Videos of cookery in an Indian village

January 12, 2017 11:58 AM

My Money My Food is an Indian YouTube cooking channel. While occasionally featuring videos of food collection or Indian street food, its primary content is footage of meals being cooked at village-scale. Some prime examples: Cooking 500 Quail Eggs in Our Village; Cooking 101 Chicken Legs in My Village; Cooking a 40 Pound Stingray in My Village; Cooking Mole Crabs in My Village. (NOTE that many of these videos feature meat in its yes-this-is-a-dead-animal form.)
posted by Going To Maine (16 comments total)

whoa is this awesome. my days of not knowing what to do with 40 lb. stingrays are over!
posted by mrdaneri at 12:04 PM on January 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

I like how these videos have this sort of sparse narration-less flow. Nothing but the cooking, and the sounds of the surroundings*. It reminds me of the Primitive Technology videos in that respect. Or this video of Taiwanese Teppanyaki.

*I did discover that have short descriptions of the steps if you turn on captions.

Also previously
posted by zabuni at 12:25 PM on January 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

Yes! I quite enjoy this channel and feel bad I've not posted about it myself. Supremely relaxing and the only problem is that I usually end up hungry...
posted by Harald74 at 12:42 PM on January 12, 2017

101 chicken legs? So was one of those chickens only a one-legged chicken? Or maybe they only took one leg off one chicken and she's still flailing around somewhere? I'm going to be thinking about this all day.
posted by fiercecupcake at 12:57 PM on January 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

Chicken like that, you don't eat all at once.
posted by ZaphodB at 1:26 PM on January 12, 2017 [8 favorites]

Those cooking and prep vessels are beautiful, and I loved how the cooking was done over a carefully tended fire.
posted by Slap*Happy at 1:53 PM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

I love that the ubiquity of video and Youtube means that we now have access to this sort of content created by people directly rather than mediated by anthropologists as it would have been if I could have viewed it even just 20 years ago.
posted by lollusc at 2:48 PM on January 12, 2017 [7 favorites]

These videos are filmed in my home state (Tamil Nadu) and the village looks remarkably like the village where the farm my mom bought is situated, so these videos make me feel very nostalgic. The landscape is so typical as well the sounds - you can almost hear the sultry humidity. Sometimes in the distance you can hear songs playing - also very typical, usually Tamil film songs, sometimes a local temple.

If you're wondering what it is they're saying in the videos, it's usually pretty mundane stuff like - "that grinding took so long that's it's set us behind" or "I think you should do that in two batches".

I'm wondering what the background is of the guy behind these videos. My theory is of some kind of village guy done good, or a local landowner with a generous impulse. That's basically because while the implements are very basic, they're almost pointedly so - someone who owns a farm of that size and who can afford to feed so many people such expensive ingredients (all that meat and shark and whatnot is not cheap) can definitely afford an electric mixer-grinder. On the other hand, some of the implements/techniques used show that he's fairly worldly e.g. the spider he uses to lift the fried chicken out of the oil is not traditional to South India, and his "Village Fried Chicken" is definitely referencing KFC. It's almost like his hobby is to go back to his village, buy lots of protein, cook it all up with the help of the residents, and serve it to them. This is also borne out by the ends of the videos where he asks people what they think. You can tell he takes a lot of pride in being able to give back to the village residents, and he wants them to experience food that may be unusual for them and tell him what he thinks. There are definitely worse hobbies. Good for him!
posted by peacheater at 4:52 PM on January 12, 2017 [31 favorites]

Another thing this reminds me of is our village celebrations of Pongal, which is a Tamil harvest festival. It's traditional to eat Pongal during this festival, which can refer to two dishes - one sweet and one savory. My mother loved to celebrate Pongal on the farm, and being the most well-off people nearby, would invite the entire village. We would make sweet and savory pongal in two gigantic pots on an outdoor fire and serve it to everyone. Sweet pongal is basically like a glorified rice pudding (with more cashews and raisins and spiced with cardamom and so forth), but the flavor was something else when cooked over an open fire. And savory pongal is most like a kind of rice porridge, but again extremely flavorful.
posted by peacheater at 5:14 PM on January 12, 2017 [11 favorites]

I love the videos but they make me very hungry.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:51 PM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

This channel on Indian cuisine also happens to be a sausage festival.
posted by Pazzovizza at 11:48 AM on January 13, 2017

True - definitely all dudes.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:32 PM on January 13, 2017

This was posted previously.
posted by werkzeuger at 5:45 AM on January 14, 2017

Just to be clear not complaining, peacheater's comment alone makes this thread valuable...
posted by werkzeuger at 5:47 AM on January 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

One of my favorite things about his videos is how often he feeds his cat the finished dish.
posted by werkzeuger at 5:50 AM on January 14, 2017

Ha, I could have sworn this was posted previously, but couldn't find the thread.
posted by peacheater at 6:16 PM on January 14, 2017