CHENNAI: Namma Ooru Manappatti Samayal is a month-long village food festival currently being held at the Maplai restaurant. One of the senior cooks of Manappatti which is 60 km from Madurai, N Thondi curated the menu for the festival.
Preparing and serving a non-vegetarian meal for 20,000 people is not an easy task and the cooks from Manappatti, popularly called the village of cooks, have been doing this day-in and day-out. Thondi, has been a cook for the last 50 years. “It looks like a simple job but requires a lot of planning, a hundred people for preparing and another 150 to serve the food. Both men and women are involved in it,” said the 78-year-old.
Some of the commonly prepared delicacies of the village include chukka (dry fry), biryani and gravies made of bones. “I picked up this trade from Vairavan Ayya who is known as the guru of quite a number of cooks in our village. I started cooking at the age of 16. A fresher usually begins his or her career with cutting vegetables and the slow progress towards cooking a dish. It takes around 10 years for a person to lead his or her own team,” he added.
During the wedding season, there is an increase in the demand for these cooks and they travel to various places in the country or abroad. The women usually take care of cooking at home. “Last year, we had to cook for MGR’s 100th birth anniversary at Kalaivanar Arangam for around 5,000 people. We commonly travel around Sivagangai, Madurai, Ramanathapuram, Theni and Dindigul. Our duration of cooking depends on the type of function and number of people. The people from Maplai recently visited us, learnt our style of preparation and we also sent master cooks to train their in-house team,” said Thondhi.
The cooks follow a traditional method of preparing the ingredients in the village. They are hand-ground and crushed to retain the flavours. The longer the marination of the non-vegetarian ingredients, the better they taste. They also stick to the traditional method of wood fire-cooking. According to Vinod, CEO of Maplai, “At Maplai, we organised food festival based on the four states of southern India and it has been a great crowd puller. We wanted to serve our guests something niche, hence, we wanted to bring in Namma Ooru Manappatti Samayal. However, we faced two challenges, one in scaling down the production which these cooks from Manappatti are used to and modifying our kitchen exhaust to accommodate extra wood fire hearth.” The menu includes Chicken Chukka, Mutton Chukka, Manappatti Naatu Kozhi Kulambu. The festival at all the outlets of Maplai restaurant is expected to go on till the end of November.