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Karthigai Deepam
The festival of lamps in Tamil Nadu, with sweet appam, pori and adai flavoured with cardamom and dried ginger.
Spices for Karthigai Deepam
Rows of clay lamps light every doorstep on Karthigai Deepam, and at Tiruvannamalai a great flame is lit on the hilltop. The kitchen makes sweet appam, nel pori (puffed rice balls with jaggery), adai, a mixed lentil pancake spiced with red chilli, asafoetida and fennel, and sometimes aval. Cardamom and dried ginger (sukku) are the usual sweet flavours, as dried ginger is considered a warming spice for the damp months of the northeast monsoon.
The spices
Written by the EveryMasala desk with AI assistance. Background: "Karthikai Deepam" on Wikipedia. Customs differ from place to place and family to family. If this is your tradition and we have it wrong, tell us.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Asafoetida: Toyah, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Ginger: Venkatx5, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Cardamom: Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0, source