The food you eat speaks a lot about the person in you and about the culture you belong to. Keralites love to have a lot of spice in their lives and the Kerala cuisine is equally spicy and hot, in keeping with their lively lifestyle. Today Kerala cuisine is a hit among one and all around the world, drawing the interest of several travelers. Tourists visiting piece of land make it a point to have a taste of the cuisine in Kerala to get a smack of the typical South Indian tangy and chili flavor.

Influence on Kerala Cuisine:
Often visited by seafarers, the culture of Kerala has been influenced variedly by several other cultures. These influences have been instrumental in molding the history, socio-cultural backdrop and cuisine of Kerala. Christianity laid its roots here as early as AD 400, and Judaism and Islam also came via sea. Over the years, travelers from Italy, China, Greece, France and Africa came to the coastal belts of Malabar to collect spices. The advent and intrusion of several of these communities have accordingly led to a fusion in Kerala cuisine with its fascinating array of meat and fish dishes. Seafood, coconut and other such things are essential ingredients of Malayali kitchen.
Staples in Kerala Cuisine:
Rice, or more precisely, unpolished rice, is the staple diet of the Kerala cuisine. Apart from the boiled dish eaten as a main course, there is also a wide array of snacks and breakfast items made of the cereal. Ground into flour, it takes the shape of the bamboo formed puttu, the round and spongy vattayappam, the fringed palappam, the idiappam that looks like fine noodles, the sweet uniappam, the pancake-like kallappam, and the stuffed ball called kozhikotta. There is also chapatti-like bread called pathiri that can be made into thin one called vatipathiri, a box type pettipathiri and a sweet cake-Chattipathiri. Sometimes the Pathiris are also stuffed with chicken, mutton or beef, and fried, or steamed if stuffed with fish.

Coconut, chilies and tamarind have been integral parts of Kerala cuisine and almost all dishes have a touch of coconut, tamarind and chili flavor in some form or the other.

Most of the Hindu Malayalams, except the Nambudiris who are strict vegetarians, relish non vegetarian dishes. However, they avoid serving non-vegetarian food on certain days, although for the other communities no festive affair is complete without it. Due to the influence of the foreigners beef has acquired considerable popularity in the cuisine of Kerala.


Spices like cardamom, pepper, nutmeg, and beverages like tea and coffee are some of the important members of Kerala cuisine. Vast plantations of the same are found on the high ranges of Kerala while plantations of clove, ginger and turmeric are prevalent in the lower altitudes. The midlands are full of paddy fields, tapioca, all kinds of hardy vegetables such as yam and gourd. Also there are orchards of tropical fruits like banana, jackfruit, mango, pineapple and cashew. The lowlands mostly cultivate coconut trees and paddy.

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