1,000 ways to love rasam—southern India’s signature peppery broth.
According to Prabhakaran, at a more granular level, the ingredients that went into rasams were carefully chosen for their specific nutritive or digestive properties. “Ginger and black pepper are considered good for colds [and immunity], while tamarind and cumin enhance digestion. Coriander seeds have anti-inflammatory properties; mustard and fenugreek are antioxidants,” she explains.
Even though the principle of balancing the shadrasas through food may have been diluted with the passage of time, most rasams are a finely calibrated tribute to one or more of these tastes. Take the vepampoo rasam, for instance. The main ingredient of this rasam from Tamil Nadu are the dried blossoms of the vepam or neem tree. When fried in ghee and added to a tamarind-based rasam, the blossoms bring an aromatic and mellow bitterness to the dish.
A rasam is therefore a feat of whittling many competing—and complementary—flavors down to their very essence., an anthropologist based in Auroville with an avid interest in food, says that this is both the charm and the challenge of the dish. “You have to build a scaffolding of ingredients, so that one little taste stands at the pinnacle,” she told me.
According to Achaya, Niccolao Manucci, an Italian doctor, writer and traveller who visited India in 1654, made mention of a brew that could well have been rasam. “In about AD 1700, Manucci noted that south Indians ‘sip a concoction which is some water boiled with pepper’,” wrote Achaya.
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