The Kochi Bakery That Says It Gave Kerala the Egg Puff

Every bakery in Kerala keeps the same triangle under the same glass. Flaky, a little greasy at the corner, and hiding half a boiled egg inside. The egg puff is so ordinary here that almost nobody thinks to ask where it started. One Kochi bakery, open since 1939, has an answer, and it involves its own kitchen.

Cochin Bakery opened that year on Cannon Shed Road, near the old boat jetty in Ernakulam. Four brothers from Thalassery started it: M P Karunakaran, M P Achuthan, M P Kumaran and M P Balakrishnan. They came out of the Mambally tradition in Thalassery, the lineage most often credited with starting Kerala's bakery industry, whose Royal Biscuit Factory dates to 1880. In the early years the shop had no formal name. People simply called it the bakery, and as M P Ramesh, a director of the business and a son of founder M P Achuthan, tells it, the family eventually decided to name it after the city instead.

How the egg got inside the puff

By Ramesh's account, puff pastry had only recently reached Kerala's commercial bakeries, arriving in the 1960s, and the fillings then were meat. The bakers tried replacing the meat in a puff with a boiled egg. The experiment produced a cheaper snack that appealed to a wider range of customers, and Ramesh dates its spread to around 1973 and 1974.

Whether it was the state's very first egg puff is not something a document is going to settle, and the story as it stands is the family's own telling. What the bakery can point to is the sequence. Before the puff it had been using its boiled eggs for egg bajji, dipped in gram flour batter. Afterwards the egg puff stopped belonging to any one shop. If you have read our guide to how Kochi eats, this is the pattern the city keeps repeating: something borrowed, something adapted, something that feels native within a generation.

The shelf that sold Basheer

The bakery sat in the middle of a working city rather than off to one side of it, and it collected the city's people accordingly. Ramesh says his father gave Vaikom Muhammad Basheer a shelf and a seat inside the bakery to sell his books from. It is family recollection rather than documented history, but it tells you what a bakery counter used to be on Cannon Shed Road: not somewhere you passed through, but somewhere the neighbourhood actually stood around in.

The bakery also says it entered the Limca Book of Records in 2006 with a cake that ran 217 feet and carried 172 pictures of national leaders, major events and celebrities. That is the sort of thing a business does when it is old enough to want a party.

What the name covers now

What began as one counter is now a chain, trading as Cochin Bakery and also known as Ceebees. A 2022 count put it at thirteen branches: five in Kozhikode, five in Mangaluru, two in Ernakulam and one in Kasaragod. By the company's own account it opened a Kochi showroom in 2006 and keeps a well equipped factory and two outlets in the city.

The puffs themselves were mutton to begin with. When mutton got expensive the bakery moved to chicken, and beef puffs took off later, though more in places like Kottayam than here. The bakery credits founder M P Achuthan with several of its early lines, the Ceebees Japanese cake, butter beans and tea rusks among them, and Ramesh developed the ghee cake in 1992 that the business now treats as its signature.

Still here, which is the point

Most of what made mid-century Ernakulam has been knocked down, rebuilt, or turned into something with valet parking. A bakery that opened before independence and is still producing bread, cakes and puffs is not a museum piece, and it has not got there by staying still. What started at that counter on Cannon Shed Road now runs a factory, a showroom and, by that 2022 count, thirteen branches across two states.

What did stay still is the object. The next time you take one off a tray without looking at it, which is how everybody takes one, it is worth knowing that the shape has a Kochi address attached to it. For more of the city's older food, start with our street food crawl, or browse the rest of Lifestyle.