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Although gluttony is one of its seven cardinal sins, Christianity is more than forgiving of a love for food and drink. Our numerous saints each get a feast day. We are repeatedly told to “taste and see that the Lord is good”. And if that isn’t enough, the spirit of Christ himself is embodied in bread and wine.
This isn’t unusual. Across the world, religions have used culinary traditions to sustain them. Fed with meaning, rituals focus on specific dishes or entirely abstain from eating to elevate the human spirit in the hopes of having a dinner table conversation with the Divine.
In Kerala, Malayali Christians take metaphors so seriously that you can almost taste them.
Irrespective of denomination, sub-group or diocese, Malayali Christians have always been united in our perpetual adoration for meat and alcohol. Our non-vegetarian diet has often entered the arena of India’s identity politics, battling against hegemonic forces that uphold vegetarian puritanism.
On the day to day, our culinary culture is about having good food and drink, and eating it too. Festivals take it up a notch. Christmas, for example, practices revelry as ritual, so the festival cuisine serves its celebratory spirit on a platter.
But during certain periods of the year, we are asked to practice self-control and prioritise self-reflection. We are promised salvation in return for sacrifice – an absolute mood-killer. As someone who enjoys the fruits of Syrian-Christian life, I dread the season known as Lent.
A season unseasoned
Lent feels like all the seriousness and sorrow of Christian mythology was packed into 40 days. The 40 days represent the 40-year exodus of the Israelites mentioned in the Bible and a 40-day fast that Jesus Christ undertook.
But while these figures braved the desert, the challenges for today’s Christians aren’t the scorching heat or the parched landscape. Instead, what’s left dry and lifeless are our taste buds, deprived of their usual Kerala Christian culinary masterpieces.
Still, there is an interesting flavour to this season as well. Like the saccharine taste of Christmas, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday in the last week of Lent have tastes of their own, accurately representing the spirit of the season: bland and bitter.
Strange menu, stranger meanings
The last week of Lent, known as the Holy Week, begins with Palm Sunday. But Syrian-Christians start the celebrations a day early, on Kozhukkatta Shani or Kozhukkatta Saturday.
Kozhukkatta is a delicious rice-flour dumpling filled with grated coconut and jaggery, but its symbolism makes it hard to swallow. They represent the stones hurled at Christ as he made this way to being crucified.
Over the next few days, “hard to swallow” becomes a little too literal for our liking.
On Maundy Thursday, Malayali Christian households ready themselves to make the star of the night’s Passover ritual – the pesaha appam or indriappam. The indriappam is the Indian equivalent of the hot cross bun, but named so by grammar renegades who read the inscription at the top of Christ’s cross wrong.
“INRI”, in Latin, stands for “Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum” or Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. However, some Malayalis read it not as an acronym but a word.
Different denominations across Kerala make indriappams in their own style, said food blogger and home cook Maria Jose from Ernakulam. Jacobites usually garnish indriappams with fried onions. Some steam it in a banana leaf, while others choose to grill it.
But whatever form it takes, since it represents Christ’s Last Supper, the unleavened appam is always eaten together as a family. “We only eat it once a year on Maundy Thursday, so family and friends would come together to make it and eat it, which is why it was extra special,” said Maria Jose.
Unlike Christ’s Apostles who washed down their bread at the Last Supper with wine, our dry appams are paired with sarkara paal – a dip of coconut milk, rice flour and jaggery, to which some add banana. This makes the whole experience slightly less intolerable.
Both the bread and the dip are adorned with small crosses made from strands of palm leaves that had been blessed in church a few days before, on Palm Sunday.
Maundy Thursday’s Passover ritual commences in the evening, once the church services finish. Family and friends gather around the table as the head of the household recites prayers and breaks bread. Once amens are muttered, quiet quarrels break out as hands try to grab the smallest piece possible.
But piety briefly becomes play as some families take a short break from the overall gloom. Whoever receives the strand of palm leaf in their bowl is knighted Judas of the Year – a reference to the disciple who betrayed Jesus. My god-fearing grandmother held the title for three consecutive years.
The respite is not long. In a few hours, the faithful enter the underfed belly of the beast – Good Friday.
The bad tastes of Good Friday
Observant Christians, as my mother recalled, only eat one meal on Good Friday, which marks the anniversary of Christ’s death.
Growing up in the Christian-dominated district of Kottayam, her childhood was a blueprint of loopholes on how to avoid the misery of the Lenten season with as little Catholic guilt as possible.
“Once, we saw a picture in the newspaper of the then Pope receiving a roast pig as a Good Friday present,” she recalled. It prompted her to march into her parent’s room and question Kerala Christian Lenten practices.
Her dissidence didn’t last long. She was back in church before she knew it.
The church rituals of Good Friday reflect Christ’s journey carrying his cross to the top of a hill on the day of his death, as he is whipped by Roman soldiers. The congregation participates in a ritual known as “the Way of the Cross” – a 14-milestone, snail-paced prayer walkathon that symbolises Christ’s journey to Calvary, where he was crucified.
The sorrowful hike under the hot April sun almost becomes worth it when you’re given cold, spicy sambaram (buttermilk) at the end to cool down. This is followed by the single meal you receive for the day, commonly served at church itself.
“The Good Friday meal is very simple and basic,” Maria Jose noted. She described a staple meal of kanji (rice porridge), payar (red cowpeas) and pappadam. My mother added that in many places, “a bitter gourd side-dish is mandatory so that the bitter atmosphere of the day isn’t forgotten”.
How we wish the bitterness would stop at a side-dish. To represent the vinegar given to Jesus when he begged for water, the faithful brew and drink kaippu neeru – a decoction made from bitter gourd leaves, neem and other acerbic leaves that are crushed into a paste and mixed with vinegar and water.
Kaippu neeru does not go down easily.
“I gag every time I have it,” my mother confessed. Wasting kaippu neeru is considered almost sinful. “So, if the person serving it to you has a grudge against you, they usually pour a little extra,” my mother claimed.
Food for thought
After all of the Holy Week’s hassles and hacks, the faithful finally gain redemption in the form of the Easter banquet. Some don’t even wait for daylight, breaking their fast immediately after midnight mass late on Saturday.
But why go through this period of deprivation and dreary tastes in the first place? Especially when our daily bread is so delicious and free from moral judgement. While fasting is often considered a spiritual practice that fosters a deeper relationship with the Divine, could there also be deeper notes to the bitter and bland flavours Malayali Christians subject themselves to on Holy Week?
We’re obsessed with the spiritual symbolism of the food and the rituals that emulate Christ’s suffering, but let’s face it. We’re not him. He fasted alone in the desert and later agonised by himself before being taken away to his death. But unlike him, we are not alone. Our sorrows, like our celebrations, are shared. During Holy Week, we invite everyone, irrespective of faith, to break bread, swallow bitter dishes and yearn for the Easter banquet together.
In an age when we question tradition and ritual for being performative and pointless, there still exists a community spirit that rises from religious cultures. Holy Week’s rituals, profound for some and painful for others, survive because they nurture a community that cares about them, keeping alive both the culture and its creator.
So, as we chew through Maundy Thursday’s bland appams and swallow Good Friday’s basic kanji and bitter kaippu neeru, we are left with a sweet aftertaste that reminds us that even if we’re eating these foods or finding new ways to avoid them, we’ll always do it together, as one community.
Joshua Eugine is a writer from Kochi who enjoys writing about culture and the people and places who keep it alive.
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