Walking about Bruxelles one sunny November morning, we chanced on a spice shop with bottles of pepper and something called “Curry Vadouvan” stacked enticingly in the window display.

I recognized “vadouvan” at once as the Gallicization of the Tamil “vadagam” (alt. spellings: vadavam, vadaham)—which, the way I know it at home, is a unique spice preserve made by combining, incidentally fermenting, and eventually just slow drying shallots and garlic (primarily) with curry leaves, rock salt and a predictable range of whole and powdered spices. Longue durée drying, I wanted to say, adapting a term from French historiography: a lengthy, intense, patient, life-encompassing process in which Tamil women in a household convert fresh ingredients into oil-and-salt preserved spice balls which blacken and improve with age, and are used to flavor a variety of dishes for the coming year or two.

The mixture is stored out of the house—the smell is frequently too pungent to bear indoors—drying terraces commandeered when the sun is the hottest, neighbours notified by both bustle and redolence of what is being prepared and fully primed to beg a share. Since the process enmeshes sun-cooking, fermenting, and drying, the threat of spoilage is ever-present and must be painstakingly warded off. Periodic rounds of castor oil-coating serves this purpose, as do other obeisances.

Hindu families preparing vadagam for instance will fashion the first one in the shape of a Vinayaka, right down to a red chilli pottu [bindi] for good beginnings, and an iron nail and a bright red chilli are present with the whole drying lot as dhrishti [evil eye] protections. Nothing is taken for granted.

Vadagam-making sits right alongside the large-scale household preparations of vadaams, varthals, and applams, a mixed array of dry condiments and wafers, each one in its way making full use of seasonal abundance and preserving it for the sparser seasons ahead.  Each community and region boasts a set of methods and proportions that, in turn, produces at least some of the signature flavors of their cuisines.

But now what was this elaborately made spice mix to anyone else beyond the old Tamil neighbourhoods of its origin? This Gallicized alter ego of my own Tamil self, this immigrant to the erstwhile centres of colonial power—what was it doing, here in Bruxelles?

Just like that, what had begun as a casual tourist romp turned into an ethnographic moment: before my family knew it, I was in the shop talking to the proprietrix, who was herself from Cameroon. She knew the Tamil origins of vadouvan, of course, being intent herself in expanding, even so many centuries after the start of the spice trades, the still-limited taste palates of her European clientele. But, even by her own reckoning, few others would know this spice, or its origins—even less what to do with it.

The Myth of the French Colonial Masala

So, what is “vadouvan” that vadagam has become? The most common definition is that it is a “French masala,” a “French take on curry powder” originating in Pondicherry, because that was, of course, from 1674-1954, the key French comptoir of the Coromandel coast. It is to be differentiated from the “curry powders” of British India, as being both French (read: distinguished), chunkier, milder, and wetter, too, added the Bruxelles proprietrix.

In a strange way, spice mixes reflect the tension between these erstwhile European superpowers and resolve them in a sort-of culinary equivalent of territorial separation: the British had Madras curry, the French had vadouvan. Thinking of curries this way, however, as but-of-course colonial creations—degrading “British oversimplifications,” Madhur Jaffrey dismissively called them in 1974, things that “the Europeans imposed on India’s food culture”[1]—unfortunately allows most casual observers to simply attribute curries and their essential spice mixes to the colonizers. It effectively erases not only the actual origins of the kari/curry idea, and the role of those local cooks and savvy entrepreneurs who innovated, adapted, and made Indian dishes palatable to foreign tastes in the first place. “Madras curry” might have been a British fixation, but the famous Vencatachellum Madras Curry Powder was produced for nearly a century by P. Vencatachellum Pillai and his son, P.V. Subramania Pillai, an immensely successful Adi-Dravidar business family in erstwhile Madras, with J.A. Sharwood & Co., Ltd. appointed as sole agents and distributors in the UK.[2] With scant attention paid to the roles of these mediators and middle-folk, a spice mix like vadouvan easily becomes a creation of the “French colonialists in a southern region of India.” Chef Cedric Maupillier of Convivial in Washington DC’s trendy Shaw neighbourhood then affirms this in The Washington Post: ”Vadouvan originated with French colonization of Pondicherry,” he says, “The French brought back with them the idea of a curry blend, but one that ended up milder than the Indian version.”

But did they, really?

The French, with their own extolled gastronomic traditions were known to be “less accepting of the foods of their south Asian empire than the British or Dutch … there are virtually no traces in their cuisine of their long association with India, which lasted until 1954” (Taylor Sen 2009: 110). Paris got its first Indian restaurant, opened by an Indian government delegation, as recently as 1975. Chances are that the French brought back nothing of India’s cuisine during their colonial sojourn, least of all a flavouring as potent and distinct as vadagam.

