Kozhi Stew

Chicken coconut milk stew — tender chicken pieces cooked in a fragrant, ivory-pale gravy of thick and thin coconut milk layered with whole spices (cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, star anise), fried onion and shallots, ginger, green chilli, potato, and curry leaves, seasoned only with salt and white pepper — no red chilli, no coriander powder, no turmeric in the Travancore version, so the sauce remains a pure, luminous white. The chicken is never deeply fried before adding; it cooks gently in the coconut milk from raw, absorbing its flavour as the milk reduces slightly. The stew is the classic companion to appam: the hollow centre of the lacy appam is filled with the warm stew. A Sunday morning ritual in every Syrian Christian Travancore household; Christmas morning breakfast is appam and kozhi stew without exception.