of India, author Srinath Perur opens with a chapter on a bus tour of south Indian temple towns, beginning with Madurai. Writing about a fellow traveller, a Bengali gentleman who finds himself in strange culinary waters, Perur writes: “He is also unhappy that the group eats only at restaurants that are either ‘pure’ or ‘classic’ vegetarian.

We are about to enter one such place for lunch when he points at the restaurant next door with a board listing Chettinad meat preparations. ‘Why can’t we go there?’ he asks me. I tell him he should just eat there if he feels like it, but he wants to get his money’s worth from the tour, even if it means enforced vegetarianism." I have zero sympathy for the gentleman.

He is in Madurai, and if his Bengali heart doesn’t leap at the discovery that this particular temple town is likely to blow a lifetime of meat-eating experiences out of the water, he deserves his vegetarian fate. On a recent August evening, I find myself starting on a food tour of Madurai hoping to compensate for his parsimony and unadventurousness. Also read: Moulding a ‘modak’ over memories of Ganesha It’s not a Monday, but it’s certainly meaty, as Madurai meals are likely to be.

I discover, however, that there is much more to the Madurai food story: urban migration has played a big role in shaping its cuisine, and the city—sprawling, ugly, heavily industrial—contains complex layers shaped by caste, migration and culture. The evening starts and ends with two beverages associated with the city. While the endnote is provided by Madurai’s famous jigarthanda, that thick, goopy concoction made with milk, almond gum, sugar