I phoned Dr. Lourdes Tirouvanziam-Louis, an old acquaintance and author of The Pondicherry Kitchen, a collection of family recipes in which this flavouring mixture features large. She was categorical: vadavam, as it is known in local lingo, is neither French nor creole. “Don’t get these things confused,” she cautioned. “It is Tamil.”

When I asked about vadouvan in particular, she conjectured that this may have been a derivative of the typically Jaffna Tamil “vadaham” sold these days at Sri Lankan grocers in France; there are distinct regional pronunciations of “vadagam” after all, with vadavam, and vadaham as common variants. Whatever the route, “vadouvan” appears to have burst onto European scenes only in very contemporary times. Gourmet put up a recipe for “Vadouvan spice” in 2008, attributing it to the much-feted Michelin starred chef Iñaki Azpitarte of Le Châteaubriand in Paris. The American morning Today Show then touted it in 2015 as “the curry powder you need in your life,” though it wasn’t until 2021 that The Washington Post remarked on its increased presence on many chic restaurant menus, exotically flavouring everything from pumpkin potage, lamb-accompanied “dahl”, skate wing, foie gras and (eventually) blue crab and kale salads. A “Vadouvan Sweet Curry Sauce” is even on the menu of New York’s 3-Michelin-starred La Bernadin. Even though none of these vadouvan spice mixes appear to have been produced by the traditional methods of castor oil-coating and patient sun-drying, this suddenly trendy Tamil spice mix was clearly having its moment in the shining Western sun.

Pondicherry’s Vadavam

Dr. Louis and I chatted at length about the uniqueness of Pondicherry’s traditional vadavam formulations: unlike the thalippu vadagams [literally, tempering spice mixes] of other Tamil Nadu regions, Pondicherry’s vadavams rely heavily on shallots and garlic, with only minimal spices, dals, and even curry leaves added in.

But they are central to local Tamil fare in nearly all community foodways. “This is how we make them in my community,” Dr. Louis said repeatedly, “My Chettiyar and Mudaliyar friends do it a bit differently.” Whatever the specific recipe followed, these slow-dried, slowly ageing, slowly darkening balls not unsurprisingly release blasts of rich, earthy umami flavor when they are fried quickly and added to dishes. They complement just about all tamarind-based saucy preparations (fish or vegetable puli kuzhambus) beautifully. In some communities, they also can flavor a range of meat dishes: particularly the darker duck and lamb. And, at Pongal time, which is (fortuitously for Evangelists) coincident with Epiphany, a serving of Muunru Raja Pongal—Chakkarai or sweet Pongal by any other name, but here evangelized with the three “kingly” ingredients of rice, sugar, and coconut milk—and a side of Vadavam tovaiyal or coconut-based vadavam chutney are the customary offerings of Pondicherry’s Tamil Catholic households, alongside an odd-numbered array of seasonal vegetable dishes.

Broader Tamil uses across community and region are not much different, though the vadagams themselves may be. Vepampoo [neem flower] vadagams may simply be crumbled, fried and served as crunchy condiments (not unlike varthals). Onion vadagams are essential flavor boosters in keerai masiyal or mashed greens preparations. It would not be a stretch to read vadavams as both specific to a region like Pondicherry, and emblematic of Tamil approaches to flavouring generally, even if those staunchly vegetarian, typically Brahmin communities who eschew the use of onions and garlic or the distinctly meatier flavours of a condiment caught by the sun, as it were, somewhere between fermenting, drying and not-spoiling would not consume them with equal relish.

Tamil Flavour, French Twist

What distinguishes vadouvan, then, from its Tamil predecessors? If it’s not colonial origin, it’s the shallots the French added! some will quickly and enthusiastically add—to which, ‘ow you say “bull-shit” en Français?

For Tamils, “onions” often mean only shallots, sambar or small/ kutti vengayam, which are preferred more for flavour and health benefits. The “Curry Vadouvan” I found in Bruxelles was a coarse powder, heavy on turmeric, using white mustard instead of black and possibly other aromatics: cloves, nutmeg, thyme have apparently become common additions in this Indianized “all spice” formulation. Perhaps some of these added tastes plus quicker preparation by frying rather than sun-drying make for a milder flavour profile, though the claim that the French ramped down the spice levels needs itself to be tempered by the fact that “burning” spices like pepper and chillies are notably absent in all Tamil vadagams.

More than likely, it’s the imputed Frenchness of vadouvan with its Oriental twists that makes for at least some of its modern chic and trendy appeal. That Oriental “twist,” however, is a central flavor of my Tamil world—not to be dreamily romanticized as part of some imagined colonial past, but acknowledged, front and centre, as a crucial Indian contribution to global gastronomies in the present.

