Chettinad cuisine

In Chettinad food, major spices used include anasipoo (star aniseed), kalpasi (a lichen), puli (tamarind), milagai (chillies), sombu (fennel seed), pattai (cinnamon), lavangam (cloves), punnai ilai (bay leaf), karu milagu (peppercorn), jeeragam (cumin seeds), and venthayam (fenugreek).

In the 2014 book The Bangala Table: Flavor and Recipes from Chettinad by Sumeet Nair and Meenakshi Meyyappan, historian S. Muthiah writes:The Chettiars have traditionally been vegetarians.

Further non-vegetarian influences became entrenched in Chettiar food habits from the late 18th Century after they established businesses in Ceylon, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, French Indo-China and what is now Malaysia and Singapore.

To the coconut and rice and legumes that are staples of South Indian cooking they added Tellicherry pepper, Ceylon cardamom, Indonesian nutmeg, Madagascar cloves and blue ginger, or galangal, from Laos and Vietnam.In places like Penang, in what is now Malaysia, the Chettiars developed a liking for the sweet-sour piquancy of Straits Chinese cooking, In Saigon, they adapted their cuisine to absorb the herbs that perfume Vietnamese food.

In Buddhist Ceylon, they relaxed their dietary prohibitions typical of orthodox Hindus and came to enjoy meat.Thus, the Chettinad region—a semi-arid zone comprising scores of villages, sleepy and agrarian, studded with important ancient temples yet far from major commercial centers—became an unlikely locus of internationalized tastes.