Ruia Safir’s favourite food in the word is prawn masala unde. Here. she makes the case for why this Beary specialty needs to become yours.

Mangalore has no great wars or monuments to diplomatic legacy, but in a hundred years if someone tried the prawn masala unde and declared it their favourite food, my work here will be done.

The unde is one of the specialties of the Beary community in Mangalore. The Beary community might be small and often overlooked, but their food stands out. Pache curry (green curry) with idiyappam, jackfruit and cucumber sweets, kurchi (pony fish) curry, and the pinde (a smaller, more misshapen version of the unde). We stuff our food with community, it is our little container for culture.

‘What’s your mother tongue?’ The question used to put me under undue duress as a young girl.

Answering ‘Beary’ was usually accompanied with confusing explanations:

“It’s what the Muslim community in Mangalore speak.”

“No, it doesn’t have a script.”

“No, it’s not the same as Tulu.”

The explanations grated at me. I could understand overlooking smaller dialects or cultures. But this was Mangalore!! The home of ghee roast and kori roti, best prawn sukka and fish curry, and objectively (or perhaps, subjectively) the greatest food on earth.

Outside my little bubble of Bangalore, even fewer of these foods were known. I’ve always thought no history textbook narrating wars could possibly be as important as those preserving culture: the stories told about each other, myths, legends and even recipe books. If we knew how to make Rome’s immortal cement decades ago, many more monuments would still be standing tall today. Someone forgot to write down the recipe. A recipe for cement, sure, but a recipe nonetheless. Nothing was built in a day, neither Rome and nor recipes.

Ursula Ke Leguin refers to The Carrier Bag Theory of evolution in her literary analysis: “We’ve all heard about all the sticks and spears and swords… but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained.”

History often forgets to preserve the domestic.

My mother, again objectively, is the best home cook there is, living up to a certain hearsay about Mangloreans and cooking. She’s made the perfect choux pastry, a notoriously difficult task, while bored over lockdown. I’ve had dreams about her Thai curry. Many that have tried her tiramisu say it rivals the dessert in Venice.

However, she simply couldn’t (or wouldn’t) make my favourite food, something she grew up eating. I tried prawn masala undes one summer during vacation in Mangalore and knew, with no doubt in my mind, that I had found my favourite food. With the best components of Mangalorean food — coconut, rice flour and prawns — all packed in perfectly round picnic packages.

I convinced my mother to help make these undes. We sat together to stuff the rice balls, while my mother reminesced. Her mother, too, enlisted everyone to fill the balls, and they would all sit together watching the show, Chitrahar, and make dinner. The kids would compete to see who could fit more prawns in their unde before it overflowed.

I could not find much significance to this dish, or if it is important to the community. My mother, however, conjectured that it was perhaps simply just another way to eat rice and get the family together, which doesn’t require an occasion or reason.

The Beary community might be small and often overlooked but their food deserves attention — pache curry (green curry) with idiyappam, jackfruit and cucumber sweets, kurchi (pony fish) curry, and pinde (a smaller, more misshapen version of the unde).

We stuff our food with community, it is our little container for culture.