How a Muslim man from Kochi is preserving the city’s Jewish culinary history

The yolk does not fall cleanly.

It has to be guided into the syrup.

Too slow, and it thickens before it reaches the surface.

Too fast, and it breaks.

For a moment, the threads hold. Then they begin to disappear into themselves.

This is how Thoufeek Zakriya remembers it.

Not as a historian of this kitchen but as someone who stood close enough to learn it.

Thoufeek grew up in Kochi’s Mattancherry, near Jew Town, in the orbit of the Paradesi synagogue and the last Jewish households still living there.

When he wrote to me, it was not as a historian, but from memory.

Thoufeek called it what was in his house. Muttamala, an egg garland.

It wasn’t familiar to me, but I was fascinated by both the man and the dish: a golden egg-yolk dessert.

He did not describe this dish as Portuguese. He did not describe it as Iberian.

And yet, the dish belongs to a wider family of egg-thread confections that can be traced across the early modern routes of the imperial Portuguese world.

In Portugal, the technique is still known as fios de ovos – egg yolks drawn into fine strands and set in hot sugar syrup.

Like its more famous cousin, pastel di nata, it emerged within Portuguese convent kitchens, where egg whites were used for starching laundry and textile finishing, leaving a...

Read more