Their Chettiar cousins incorporate in their repertoire just about everything that grows or moves: sun-dried legumes, berries and kalpasi fungi make their way into curries, as do every kind of game – rabbit, quail, pigeon. Their signature dish is Chettinad chicken (with whole peppercorns) Sit down for Mudaliar meal- vazhaipoo vadai (fried banana-blossom rissoles), with perhaps kathirikkai varwal (masala stuffed brinjal in sour gravy), a plethora
of kozhambu (curries) with green masala, tamarind and pepper, and pakoda kurma (dumpling curry).
Goan curries of Portuguese antecedent yield fierier dishes still.

Konkani cuisine often uses the indigenous cashew liquor, feni for marinade. Picking and drying are common techniques (as in the famed prawn balchao, dried Bombay Duck and spicy choriz sauages), with liberal use of chillies and garlic. Pork dishes are a dime a dozen when the fierce monsoon interrupts fishing: jaggery-alleviated vindaloo, sorpotel, aad maas, and tripas literally go the whole hog. Christmas week celebrates the best seafood- xinanio (oysters) breaded and fried: promfret, mackerel and kingfish stuffed with spicy-sour recheado masala, zawb(mussels) and cawrpa (clams) in their shells.

Maharashtra bridges the North-South divide, as with Goan pao (sourdough) puris and polis (fried breads) punctuate the staple of rice. Foods are than ghee-drenched North Indian and chilly pungent Southern spices.
Neighboring Karnataka offers less coconut and seafood, producing sweet-sour vegetable and lentil curries. Gram-flour makes an insistent appearance, as thickening agent and in batters and dumplings. Nilgiri spices are undercut by kokum and jaggery.

On the far side of the peninsula, Hyderabadi cuisine derives from the kitchen of the Nizam rulers. Richer Andhra spice mixes feature saffron and mace in stellar biryanis, meat curries abound, but a notable partiality for brinjal results as mustard-tempered baghaare baingan.