At Manapatty, a village in Tamil Nadu, almost everyone is a wedding cook

Discover the rich culinary history of Manapatty, a village in Tamil Nadu known for its wedding caterers and signature dishes.

A lone man is taking a nap under a tree in the deserted village square of Manapatty in Melur taluk, Madurai. He wakes up, rubbing his eyes, to introduce himself: Kalyana Sundaram, a wedding cook. It is a little past 8am when we arrive at this village, which is considered southern Tamil Nadu’s headquarters for wedding caterers.

A man stops by on his way to the bus stop: he too is a cook. Another young man, S Bala Murali, pulls over on his bike: he has worked for several masters and his father is a master himself. Soon, we realise every other person we meet in the village is either a master with his own army of cooks, or is a cook with several decades of experience.

“Last minute family wedding in the works? All you need to do is visit our village to arrange a team to take care of the cooking,” says Bala Murali. “There will be one master or the other here who can help.” Cooks from Manapatty travel across the State to prepare mammoth feasts for functions through the year. They are sought-after for their mutton biryani and mutton nei chukka, a dish of slow-cooked meat with a smattering of crushed ginger, garlic, red chillies, and plenty of gingelly oil.

Cooking is entwined in the psyche of the inhabitants of Manapatty. “In India, especially Tamil Nadu, it is common practice for people from rural districts to shift to bigger cities for better work opportunities when crops fail them,” says M Balasundhar, the son of P Murugesan, among the most reputed names in the field from the village. “But our people took to cooking instead.”

In the 1960s, a great drought hit the region. Rains failed them repeatedly and their lands turned dry. A man arrived on a bicycle from nearby Melur one morning, shirtless and pot-bellied, dressed in just a lungi. Vairavan, a wedding cook, was looking for extra hands. A handful of men from Manapatty, more than happy to have found work, volunteered to join him.

Among them, was Murugesan’s father Periya Panayan, better known as Thondhi, Mandayan, Ayyan Kaalai, and Sellaiyya. “Vairavan was the guru who initiated our ancestors into cooking,” recalls Murugesan, seated at a table near the wood-fired kitchen of his company MS Caterers’ unit in Madurai’s Pandi Kovil neighbourhood.

“He taught them the nuances, and each of them eventually started their own catering business, training more men in turn,” says the 56-year-old. The village, home to 650 families, has over 25 masters, with most inhabitants related to cooking in some form or the other. Murugesan has been in the field from the time he finished school. His catering company MS Caterers has cooked at weddings across Tamil Nadu, in places such as Madurai, Theni, Chennai, Coimbatore, Tiruchi, Sivaganga, Thanjavur, Ramanathapuram and Dindigul. They have even travelled to the Andamans and Singapore on cooking assignments.