Come Christmas, home cook and culinary expert Marina Charles is busy baking her signature Orappam, a dessert that is must at homes in St. Andrews, a serene, beachside village, 14 kilometres from Thiruvananthapuram.
Rice flour is cooked in coconut milk with sugar and ghee till it achieves a thick paste-like consistency. A little fennel is added for flavour. Marina recalls that her grandmother and mother would then take the mixture, close it with a lid and keep it on the embers of a firewood stove. Burning bits of coconut shells were heaped on the lid. Different versions of Orappam are cooked on festive occasions in many households in Southern Kerala. But the ones made in coastal villages in Thiruvananthapuram have a different consistency and flavour.
