Does your tummy hurt?

Until I read this in the NYT, I hadn’t even heard of something called the BRAT diet: “a diet of bananas, rice, applesauce and toast to treat gastrointestinal ailments, a regimen often known by the acronym BRAT.”

No, it is not for everyday dieting, but to ease the system that has been upset by a stomach bug.

How did it come into practice?

The BRAT diet was developed in the early 20th century for children with diarrhea. Doctors believed that eating less and sticking to bland foods would reduce the number of bowel movements and the accompanying fluid loss.

Now, studies find that there’s no difference between BRAT and regular diets when it comes to improving vomiting or diarrhea conditions.

I grew up in a part of the world where bread was not a part of everyday life. And, it was not until I came to the US and walked through the grocery store aisles did I know that there is something called applesauce. We had rice and bananas, but there was no BR diet when my stomach was upset, and my stomach got upset more often than I liked. So, what did we do?

While most people think that bananas help with bowel movements, especially when constipated, my parents and many of the elders in the extended family considered bananas as normalizers: Bananas help movement when there is none, and help stop moving things when they run.

So, count in B. And we had bananas in plenty.

When the system was upset, then rice intake was modified. Rice was intentionally overcooked, or the cooked rice was mashed up as much as one could mash it up. A little bit of salt. The final ingredient added to this was a watery buttermilk.

When I was new in America, and when my taste buds craved for the old country concoctions, I bought buttermilk from the grocery stores a few times, buying a different brand each time, only to be disgusted with the taste of buttermilk that was not the buttermilk that I was used to. Curd in the old country was called yogurt here, and it tasted more or less the same, depending on the brand. But not buttermilk.

A few years into my American life, I understood that the word buttermilk means different products in the US (and Europe) and India.

Every morning, amma carefully scooped out the cream on top of the freshly-made curd, er, yogurt. The cream went into a jar with a little bit of yogurt. Every three or four days, there was enough in the jar to produce a ball of butter. One of us kids helped out by vigorously shaking the jar for about 15 to 20 minutes, when the butter would separate out from the liquid and coalesce into a ball. A different way to churn butter.

So, we now have butter and yogurt, which is thayir (தயிர்) in Tamil. Thayir that is churned with water becomes moru (மோரு or மோர்), which, for reasons that I do not understand, is called buttermilk.

This buttermilk, moru, plays an important role in nourishing the system that is upset by a stomach bug. The magic is in the probiotics in the moru. It is added to the overcooked rice and salt, along with water, and you can now imagine a very thin rice gruel, congee.

Fun fact: Congee is derived from the Tamil word கஞ்சி. The sound of that Tamil word has worked its way into the culinary vocabulary.

So, what was our diet to address the stomach bug issues: Rice, buttermilk, salt, and water. As the system improved, the mix became thicker and thicker, and eventually one was on to regular foods, starting with Idli and yogurt.

Humans have always had to deal with stomach bug issues. It also then means they were addressed differently according to their respective culinary cultures. I wonder, for instance, what Native Americans here in the Willamette Valley did, especially when they did not have the B—banana.

What did your mother do when anybody in the family came down with the stomach bug?