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Pongal
The Tamil harvest festival, with rice boiled over in a new pot and flavoured with cardamom, pepper and cashews.
Spices for Pongal
Pongal marks the end of the harvest, when the first rice of the season is boiled in milk until it overflows, a sign of plenty. Sweet sakkarai pongal is rice and moong with jaggery, ghee, cardamom and sometimes edible camphor, while venn pongal is a savoury version tempered with black pepper, cumin, ginger, curry leaf and cashews. Pongal vessels are often wrapped with fresh turmeric plants and sugarcane, so turmeric root appears as a decoration before it appears in the food. The festival lasts four days, with a day set aside for cattle.
The spices
More spices used for Pongal
Written by the EveryMasala desk with AI assistance. Background: "Pongal (festival)" 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.
- Turmeric: J.M.Garg, CC BY 3.0, source
- Cumin: Sanjay Acharya, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Erode Turmeric: Sivaranjani, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Cardamom: Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Black pepper: David Monniaux, CC BY-SA 3.0, source