Salt

The kitchen keeps three salts, and they are not interchangeable in the cupboard even though the family sometimes swaps rock and black for each other. Plain salt is the workhorse: it seasons dal water, vegetables and rice through the cooking, added early so it melts into the dish rather than sitting on it.

In the temple recipes hosted here, plain salt is what the day-to-day abhada cooking means; the fasting kitchen never uses it. If a dish is for Ekadashi or Navratri, it takes rock salt instead, and the two must never be summed as one grocery.

The ayurvedic view: salty is one of the six tastes (lavana rasa), used in small measure to kindle digestion and open taste; excess is blamed for aggravating pitta and kapha alike.