A lot of Malayali food is reasonably well-known across the country. Appam and stew, porotta and beef, egg roast and Malabar biriyani have all received some attention and (much deserved) love, particularly with the explosion of food content on Instagram.

There are some food items, however, that I have yet to see even mentioned in all these posts. Among them is ari unda (rice ball), a simple snack that is my favourite accompaniment with tea. It is made from roasted rice powder, jaggery, grated coconut and cardamom.

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One bite of an unda, with its rich, earthy flavour, followed by a sip of tea, is enough to transport me instantly to childhood summer holidays spent in our ancestral home, with nothing to do but wander around, eat, read, nap, repeat.

My love for the unda is only deepened by the fact that it isn’t easy to find in shops, even in Kerala. I think this is partly because it sits in an odd category – more perishable than other teatime snacks, like murukku and mixture, but not a freshly prepared item, like pazham pori or banana fritters, now common at Malayali tea stalls elsewhere in the country.

I have spent hours tramping through Kochi, looking for it at dozens of bakeries, rebuffing all offers of its distant, vastly inferior cousin, avalose unda. I have bought out entire stocks from bakeries, transported the packets to Bengaluru and refrigerated them, and eaten one a day, so that they last me through weeks of teatimes.