Chettinad Food Trail, Karaikudi

The first thing to unlearn is the word. "Chettinad" on a menu almost anywhere in India means a dark, chilli-heavy gravy, and that dish is largely a restaurant invention — Anjappar, the chain that made the name famous, was founded in Chennai in 1964. Real Chettinad cooking leans on black pepper rather than chilli, uses coconut with restraint, and grinds its masala fresh for each dish. The Bangala describes it as spicy but not hot, which is exactly the distinction. Visitors who arrive expecting the restaurant version often decide the real thing is somehow not proper Chettinad. The second thing to unlearn is that this is a meat cuisine. The Nagarathar Chettiars were traditionally vegetarian and their ritual feasts still are. Chicken Chettinad is the tail wagging the dog; the dishes the community actually built its reputation on are things like kandarappam, kavuni arisi, paal paniyaram and uppu seedai. What makes the food taste of this place and nowhere else is a short list of spices used in combination — anasipoo, which is star anise, and kalpasi, a lichen sold as black stone flower, alongside fennel and a great deal of black pepper. Kalpasi is the one you will not have met elsewhere and the one that makes a Chettinad kuzhambu smell like Chettinad. And this is not a city trail. Chettinad is seventy-six villages — fifty-six in Sivaganga district and twenty in Pudukottai — spread over 1,550 square kilometres, with Karaikudi as the hub. You eat in restored mansions, and you drive between them.

BOOK AHEAD, ALWAYS. The good food here is cooked in houses to order. The Bangala in Karaikudi is the best-known dining room in the region; Visalam at Kanadukathan, Saratha Vilas at Kothamangalam — a 1905 house reopened as a hotel in 2010 — and Chettinadu Mansion are restored houses that feed guests and, with notice, visitors. None of them is a walk-in. YOU NEED A CAR. Seventy-six villages over 1,550 sq km, and the mansion villages — Kanadukathan is about ten kilometres from Karaikudi — are not walkable from town or reliably connected to each other. THE VEGETARIAN SIDE IS THE ORIGINAL. Ask for kandarappam, kavuni arisi, paal paniyaram and uppu seedai by name. They will not be on a tourist menu by default and they are the food the community actually cooks for itself. TEMPLES. Pillaiyarpatti''s Karpaga Vinayagar temple opens 6 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. and 4 p.m. to 8.30 p.m., closed through the middle of the afternoon. Tamil Nadu temples have been directed to display boards restricting non-Hindus beyond the flagstaff; treat that as the working rule and ask at the gate rather than assuming. THE ANTIQUE MARKET IS A COMPLICATED PLEASURE. The lane at Kallukatti is genuinely interesting and much of what is for sale was taken out of houses that are now gone. Buy knowing that.

The money came from somewhere else. The Nagarathar Chettiars were bankers and traders across Burma, Ceylon, Malaya and Vietnam, and the mansions were built with what came back, between the 1850s and the 1940s. That trade is why a Tamil regional cuisine carries star anise and why the houses hold Burmese teak, Italian marble and Belgian glass. The mansions are also why the region is on India''s UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List, submitted in 2014. Many of the houses are shut, some have been sold for their fittings — there is a lane of antique dealers at Kallukatti, about four kilometres from Karaikudi Junction, selling doors and pillars stripped out of them — and the ones you can eat in are the ones that found a second life as hotels. The floors underfoot in most of them are Athangudi tiles, still handmade in the village of that name twenty-four kilometres away.