Mrs KM Mathew, who in her lifetime published over 25 cookbooks and edited the women’s magazine Vanitha for 25 years, passed on 20 years ago. “But, there are thousands of hand-written recipes that have been left behind in my mother’s cupboard. Her recipes had the minutest of details... she was very thorough, mentioning every step in the cooking process, no matter how insignificant. They were tried and tested several times, before she finally wrote it down in her diary,” says Mammen, “Even a simple recipe would run into two pages.”

Mammen shares that her sister-in-law Prema is the brain behind this new collection. “She in her quiet way did this,” says Mammen, typing the recipes down, editing and simplifying them for aspiring cooks. The book is divided into separate sections, with a vast menu of dishes making it into the snacks, meat, seafood and vegetarian specialties, and jams, pickles, chutneys and chutney powders.

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Heavily influenced by her home state Kerala and the Syrian-Christian food she took a delight in serving to friends and family, Mathew’s cooking also drew a lot from her peripatetic upbringing. Mathew was born and brought up in Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, where her father was a doctor. She moved to Madurai for college, and later spent her married years in Chikmagalur and Byculla in Mumbai, before settling in Kottayam. “My mother loved the life in Mumbai; she had made so many new friends and there was so much for her to see and grasp. When my uncle asked my father to move to Kerala and help him with Malayala Manorama, amma was shattered. But she moved to Kottayam and turned her life completely,” says Mammen, who was born in 1955, sometime after her parents shifted base. It was during the same year that her mother published her first cookbook in Malayalam, titled Pachaka Kala (The Art of Cooking).

Duck fry

Her journey with writing about cooking began much earlier. It was Mammen’s grandfather, KC Mammen Mappillai, who first spotted her talent and asked her to write a column in his newspaper. Her first cookery column on doughnuts, appeared in Malayala Manorama newspaper on May 30, 1953 along with her recipe for Goan Prawn Curry. These appeared under the name Mrs Annamma Mathew, and she became fairly well-known after a column on mutton bafath, shares Mamman. But she became incredibly popular after she started using the name Mrs KM Mathew, a name she took after her husband.

“My mother was a disciplined person, with a proper routine. She woke up at 3.30/4 am every day. The first thing she’d do is write down a recipe that she wanted to try out that day. After that, she would walk to the church, attend mass, and then return and do yoga,” says Mammen, “After a bath, she would enter the kitchen and try out the recipe.” Mathew had two helps working with her; every step was closely monitored by her. “She could try out the same recipe for two to three days,” she remembers, before she would write down the recipe. “It was a lot of hard work.”

At the dinner table, recalls Mammen, the family would try her experiments. But nothing except food was allowed to be discussed while eating. “That was a rule; she would say, ‘Concentrate on the food, and give me the right feedback’. She felt one would lose interest in the food.”

If and when her readers or friends came back to her saying a particular recipe had not turned out the way they had expected, Mammen says her mother would offer sending her cooks to help them. “She truly was a people’s person. When a driver or anyone came home, she would ensure they sat on the dining table, and ate her food.”

KM Mathew

One thing that Mammen most admired her mother for, was her honesty. “She never copied a recipe,” she says. “If she went to a restaurant, and she loved a dish, she would never ask the chef how they have made it. She would go through the menu, and even ask permission to take the menu back home, sometimes offering to pay for it.” Mammen says her mother just had the gift to deconstruct a recipe, adding her own flavours to it. “She had a God-given talent to create recipes.”     

What amused Mammen most was how her mother, when writing down the recipes in a diary, would mention “this is my favourite recipe, please try it out”. “But  I  was telling my brother, how all her books were bestsellers, and every recipe a favourite.”

Fish molee

INGREDIENTS
 500 gm fish pieces
 1/4 cup oil
 1 cup onion, sliced
 1 tsp ginger, crushed
 1 tsp garlic, crushed
 6 green chillies, partially slit
 1/2 tsp peppercorns, crushed
 2 sprigs curry leaves
 1st extract of coconut milk from freshly grated coconut
 1/2 cup, thick
 2nd extract of coconut milk
 2 cups
 Salt to taste
 1 big tomato, quartered

METHOD
Clean the fish well in salt water. Heat some oil in a pan. Sauté onion, ginger, garlic, green chillies, peppercorns and curry leaves. Transfer the sautéed ingredients to an earthen pot or a deep pan. Add the 2nd extract of coconut milk and allow this to simmer. Add the fish pieces and salt. Cover the pan and cook on low flame until the gravy thickens. Add tomato and the 1st extract of coconut milk. Do not stir with a spoon or ladle, instead take the pan off the heat, hold carefully with both hands and gently rotate or shake carefully so that the contents are well mixed. This process will prevent the fish from breaking. Continue to cook over low flame till the fish is fully cooked.

Idichakka thoran

INGREDIENTS
 3 cups tender jackfruit (idichakka), skinned and diced
 1 cup coconut, grated
 2 garlic cloves
 1/2 tsp chilli powder
 1/4 tsp turmeric powder
 1/2 tsp cumin seeds
 1 tsp mustard seeds
 2 dry red chillies
 1 sprig curry leaves
 2 tbsp oil

METHOD
Cook the diced jackfruit in a steamer. Using a pestle and mortar, crush and shred the jackfruit. Keep this aside. Coarsely grind coconut, chilli and turmeric powders, cumin seeds and garlic. Add the ground ingredients to the cooked jackfruit. Mix this well and set aside. In a pan or wok, heat oil. Splutter mustard seeds and dry red chilli broken into two and curry leaves. Sauté lightly. Then, add the cooked jackfruit and ground coconut mixture. Sauté this well till all the moisture dries out completely. Remove from the fire and serve hot.
 
Note: Cutting open the jackfruit, removing the pods and preparing them is a sticky, slippery process. Liberally applying coconut oil or any light cooking oil on your hands will help alleviate the stickiness. Alternatively, you could use food-grade gloves.