How Mumbai’s masalawaalis make a single spice from 30 ingredients

Bottle masala is impossible to find in stores.

FIRST CAME THE BURNING EYES. Then the uncontrollable sneezing.

I was seven years old and watching three sari-clad ladies, each holding a tall, wooden pestle, adroitly throw their sticks into the center of a deep wooden vat. It was filled with dried chilies, which explained the pungent aroma in the air. Thump-thump-thump. The ladies’ synchronized pounding created a hypnotic beat.

What I witnessed that summer day in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, was the annual tradition of hand-making bottle masala—a fragrant, reddish-brown spice blend named for the darkly colored bottles it’s stored in. Crafted from 20 to more than 30 ingredients, the one-of-a-kind mix is synonymous with the East Indian community—descendants of people indigenous to the North Konkan region on India’s west coast who converted to Christianity. This minority was officially recognized as “East Indians” by the government in 1887.

Where does that nice smoky flavor come from? JUDE ALBUQUERQUE

“When the British took over Bombay, the city’s native Catholic population took up the moniker East Indian to differentiate us from the other Christians who had moved to the city,” explains Reena Pereira-Almeida, creator of the East India Memory Co., a project that documents the group’s history and culture. “Over time, our cuisine, language, clothing, music, etc. came to reflect a mixture of Maharashtrian, Portuguese, and British influences.”

The rusty-hued bottle masala exemplifies this unique amalgamation. Chef Michael Swamy traces its origins back to goda masala, a roughly 20-ingredient mélange made by Maharashtrians using the same hand-pounding procedure that so enthralled my younger self. “Dry blending of spices is a very Maharashtrian thing,” he says.

But this artisanal practice is slowly dwindling. Few families have the space for hired masalawaalis to pound out bottle masala now that Mumbai is a megacity. Instead, they are choosing the convenience of having their mixes made in mills, and some households have filed away their family recipe, reducing the wild, family-by-family diversity of masalas out there. Still, for East Indian home cooks, bottle masala remains at the heart of their kitchen’s spice collection.

The vessels that give the mix its name are often leftover beer bottles.

“It has an earthy, smoky flavor—very subtle,” says Verna Texeira, a Brooklyn resident who was raised in Bombay. “It’s also very versatile—used with meat, vegetables, or fish—and changes the taste of the dish according to what you are cooking.” In The East Indian Cookery Book, first published in 1981 by The Bombay East Indian Association, bottle masala is listed in 34 recipes, including dishes such as duck moile and prawn lonvas, which are celebrated within the community. It’s also the first recipe in Swamy’s tome, The East Indian Kitchen, in which he shares two versions of the blend.

“East Indian food is a mish-mash,” says Swamy. “You have the Indian side, which is very pure and holistic and includes no meat. Then the Portuguese came and introduced meat eating, like pork, and even bread.”

Sarpatel, made with cubed pork and bottle masala, perfectly represents this fusion. Due to the limited availability of the community’s spice blends, though, and scarcity of East Indian restaurants, the cuisine is a mystery to most of Mumbai. Swamy partly blames its underrepresentation on anecdotal evidence that East Indians are “secretive” and notorious for guarding their recipes.

“I got a lot of whiplash from my aunts for sharing our recipes publicly in my book,” he says. Verna’s mother, Georgina Texeira, admits she’s possessive about the bottle masala recipe she inherited from her grandmother. “I have shared it only with close family and friends,” she says.

In some villages, these okhli were built into the floor. JUDE ALBUQUERQUE

This helps make bottle masala, and East Indian cuisine, special: Each family’s recipe differs depending on the area and sub-group they belong to. “The taste and color of the bottle masala will be different for each home and from village to village,” explains my father, who grew up in the former East Indian stronghold of Mumbai’s Pali Village. Some families use a combination of chilies. Others favor the Kashmiri chili, which lends the mix its trademark maroon hue. Common additions include turmeric, black peppercorns, fenugreek seeds, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, wheat, nutmeg, cumin, mugwort … the list goes on.

Like my father, Texeira remembers the masalawaalis going house to house in her hamlet of Kalina to register families interested in having bottle masala or other spice blends made during the warm summer months. She also looked forward to the impending visit from the masalawallah (spice man). Like Santa Claus, he carried a large bag and delivered the pylee—all the spices each family required.

