via BBC, 30 March 2023: A popular Indian rice cake with a possible origin in Indonesia.
Despite its ubiquity, the dish’s origin is hazy. The 920 CE Kannada text, Vaddaradhane, a book of 19 stories of local ascetics, mentions the word iddalige, from which idli is believed to be derived. Similar dishes are described in Lokapakara, a 1025 CE guide for common people, and Manasollasa, a 1130 CE encyclopaedic socio-cultural Sanskrit text. In A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food, published in 1998, food historian and nutritionist KT Acharya posits that an Indonesian fermented dish called kedli could be the precursor to idli, having been brought to India between the 8th and 12th Centuries by the cooks of Hindu Indonesian kings who travelled back and forth between the two countries in search of brides.