I write this as a tribute to Dr. Lourdes Tirouvanziam-Louis, to whom I spoke in early 2024 but who passed away sometime after, and offer thanks Madhu Naidu for introducing us so many years ago. In her honor, I reproduce this very special recipe from her book The Pondicherry Kitchen: the vadavam thuvaiyal. She often encouraged me to make my own vadavams from scratch–which I will, someday, right alongside Kallidaikurichi applams made with pirandai saar or juice.

[1] Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006: 115

[2] https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/the-long-story-of-how-a-dalit-family-once-ruled-the-global-condiment-industry/article67193814.ece

The Indian jaggeries assembled here were procured through various sources on- and off-line, but the kithul took some very generous help from friends. Soham Kacker went off to be Curator of Living Collections at the Lunuganga Trust, in Sri Lanka and knew of my wish for kithul so he found a friend to play mule. Sharon Atapattu-Tissera of Hideaway Resort, Ulle, Pottuvil was kind enough to source even more from a trusted producer. I’m so very grateful to them both for making this portrait possible.

Winters present the only real opportunity, because Bengal’s prized khejur gud or Indian sugar date palm jaggery is produced only then, and because the drier air of the late Indian winter and early spring keeps the other palm jaggeries of the subcontinent drier, longer. I present four here, all palm sugars, all but the coconut native to this region, though India is a secondary center of coconut origin, too:

• the toddy palm/ Borassus flabellifer,
• the Indian sugar date palm/ Phoenix sylvestris (L). Roxb,
• the fishtail palm/Caryota urens, and
• the coconut palm/ Cocos nucifera.

Each of these palms flower different times, and tappers know best which plants to pick for their purpose: older, shorter, water-stressed, or other, judged by environmental conditions as much as the number of leaf fronds and other details. Ladders are fashioned to reach the blossoms out of bamboo or just alternating indentations made in the tall tree trunks, and ropes tied between trees at times to allow arboreal passages–or none of these. Tapping happens by making incisions at the base of their immature inflorescences, applying lime or some other secretly guarded mixture of spices and herbs to the cuts both to prevent infections as also to ensure sap release, and then tapping or massaging the flowers in such way that allows the free flow of sap–which is then artfully caught in earthen matkas mounted impossibly to collect the sap at the cut ends of the inflorescences. None of it is a one-climb affair: tappers go up and down the trees over days and months to prep, attend to the inflorescences, and collect sap. They work whole groves of trees in single days. It’s no small task, or feat.

The vascular sap that eventually fills their mud containers is called neera or neero or pathaneer in almost all regions, is clear as water and can be drunk as-is: it’s deliciously light, sweet, and nutrient-rich. I remember seeing pathaneer from the palmyrah or panamaram as a child regularly sold by vendors near temples and in other public places in Tirunelveli and drinking it from palmyrah palm leaf-fashioned boat-like cups with bits of ice apple/nungu thrown in, sharbat style, for texture, on the banks of the Tamraparani river.

In Bengal it’s khejurer ros, the juice of the date sugar palm. Within hours pathaneer will have fermented and soured becoming the cloudier cal or kallu–a mildly alcoholic toddy that was, in the days before baker’s yeasts, the additive that allowed appams to become these soft lacy delectable things. To control the fermentation, this sap is boiled until it thickens and darkens (usually), producing first a molasses and then a jaggery that can be set in moulds, typically coconut shells.

A great deal has been written and videographed about the tapping of palm inflorescences to collect sap, which is a difficult art and a dying one because there is nothing about it that makes commercial sense. Or, applying fair trade logic would make these jaggeries much, much more expensive, which perhaps they should be if we’re to start valuing them enough. Tapping was also a caste-based activity, with the Nadars or Shayanars in the South tapping palmyrah, the Tiyans tapping coconut on the Coromandel, the Billavas being the Tulu-speaking toddy drawers of the South Canara district, the Siulis [Seulis] or Gachis in Bengal–and all of them reviled while the sap and its resulting sweetness was prized and revered. To bring about the uplift and reintegration of such communities, many of whom have abandoned tapping anyway, means losing the old lifeways, or paying dearly to keep what truly matters about them. So I want to describe the ecology and tapping of each jaggery type because it’s time we pay attention to what it takes to bring these precious sweeteners to our tables.

Borassus flabellifer: PANAVELLAM

I’ve written much about the panampazham or toddy palm fruit [processing, rice cakes, payasam, malpuas, and fibre wicks] but little about the fan-shaped leaves [which were once local stationary for all the palm leaf manuscripts of the Tamil written traditions], young shoots [பனங்கிழங்கு/ panangkizhangu which are still boiled and eaten as nutritious snacks], and not enough about the lives of the climbers and tappers. All these are in a way intermingled in panavellam, the dark jaggery of the toddy palm which is, somewhat fittingly as we shall see, bitter-sweet. This is also called karupatti after it’s the near-black-firm form.

