A cake baked in a borma (a traditional coconut shell-fired oven) is the stuff of nostalgia. People from a generation or two ago, when cakes were not as widespread, fondly remember them. Bakeries were few and far between, and those primarily baked bread.
Kochi-based baker Tsarina Abrao Vacha’s great-great-grandfather, Ignatius Rozario, is said to have baked the first loaf of bread in Kerala sometime in the early 1850s. He set up a bakery in Kochi called Rozario’s Bakery, one of the first such in Kerala. Baking is said to have been introduced in Kochi, like in Goa, by the Portuguese.
A borma is a coconut-shell-fired oven, traditionally used in bakeries in Kerala before the arrival of electric ovens. Tsarina says her memories of the borma during Christmas time are not uni-dimensional. “What I feel is two dimensional — a warm feeling — the fragrance of baking cakes with the temperature of the borma.
That is how I remember it,” says Tsarina, an architect, who refers to herself as a fifth-generation baker. She remembers the “humungous pile” of coconut shells at Rozario’s that would be used to fuel the borma. Rozario’s, on Broadway, shut shop in 1988.
While the borma is set to becoming a relic of the past, a handful of old-school bakers still bake bread and cakes the old-fashioned way. One such is St Joseph’s Bakery, Kumbalangi near Kochi. Cakes ready to be loaded into the borma at St.
Joseph’s Bakery | Photo Credit: THULASI KAKKAT Watching the flames inside .