While this home-delivery service no longer exists, Texeira and others visit Mumbai’s larger markets to procure ingredients. Verna, whose mother has been making bottle masala for 30 years, fondly remembers this annual shopping spree and the two- or three-day process of sun drying the spices.

Thump. Thump. Thump. JUDE ALBUQUERQUE

“All the verandahs in the village would have the spices laid out on bedsheets or steel thalis,” she explains. “In the afternoons, my mother would send me to the terrace upstairs to turn the chilies in the sun. It was such a beautiful, sensory experience seeing the yellow turmeric, the round coriander seeds, the red crinkled chilies … ”

Marise Ann Lawrence likens the atmosphere of the masalawaallis’ arrival to a party. As the spice ladies removed the denkhas (stalks) from the chilies, or tossed ingredients in an earthenware dish over a wood fire, they’d chat with her aunts and mother and exchange family stories. “It wasn’t just about the work,” she says.

Depending on the quantity made, the procedure could take a day or a whole week. “It was like a picnic,” adds Texeira. “You’d have to provide them with tea, sugar, milk, and oil, and in the afternoon, they would cook their meal.” My father remembers the spice ladies preparing a dish with dried Bombay ducks, a fish found in the Arabian Sea, which they would char in the wood fire’s embers and smash together with raw onion to make a chutney.

Just as larger families band together for masala-making season, East Indians, as a minority group, unite for community celebrations, religious feasts, and weddings, says Pereira-Almeida, who grew up in India and now lives in Australia. 

“Those who have settled in other countries come together for occasions like Christmas and Easter,” she adds, referencing the sizeable East Indian diaspora. And traditional East Indian specialties, including those made with bottle masala, always play a starring role at these events.

Mixing and sifting. JUDE ALBUQUERQUE

Once the toasted spices cooled, the masalawaalis would start hand pounding. Standing around a chalice-like okhli—built into the floors of homes in some villages—they established their catchy rhythm, taking turns slamming the spices. “It is pound, sift, repeat. Pound, sift, repeat,” says Lawrence of the three- to four-hour operation.

“I remember their bangles clinking as they worked,” says Verna. Decades later, she remains fascinated by the ladies’ strength.

As mounds of vibrantly colored spices piled up, the masalawaalis gently combined the powders with deft circular hand movements. They then filled narrow-necked beer or whiskey bottles, patiently pushing down the masala with a wooden stick and sealing it with a cork and piece of cloth secured with string.

While many East Indians are nostalgic about the hand-pounding process, most find that making bottle masala—including sourcing and roasting the spices—is too much work, even though the mills have sped up the job. Still, a stubborn few do it themselves to ensure quality, and Swamy believes the traditional method releases the spices’ essential oils slowly, giving the blend a mellow flavor, while mechanical methods leave a slightly bitter aftertaste.

Laid-out ingredients can be a colorful sight. JUDE ALBUQUERQUE

The old-school procedure may soon be relegated to memories, but the love affair with bottle masala continues for this community dispersed around the world. “Other communities say everything we cook is always with bottle masala, that we can’t survive without it,” says Texeira. It’s not much of an exaggeration: On her yearly visits to see Verna in Brooklyn, she always has a packet or two of bottle masala stashed in her suitcase.

“If I call my Mom and ask her what to do if I’m stuck with adding flavor to a dish, she will say just put bottle masala,” says Verna, laughing.

(Source: Gastro Obscura)

In spice-laden Kerala, a break from urban India

Younger Indians, flush with disposable income and a new found appreciation of the cultural riches within their own borders, have discovered Kerala. And for good reason, writes Kim Severson on the NYT. He saunters around Kerala's spice gardens, organic farms and tea estates. For him, Kerala is a 'cook's' own country. Read on: 

The skinny, 80-year-old Indian yogi was doing his best to suggest ways I might adjust my ample 55-year-old American body into a passable downward dog.

I admired his ambition. I’m an enthusiastic but generally bad practitioner of yoga. But here in the darkened yoga hut at Spice Village, a botanically focused resort on 14 organic acres in the middle of the Cardamom Hills of Kerala, on India’s southwestern coast, I thought I had found a kindred soul on the mat next to me. Her downward dog wasn’t looking so good, either. We smiled at each other in that awkward, supportive way tourists sometimes do.

After class, we chatted. I asked her where she was from. The 37-year-old mom told me she was from Mumbai and came to Kerala because she needed a break.

