It is not every day that Kerala Finance Minister Thomas Issac gushes about cakes! But when he did on Facebook, not many people were surprised because every foodie worth his/her salt in South Kerala seems to know the eatery he was raving about: a small, no-frills joint at Keralapuram, on the busy Kollam-Punalur road, about 65 km from Thiruvananthapuram and eight km from Kollam.
To learn more about the rustic cake, known as vettu cake in Malayalam (cake with a cut), I made my way to the outlet in Keralapuram, christened Ezhuthani kada by loyal customers.
A couple of joints by the same name but with slight differences, at the busy junction, can confuse newcomers. But the oldest one, with its low tile roof, is still identified by a row of blue-painted wooden door planks at the entrance. Abdul Rahim, who runs the place, laughs when he says that many customers complained when they changed the colour of the shutters because they found it difficult to identify the eatery.
“My father did not believe in a sign board,” recalls Rahim. “We follow that and the many culinary traditions he put in place in 1948 when he started a small eatery to put food on the table for his large family.”
The food continues to enthral customers, old and new. And today, the old-fashioned eatery is always filled with patrons munching into its signature cake or tucking into fiery mutton curry with Kerala parottas, idiappam or appam .
Vettu cake has put this small town on the food map of Kerala. None of the brothers is quite sure how they came to be masters of the cake or from where their father got the recipe. But they say that about 5,000 of the crunchy cakes with a crisp brown crust and a yellow, soft, moist heart, are sold every day. “We guess one of our employees made it back then and since it became a hit, the recipe has been followed faithfully without any changes,” says Abdul Salam, Rahim’s elder brother.
- At this eatery, located a little ahead of the main junction in Keralapuram, the cake is made with a slightly different recipe. About 2,000 pieces are made every day and sold out almost immediately. “The ingredients are maida , duck eggs from Madurai, sugar, cardamom powder, powdered cashew nuts and a dash of Boost,” explains Mashoor M, who has taught a couple of his employees to make the signature cake. One of them is Rizwaul Islam from Assam, who cuts the dough and deep fries them with practised ease.
- Their restaurant at Keralapuram junction was started in the early nineties and this branch was started eight years ago. In addition to vettu cake, they also serve seafood, beef and chicken and biriyani.
In 1947, when M Meeran Sahib took voluntary retirement from the Armed Forces, the former soldier with the Madras Regiment and freedom fighter returned home to Keralapuram and started an eatery for manual and agricultural labourers in the vicinity. “In those days, there were no tarred roads, electricity or piped water. This was a backwater but then that was the only enterprise open to my father in those days,” explains Abdul.
The brothers remember a time when glass cases in the front were filled with neyyappam, pazham pori , cake and also puttu, pappadam and more. Over the years, the neyyappam and pazham pori faded out of their menu but the ethnic version of the cake remained.
Blue and pink tables with matching stools welcome hungry customers, many of whom are regulars or travellers who drop in for the famous, deep-fried vettu cake and parotta-mutton curry. In between bites of the cake, Revathy SK and her sister say that this is a regular haunt of theirs as they enjoy the food.
Rahim chips in to say that they have flourished without a single advertisement. “It has all been word of mouth. Ministers, senior bureaucrats, students… all of them stop by for a bite because they know our food is fresh. Ezthuthani is actually our family name. There are no refrigerators on our premises and no preservatives either,” he adds, taking me around the place.
Rahim shows me the kitchens where a battalion of cooks are hard at work. We reach the third floor, where two men are making their signature vettu cake on two large firewood stoves. They drop slices of dough into two large urulis filled with sunflower oil and watch it bloom in the hot oil.
As the cakes rise to the surface, the aroma of cardamom and sugar fills the air. Salam, who’s in charge of the cakes, watches carefully as each batch is lifted out of the oil and placed in containers lined with buttered paper.
He hands me a piping hot vettu cake. As I bite into it, it breaks with a crunch and then comes the portion that melts in the mouth, leaving an after-taste of cardamom. Salam explains that only duck eggs are used for the cake. Every day, by about 2 pm, they wind up.
Sold at ₹8 a piece, the vettu cake, they say, can stay remain unspoilt for more than a month. “That is why customers who travel to West Asia buy in bulk from us,” says Rahim. This is comfort food for Malayalis living in distant places.
