Native rice, five millets and oils that were pressed, not extracted

Native rice varieties, and which one to actually start with

The traditional Tamil rice revival has produced a lot of romantic writing and not much practical advice, so here is the practical advice. These rices are not interchangeable with ponni and a household that swaps them one-for-one usually gives up in a fortnight.

Mappillai samba is the famous one — a red rice with a genuinely long cook, around 45 minutes in a pot or three whistles more than you expect in a cooker. It needs a 30-minute soak. Its texture is coarse and it is at its best as a kanji, in a pongal, or with a strong kuzhambu. It is not a rice for a delicate meal.

Seeraga samba is the opposite — small-grained, aromatic, the correct rice for a biryani, and the easiest native variety for a household to like immediately.

Karuppu kavuni, the black rice, is a once-a-week rice rather than a daily one: a six-hour soak, a dramatic purple pot, and a nutty flavour that carries a payasam better than it carries a sambar.

Ponni boiled rice at ₹62 a kilo is what most Puducherry households actually eat, and there is nothing to apologise for in that. If you want to move towards native rice without a fight, buy 1 kg of seeraga samba and use it for one meal a week. That works. Replacing your entire rice consumption with mappillai samba on a Monday does not.

Cold-pressed oil, and the word "filtered"

Wood-pressed or cold-pressed oil is made by crushing the seed at low temperature and filtering it, and nothing else. It keeps the aroma, it keeps a sediment layer at the bottom of the bottle, it clouds in cold weather, and it has a shorter shelf life — six to nine months rather than years. Refined oil is solvent-extracted and then bleached and deodorised, which is why it is cheap, clear, neutral and indefinitely stable.

The word to be suspicious of on a Puducherry shop shelf is filtered, which sounds like cold-pressed and legally means almost nothing. Ask how the oil was extracted, not whether it was filtered.

Our gingelly oil at ₹420 a litre and coconut oil at ₹480 come from small mills we buy from directly. The coconut oil solidifies below about 24°C, which happens in a Puducherry December and worries people who have only used refined oil; it is a sign the oil is what it claims to be, not a fault. If you want the cheapest cooking oil in town, buy refined from a supermarket — we are not a good option for that and will say so.

Pack sizes, bulk, and shipping beyond Puducherry

Staples are the only category here that is not tied to the morning van, because they keep. That changes what we can offer:

• 1 kg — for trying a variety before committing. Almost every household that ends up buying 5 kg sacks of samai started with a 1 kg pack of it.
• 5 kg — the working household size, roughly a month of one grain for a family of four.
• 25 kg — the kitchen sack, priced on the trade list, with a GST invoice. Guest houses, hostels and Auroville community kitchens buy rice this way.
• Outside the route — we ship staples to Cuddalore, Villupuram, Chennai and further by courier, prepaid, typically three to five days. Fresh produce stops at the edge of the van route; rice, millets, oils and jaggery do not.

Bulk orders above 25 kg of any single line want 48 hours' notice, because these are small mills and small farms and nobody is holding a pallet of karuppu kavuni waiting for a phone call.