She and her husband, both born and raised in India, had left their young son with relatives for the weekend and headed south to this land of coconuts and clear air — the way a tired Manhattanite might take to the Hudson Valley or a Londoner to Brighton.

A tea plantation in Munnar, Kerala. Credit Evan Sung for The New York Times

I ran into more than one city-bound Indian tourist like her as I roamed through the spice plantations, tea estates and beaches in this slice of Southwest India. Younger Indians, flush with disposable income and a newfound appreciation of organic food, holistic living and the cultural riches within their own borders, have discovered Kerala.

“All of this has happened in the last six or seven years,” said Shelton Pinheiro, the executive creative director at Stark Communications, a tourism and marketing agency working with the region. “There has been a revival in local, regional things, especially among people who have traveled abroad and come home to discover what they have here is just as special.”

We were talking over lime sodas and spicy chunks of chicken, curry leaves and shallots fried crisp in coconut oil at the Marari Beach Resort, a seaside resort near the Malabar coastal village of Maraikulum, where city dwellers come to get Ayurvedic treatments and swim in the Arabian Sea.

The chef and cooking teacher Asha Gomez was sitting with us, taking a break from the intense, late-spring South Indian sun. The author of a well-received cookbook called “My Two Souths: Blending the Flavors of India Into a Southern Kitchen,” she is often the brightest light in a room. She has been pestering me to travel to Kerala almost from the day I met her a half dozen years ago at Cardamom Hill, the restaurant she used to run in Atlanta.

“Kim,” she would say, grabbing my hands, “you must come discover why we call it God’s own country.”

I finally took her up on it. After 14 hours in a plane that took us through Qatar and then to Kochi, the largest urban area in Kerala — its airport is the first in the world run completely on solar power — we found ourselves in this beach resort dissecting the new wave of Indian travel over fried chicken that was almost like the banana-leaf-wrapped version she used to eat as a child at street stalls called thattu kadaas.

Ms. Gomez grew up in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital city on the Arabian Sea, about a four-hour drive south of the beach where we were eating. Many of the white beaches along the Kerala coast are rustic and inviting. A pleasant morning can be spent watching traditional wooden fishing boats come and go. Ms. Gomez swears that the sand is softer and the water is bluer as you get closer to India’s tip, where she grew up.

After her father died of a heart attack when she was 16, she and her mother moved to Michigan, where her older brothers were in college. She made her way to New York City before landing in Atlanta, where she has made a career out of blending the food of the Indian South with the American South, first at Cardamom Hill and now out of a private kitchen called The Third Space.

In an age where Korean taco trucks and poke bowl restaurants seem to be everywhere, the approach might seem another attempt to cash in on a rising American appetite for international culinary mash-ups. But the two styles of cooking work together beautifully.

The hot, vinegary sauce in a dish of pork vindaloo is not far from the one that moistens a whole-hog barbecue sandwich in Eastern North Carolina. The black pepper that grows everywhere here helps tame the innate sweetness in a Southern-style carrot cake. And for both American southerners and Indian southerners, eating fried chicken is deeply woven into the cultural fabric.

Young black pepper at Thomas Puttampurakkal’s organic spice farm in Thekkady.
Credit Evan Sung for The New York Times

“When I was younger no one from Madras or even Goa was thinking about going to Kerala to eat for vacation,” she said. “Traveling for pleasure was wasting money. Now anyone you talk to has either been or is planning to go.”

Travelers from the United States and Europe who might have a specific interest in tea or the vast nature preserves that hold tigers and elephants have long made their way to Kerala, starting and ending their trips in Kochi, a city of about 600,000 that is easier to navigate and less tradition-bound than New Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore.

Even outside the city, Kerala is more distinctly laid-back than most of the other 36 states and union territories in India. It’s the most religiously diverse part of India, and the literacy rate among its 33 million residents is the country’s highest. In some parts of the state, American rock edges out Bollywood soundtracks as the preferred backdrop.

There are plenty of small resorts along its sub-tropical coastline, and a series of river communities called the backwater that feature wooden houseboats furnished with cooks and nice furniture that provide a base for family vacations. Kerala’s cooking is light and infused with chili and coconut; its dishes are built largely around rice and fish.

“Most of my friends say Kerala is the soft landing for India because then you are used to India and ready for all of its glorious chaos in other places,” Mr. Pinheiro said.

