Blood Fry & Other Dalit Recipes from My Childhood
Vinay Kumar writes about the food of Dalit communities and tries to answer the question: Where does blood fry fit into a mapping of food in India?
My mom hasn't cooked blood fry in 27 years. She isn't particularly fond of it. But she remembers cooking it with her grandmother, and has promised to teach me how. It takes over five months to source the blood.
To reimagine Dalit food, born out of hunger, poverty and marginalisation, as a coffee table book would be a disservice to our struggles. Ours is a food culture that has survived in the memory of its people. Food from Dalit communities have never been featured in cookbooks; we have never had a cookbook of our own either. You can find ragi mudde in Military Hotel menus, or at Gowdru Manes, drenched in ghee. But when my mother and her siblings packed leftover mudde from breakfast as lunch for school, they would hide, away from their classmates and far from the school grounds, eating quickly before they could be discovered. Our existence and our life experiences, our memoirs and autobiographies, are works of resistance. Our eating practices, too are a protest.
Where or how does blood fry fit into a menu, a cuisine, a cookbook, or even an understanding of food in India?
The answer to that question can be found where Dalits are found in India: on the margins. Military Hotels, meat stalls around wine shops and bars in Dalit neighbourhoods, often prepare it. But blood fry has slowly faded out of our kitchens, in an attempt to hide our poverty, and for other reasons similar to why people hesitate to cook beef or dry fish. But the community-consciousness has held on to this dish. In small pockets, in the margins of the society, we hold on to our tradition.
I grew up spending a lot of time indoors, lurking by the kitchen door. It was here that I built relationships with all the women in my family; while peeling vegetables, doing the dishes or just sitting on the kitchen shelf and making conversation. Kitchens are great for building relationships and telling stories, and boy oh boy, does my family have stories. From scandals to narrow escapes, the kitchen was always bustling with stories, especially when three or more people cooked together.
“It takes a little love and effort to make decent dal, that’s it,” my friend Shalini said about the food at the student mess. Shalini is one of my closest friends from the University of Hyderabad. She was right; both of us were Dalit kids who grew up in lower-middle-class homes where money was scarce. I never starved as a child, and even when things were bad, we almost always managed. At home, we ate rice and dal (without tadka, because oil was too expensive). And we had to save the last packet of Gold Winner Sunflower Oil in case of emergency — which was usually a guest showing up unannounced. The only thing worse than actually being poor is someone else finding out you are poor.
But we’d made peace with our poverty early on. I’d rummage desperately through the kitchen for things to eat because my appetite was huge. Growing up, I’d eat as much as any adult at home. Often, I’d make do with ready-to-eat breakfast foods, like an old packet of shavge (vermicelli) or an MTR vangibath/bisibelebath masala, or rava idli mix. My memories of food weren’t always happy, or cheerful. In fact my most vivid memory of food was a yearning to eat the food from the SunDrop oil ad, because that was food I’d never seen or tasted.
Food doesn't always carry memories of love, care, or warmth. Sometimes they are reminders of harsh realities. Beef brought that into sharp relief for us. Then, there is the shame attached to food — that is a subject that has no place in food writing. Nobody wanted to talk about beef until after it was banned; not the way it is discussed today. Many people hadn’t even tasted beef until then. The ban only served to make beef more expensive for us, given the fear of beef-related violence and lynching. Despite countless reports, op-eds, editorials, anthropological studies and academic discourse, It seems like India still has trouble recognising the origin of beef: Simply put, beef was consumed because it was available to many Dalit communities in the form of carcasses. It was their ‘caste's job’ to dispose of the carcass — and to do so without payment. So the carcass became payment.
Oppression, geography, local species of flora, fauna and animals, and caste hierarchy have deeply influenced the food culture of Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi communities in ways that social scientists are still trying to map. My mother described blood fry as a dish prepared by poor families when they couldn’t afford meat. Made with coagulated goat blood, it is a local delicacy, and Military Hotels in Karnataka often serve it. Military Hotels deserve their own story, but to briefly explain, they are cheap eateries designed to serve meat to Army personnel who couldn't find meat elsewhere in the Brahminical town of Bangalore. Blood fry is a simple dish, and cooks easily, but is also very easy to mess up.
The tricky part is sourcing blood. Butchers don’t keep blood in their shops anymore, so they need a few days’ notice to get you what you need. The blood will remain red, but you’ve still got to wash it three times. My mom’s tip for cooking blood is to drop it into boiling water before frying it.
Does blood fry have nutritional value? Yes, it does. According to a food label from Iceland, it isn’t just Dalits who cook and eat lamb blood. You may read about other ‘ethnic’ cuisines using blood, but never in the same breath will you learn that it was also used as a traditional thickening agent in French cuisine. 100 g of blood contains protein content of 17.4 g, and fat of 0.4 g. Lamb meat has 25g protein and 20 g fat per 100 g, and chicken has 30g protein and 14 g fat.
My young cousin, who has never tasted, cooked or even hunted rat meat, announced authoritatively at a family gathering, that you need to blow a conch shell and smoke, to kill a rat. All the adults burst into laughter because, in Kannada, a conch shell and smoke is often a metaphor for death. Rats steal grain from paddy fields, and stash them away in burrows, only to be later discovered when the fields are cleared for the next crop. The rat ends up as dinner that night, or lunch the following day. Rats are cleaned and skinned like chicken, then barbecued on open flame, or cut into smaller pieces for a mixed vegetable and dal sambar.
Many of our cultural practices and spiritual beliefs, much of our oral tradition of stories, songs, music and literature, have faded away. But Dalit literature as a genre and literary movement emerged out of strife, resisting the caste system and people who've othered us, and denied our lived experiences; it called them out and recognised our histories. Our food may never be part of India’s ‘mainstream’ culture, but it is a part of our who we are, and a part of what India is.
RECIPE: BLOOD FRY
Blood fry is a side dish, like a thoran, meant to accompany rice and curry, or ragi mudde and curry. It can also be eaten with chapati. It is a dish that Dalit communities prepared to make up for the absence of meat — an unaffordable luxury.
Ingredients
250 gm goat blood
1 large (or 2 medium) onions
1/2 bunch coriander leaves
1/2 bunch mint leaves
5-10 garlic cloves (or more if that’s how you like it)
50 g ginger
Oil, to sauté
1 medium tomato
2-3 green chillies
Red chilli powder, to taste
Coriander powder, to taste
Turmeric, to taste
Garam masala (we love the Shakti Masalas or the chicken masala)
Salt, to taste
Method
Wash the blood, then cook it for a couple of minutes in boiling water. Cooking blood is similar to cooking paneer, tofu or kheema. You could crush it with your hand to give it the kheema/ egg bhurji texture or cut it into cubes as you’d with paneer or tofu after taking it out of the water.
Heat oil in a heavy bottomed wok, as you would for cooking any meat.
Add in the onion and fry until they begin to brown. Now add chillies, tomatoes. (My great grand aunt used to add dill at this point, you can too.)
But you should add mint and coriander leaves now.
Now you add salt, turmeric, chilli powder, garam masala. Mix well to combine.
Finally, add in the blood.
Mix it well, then cover the wok with a lid and allow to cook for 5 minutes.
Uncover and remove from heat. Serve hot.
Vinay Kumar, teaches English at the Azim Premji University and writes about South Indian cinema and he has previously written for The News Minute and The Ladies Finger.
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