The final Kucini Tale tells the story of the creolised macaron uniting the Coromandel and Canara coasts, Portuguese and Muslim traders, Arabs and Jesuits, Italy and France, and, finally, our elusive lovers.
When the Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama disembarked near Calicut in 1498, he inaugurated a new phase in history. The sea routes were opened up, and the Dutch, French, Danes, and British soon followed. The coastal enclaves they founded became hubs of cultural exchange. Their economic potential attracted many kinds of people, including merchant communities, from outside and within India. ‘Creolisation’ resulted. New, unexpected cultural products sprang up from this interaction between different languages, different gods, different ways of living, and different ways of cooking and preparing food.