In Alappuzha. Credit Evan Sung for The New York Times

It is also religiously diverse — more than half of the people here practice Hinduism, but there are plenty of Muslims, a handful of Jewish neighborhoods and lots of Catholics — a fact that manifests itself through the region’s cuisine.

The Portuguese, who landed here in the 15th century and took up the spice trade, introduced Latin Catholicism. They also brought with them a love of pork and the chilies that would come to define a lot of Kerala’s food. It’s how Ms. Gomez’s family got its name and why she grew up a meat-eating Catholic in a land where vegetarianism is the predominant eating style.

It makes sense, then, that Kerala and its food is increasingly attractive to younger people from India’s huge, sprawling cities who, like travelers in many parts of the world, are increasingly using food as an organizing principle for their vacation.

“Growing up, we never took vacations to eat and at home we never ate out unless it was a super special occasion,” Mr. Pinheiro said. “Now once or twice a week we eat out.”

In Kochi, millennial eaters are rejecting the American-style fast food restaurants they grew up on in favor of authentic experiences that offer new twists on classic South Indian dishes.

Tea harvesters picked and sorted tea leaves in Munnar. Credit Evan Sung for The New York Times

At places like Pai Brothers, crispy, paper-thin dosas might be filled with duck masala or chocolate and cashews. At Dhe Puttu, a small restaurant chain started by the popular Malayalam film stars Dileep and Nadirshah, puttus — traditionally a breakfast staple of soft cylindrical steamed dumplings made from ground rice and coconut — have been pushed into fanciful forms that can take on the flavors of Spanish paella, a biryani or even an ice cream sundae.

We ate our last meal there before heading out of the city toward the vast tea estates and spice gardens that lace the Cardamom Hills of Kerala.

To get there, we spent nearly five hours in a van grinding our way up the steep hills of the Western Ghats, stopping only for plates of vegetable curry and glasses of fresh pineapple juice. The road narrowed as we worked our way past wildlife sanctuaries and forests of sandalwood. The oppressive mugginess of the city had lifted, giving way to weather cool enough that I considered digging out the one light sweater I brought. Tea estates cascaded down the steep valleys, their tight, trimmed shrubs looking as manicured as a formal English garden.

Manoj Vasudevan, a photographer who teaches tourism in Kerala and who has been exploring the mountains here for decades, was our guide. That included explaining the finer points of mountain driving in India, which required faith, acceptance and a good horn.

The strips of pavement hugging the mountainside were often only wide enough to hold one vehicle, but sometimes three would try to navigate a stretch at once. Horns were essential to blast our gentle warnings on blind curves. Inevitable traffic knots that brought traffic to a stop were solved when a driver or a passenger would hop out and calmly direct cars and buses to back up or edge around each other. Everyone would then head on without a harsh word or even a friendly wave.

At Dhe Puttu in Kochi, a sweet and spicy take on puttu — traditionally a breakfast staple of soft cylindrical steamed dumplings made from ground rice and coconut. Credit Evan Sung for The New York Times

“We practice a kind of practical politeness,” he explained.

Many of the sprawling tea estates we passed are owned by Tata Global Beverages, which maintains 51 estates in India and Sri Lanka. We stopped for lunch at the Briar Tea Bungalow, a rambling, low-slung Colonial-style building northwest of Munnar that the British built on a mountain top surrounded by 2,500 acres of tea plants.

We waded out into hip-high tea bushes and hiked to where women armed with small hedge clippers spend the day trimming the very tips from the tea bushes. A day’s work brings in a little over $6, more if they can beat their daily quotas.

Soon, we were back on the road headed for the heart of spice country. Small spice gardens started to pop up the way “u-pick” apple orchards do in upstate New York. Some offer tours for a couple of hundred rupees, about $3. Others declare themselves to be organic, and have small shops where packets of vibrant ground turmeric, nutmeg and green cardamom pods can be had for prices that would make a cook used to prices at an American grocery store fall to her knees.

Touring spice gardens is a fairly new pursuit here, driven by an increasing appreciation of agriculture and cooking among tourists.

“Twenty years ago when I traveled this way there was not even a single place,” Mr. Vasudevan said. “Ten years ago there were maybe a few places. Now, they’re all over. Somebody started it then everyone started copying it because they saw that people were becoming curious to see how spices grow.”

