Chow chow bath: two breakfasts on one plate

Two breakfasts, one plate

Order a chow chow bath in Bengaluru and two portions arrive side by side, usually on a steel plate or a square of banana leaf. One is khara bath: savoury, flecked with vegetables and curry leaves. The other is kesari bath: sweet, glossy with ghee and a warm saffron orange. Both are made from rava, or semolina, and together they make a breakfast that much of the city knows by heart.

There is a small joke hidden in the name. Bath, as Karnataka Tourism points out, usually suggests rice, yet there is not a grain of it on this plate. What there is instead is contrast: heat and salt on one side, sweetness and ghee on the other, eaten a spoonful at a time. If you are new to the morning food of the region, our guide to Karnataka breakfasts is a good place to start.

Khara bath: the savoury half

Khara is the Kannada word for the hot, pungent taste of chillies and spice. V. Krishna's Kannada and English dictionary describes it as a taste that burns the mouth and throat, which is fair warning for anyone expecting something mild. Khara bath is rava cooked with a tempering of spices and plenty of vegetables. The food writer Shoba Narayan lists carrots, onions, tomatoes, beans, peas and curry leaves, with cashews and a generous spoon of ghee for richness.

It is a close cousin of upma, which in Karnataka is usually called uppittu. Narayan draws the line neatly: take the vegetables out and you have uppittu; pack them in and it becomes khara bath. Either way it comes with chutney, often one or two kinds, and in Bengaluru frequently a green one made with coriander, mint or both.

Kesari bath: the sweet half

Kesari means saffron, and also the orange yellow colour that saffron gives. The dish wears both. Kesari bath is rava roasted and cooked with sugar, a generous amount of ghee and often cashews, until it turns soft and glossy. Karnataka Tourism notes that it is the same sweet known elsewhere in India as sheera or suji halwa, and that it is sometimes made with seasonal fruit such as pineapple. Banana and mango versions turn up too.

What makes it distinctly Karnataka is the time of day. In much of the country a semolina sweet is a dessert. Here it is also breakfast, and Narayan observes with some amusement that while it is a morning staple at Bengaluru's darshinis and small hotels, in Chennai the same idea draws a raised eyebrow. It belongs to celebrations as well, and is a familiar sweet on festival days such as Ugadi.

A name nobody can quite explain

So why chow chow? The honest answer is that nobody knows for certain. Karnataka Tourism says plainly that there is no evidence for why the dish carries the name, noting only that a mix of sweet and spicy savouries was once called chow chow bath.

There is a tempting clue in older English. In the nineteenth century, chow-chow came to mean any mixture or medley, often of food, a word with roots in the trading ports of southern China. The Anglo-Indian glossary Hobson-Jobson, published in 1886, remarked that the idea of mixture seemed to prevail. A plate that mixes sweet and savoury fits that sense nicely, but it is a guess rather than a recorded history, and worth telling as one. To add to the puzzle, chow-chow is also a common South Asian name for chayote, the pale green squash, which has nothing to do with this plate at all.

Bath, meanwhile, belongs to a large and much loved family. Narayan describes the Kannada bhaath as a soft, comforting rice dish, and Bengaluru menus are full of them: tomato bath, shevige bath, ghee bath and the grand bisi bele bath. Chow chow bath borrows the family name while quietly leaving out the rice.

Darshinis, weddings and weekend kitchens

Chow chow bath is above all a restaurant dish, and its natural home is the Bengaluru darshini. These self-service vegetarian eateries began in the city in the early 1980s: you pay at the counter, collect a token, trade it for your plate and eat standing at a steel counter. The name is usually traced to darshan, meaning sight, and the popular story is that the first darshini let customers watch their food being made. Long before them, the city's tiffin rooms served similar food at tables with waiters, and Karnataka Tourism names old favourites such as MTR and Vidyarthi Bhavan among the places known for chow chow bath.

Beyond the counter, the pairing turns up in a few familiar places.

• At the darshini, it is a breakfast plate and, as Karnataka Tourism notes, an evening snack too.
• At weddings in Karnataka, kesari bath is a familiar part of the morning meal for guests, usually with khara bath served beside it.
• At home, it arrived later. Karnataka Tourism notes that the two were traditionally not cooked as a pair in households; once restaurants made the combination popular, home cooks followed, often for a slow weekend brunch.

Why the pairing works

Nobody wrote down who first put the two halves on one plate, but eat it and the logic is plain. Narayan likens it to a dance, a spoonful of one and then the other, and that is how most people eat it. The chilli in the khara bath makes the sweetness of the kesari taste brighter, and the ghee in the kesari softens the heat. Neither would be quite as good alone.

Half heat, half sweetness, and a breakfast that never has to choose between them.

Karnataka Tourism suggests finishing it the obvious way, with freshly brewed filter coffee. A strong, milky filter coffee after the last spoonful of kesari is about as good as a Bengaluru morning gets.

Plates like this one are part of what inspires us at Annara: generous, unfussy and just as happy shared as eaten alone with a newspaper. You can read how we think about food while our menu comes together.