2/19/2020 Chennai 3: Dosas at dawn - ANDREW WHITEHEAD ANDREW WHITEHEAD Search Andrew Whitehead's Blog 33 Share Tweet Share Shares Chennai 3: Dosas at dawn 24/2/2019 0 Comments https://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/chennai-3-dosas-at-dawn 1/19 2/19/2020 Chennai 3: Dosas at dawn - ANDREW WHITEHEAD ANDREW WHITEHEAD If anything typies Tamil cuisine it's the dosa - a pancake made from fermented batter. Rice and black gram are traditionally the main ingredients of the batter. In dosa joints in London, the dosa is usually crisp and outsize, and wrapped around aloo (potato) masala - that's the famous masala dosa. In Chennai, more often the dosa isn't crisp but soft, a little like an appam from neighbouring Kerala. It's eaten above all at breakfast time with coconut chutney, often homemade, and sambar, a lentil-based curried vegetable dish, a bit like a spicy vegetable stew. And yes - it's good! On the Madras Inherited heritage walk I've just been on around Royapettah in downtown Chennai, we all were invited in to a suite of old houses - only to discover this elderly woman cheerfully cooking dosas. Lots of them! It was barely seven in the morning and she was presiding over quite a production line - as you can see ... Making dosas in Royapettah Feb 2019 https://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/chennai-3-dosas-at-dawn 2/19 2/19/2020 Chennai 3: Dosas at dawn - ANDREW WHITEHEAD ANDREW WHITEHEAD Three houses here shared a courtyard and at rst I imagined that she was cooking dosas for everyone in these households. But just after I nished lming, a man came to collect all the cooked dosas in the container by the door - I guess there were twenty or more of them - to take them, as far as I could gather, to a local tea stall for sale as a freshly-cooked breakfast. The cooking of dosas didn't halt - I reckon this woman could easily make fty in an hour. They sell for 10 rupees each - that's a little more than ten pence. So this is quite a cottage industry. https://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/chennai-3-dosas-at-dawn 3/19 2/19/2020 Chennai 3: Dosas at dawn - ANDREW WHITEHEAD ANDREW WHITEHEAD https://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/chennai-3-dosas-at-dawn 4/19 2/19/2020 Chennai 3: Dosas at dawn - ANDREW WHITEHEAD ANDREW WHITEHEAD Like 0 Tweet 0 Comments Leave a Reply. https://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/chennai-3-dosas-at-dawn 5/19 2/19/2020 Chennai 3: Dosas at dawn - ANDREW WHITEHEAD Name (required) ANDREW WHITEHEAD Email (not published) Website Comments (required) Notify me of new comments to this post by email Submit Andrew Whitehead's blog Welcome - read - comment - throw stones - pick up threads - and tell me how to do this better! 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