Cacao fruit at Thomas Puttampurakkal’s spice farm in Thekkady.
Credit Evan Sung for The New York Times

And then there’s black pepper. From the time of the Roman Empire, people have been coming to Kerala for black pepper. Wars have been fought over it. The plants that produce the fruit are everywhere. Their thin green vines wrap around jackfruit, mango and coconut trees that grow with such abandon they don’t seem to need a bit of human effort to thrive.

Cardomom is a big money maker here, but black pepper remains the coin of the realm. Even though Indian pepper growers are fighting off cheaper production in countries like Vietnam, there are still plenty of wealthy owners who oversee vast plots of pepper plants. But in every village and small town, you can find someone who grows a little pepper and sells a few kilos when a bill comes due or there’s a wedding to fund. About 30 percent of the people who live here are involved in the spice trade, Mr. Vasudevan estimated.

Ms. Gomez and I found our way to a small, organic spice garden in Thekkady where Thomas Puttampurakkal, a retired Kerala police officer in his 80s, tends to pepper vines that twist around jackfruit and nutmeg trees growing in what seems to be an agricultural system with no real pattern or structure.

He uses only elephant dung for fertilizer. Pepper, he explained, is all about terroir. The best grows naturally here in the high elevations, the green berries protected by the shade until they ripen.

The green pepper berries become black pepper after they spend four or five days in the sun. Those same green berries can also produce white pepper, whose pungency is softened by a long soak in water before they are dried and their husks removed.

Diners at Dhe Puttu in Kochi. Credit Evan Sung for The New York Times

Ms. Gomez and I wandered through Mr. Puttampurakkal’s spice garden like kids in a toy store. We rubbed curry leaves between our fingers and dug up turmeric roots. We searched around the bottom of willowy cardamom stalks 12 feet tall, looking for green buds. We sucked the custardy pulp off the seeds inside cacao pods, smelled clove buds and peeled a bit of bark from a cinnamon tree.

We found a nutmeg tree and pulled down a round piece of fruit the size of my palm. Someone had a knife, so we sliced it open to reveal a glossy dark gem covered in a lacy red coat. The seed is nutmeg, the red covering mace.

In the little shop Mr. Puttampurakkal runs, I bought bags of the small, local black Malabar peppercorns locals call tribal pepper and another of the fat, fragrant peppercorns called Tellicherry, named after the famed growing region in Northern Kerala.

I bit into one. It tasted like citrus and flowers. In a split-second, heat overtook the flavor, like hot perfume in my mouth.

Ms. Gomez wandered in, her hands filled with nutmeg. “You have no idea how excited I am,” she said.

Rava dosa, a porous version with cashews, at Pai Brothers in Kochi. Credit Evan Sung for The New York Times

Mr. Puttampurakkal was laughing, probably at us. It was hard to tell. It didn’t matter.

I had made it to the Cardamom hills. Ms. Gomez was right. It was God’s own country. Or, at least, a cook’s.

If You Go
Kerala is always warm, but can get downright hot and muggy from March to May. December through February is reliably dry and cooler, and also more crowded. The monsoon season comes in May and can last until November. The mountains with their spice gardens and teas estates are always cooler than the coast. It’s relatively easy to rent a car or van with a driver, or take a small tour bus to the spice and tea regions. Car rentals are available, too.

Tea fans can visit the Briar Tea Bungalows (V-363, Kannan Devan Hills Village, Talliar post, Idukki; teabungalows.com/talayar-valley-bungalow-munnar/) in the Talayar Valley in Munnar, where you can pick your own tea onthe 2,500-acre estate.

For accommodations in spice country, try Spice Village (536, Kumily Thekkady Road, Thekkady, Kumily; cghearth.com/spice-village), which has an Ayurveda spa and whose stand-alone huts are well-appointed and named after spices.

At the shore, the Marari Beach Villas (North S.L Puram, Mararikulam, Mararikkulam, Alappuzha; mararibeachvillas.com) offer uncrowded beach access and a resort feel.

In the greater Kochi area, select from a dozen styles of dosa and watch them get made by fast-moving cooks at Pai Brothers (TD East Sannidhi Road, Shenoys, Ernakulam).

Dhe Puttu (NH Byepass, Edappally, Ernakulam, Kochi) specializes in an upscale, modern take on puttu, another classic South Indian dish.