Nonetheless, or perhaps as a result, panavellam is regarded as richly medicinal. It is often mixed with dry ginger/sukku and black pepper and sold in cubes that are ready to be dissolved into kashayams to treat common colds and respiratory ailments. In this form, they are called sillu karupatti or sukku karupatti.

The Nadars /Shanars of the southern districts of Tamil Nadu were the traditional toddy-tapping caste: low in status, kept out of villages, denied access to wells. Robert Hardgrave’s landmark study on The Nadars of Tamilnad: the political culture of a community in change [University of California Press, 1969], the only ethnographic study after the missionary Robert Caldwell’s damning and socio-politically damaging 1849 account of the Tinnevelly Shanars, describes the landscapes of the panamaram thus (pp. 18-19):

Farther to the south, the Tambraparni River cuts across the center of Tinnevelly District from the Ghats to the sea at Punnakayal, between Tuticorin and Tiruchendur. Winding through the district, each side of the river is bordered with a ribbon of green, irrigated paddy fields, the wealth of Tinnevelly. The district takes its name from the central town of Tinnevelly—Tirunelveli in Tamil, meaning “sacred paddy hedge.” To the southeast, the rich soils of the Tambraparni give way to the teris, the vast sandy tract of the palmyra forest. Farther to the south, crossing the border of Tinnevelly into Kanyakumari, the country becomes more luxuriant, as the palmyras mix with coconut, and the vibrant green of the paddy fields returns. With the exception of Kanyakumari, which shares the tropical vegetation of Kerala, the southern districts of Tamilnad east of the Ghats offer what Robert Caldwell described as only “varieties of flatness and barrenness. The only point open to dispute is whether the black, blistered cotton-soil plain, or the parched, unenclosed, and almost uninhabited plains of the granitic districts, or the fiery-red sandy plains of the palmyra forests are the least fertile and inviting.”

The southeastern portion of Tinnevelly District, including Tiruchendur and the greater portions of Srivaikuntam and Nanguneri taluqs, is one of the most desolate areas in South India. The teris, ranges of deep, loose, red sands, are peculiar to the region and are often destitute of vegetation. In the teris, two of which cover an area of some forty square miles each, the sands constantly shift with every blast of wind, forming ridged dunes. Despite the substratum of stiff red clay, the loose surface sands driven by the southwesterly winds, moved the sands toward the east at a slow but calculable rate. Caldwell recorded that the teris “gradually overwhelmed trees, fields, and even villages in its course.” The teris originated, according to local tradition, in showers of earth which in ancient times covered certain guilty cities. Beneath the teris, many Nadars claim, lay the ruins of the once great cities of a Nadar kingdom.

He continues with a description of the revered palmyrah and its reviled community of caretakers on pp. 25-9:

The “Palm poem,” Tala Villasam, by the Tamil poet Arunachalam of Kumbakonam, extols to Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, the supernatural origin of the palmyra and its eight hundred and one uses. In a remote age, man, as he grew discontent with creation as it came from the hands of Brahma, supplicated Siva to supply one thing which would at once feed the hungry, heal the sick, and enrich the people, who, for want of it, were “trembling like water on the leaf of the lotus.” Siva responded to man’s entreaty and directed Brahma to create the palmyra. The tree was dedicated to Ganesa, the elephant-headed son of Lord Siva. It was praised as the Kalpa tree, the Hindu Tree of Life, and it was enthroned as one of the five trees of the Hindu paradise. “The palmyra lives a thousand years,” eulogized a Tamil proverb, “and lasts another thousand years when it dies.”

The palmyra is perhaps the least elegant of all palms. It thrives alone where others would die in arid sands, sinking roots as deep as forty feet to draw water far beneath the surface.32 Almost as straight as the mast of a ship, the palmyra reaches a height of from sixty to ninety feet, with an erect plume of fan-shaped leaves at its top. The leaves are stiff, with none of the grace of the coconut’s long drooping leaves, and they are of manifold use: in the thatch- ing of houses among the lower classes, in the manufacture of mats, baskets, and vessels of almost every description; and the slips of the young leaf form the traditional stationery of southern India. The palmyra is the only palm whose wood is of value, supplying the finest rafters. The greater praise for the palmyra, however, is for the value of its products as food. The young root is edible, as is the ripe fruit, but the unripe fruit is greatly preferable “inasmuch as it contains the purest, most wholesome, and most refreshing jelly in existence.”

The most highly valued product of the palmyra is the saccharine sap or juice of the tree. The unfermented juice, called “sweet toddy,” is used without cooking or preparation and is a staple in the diet of the Nadar tappers, who take it early in the morning before they begin their labor. When the juice of the palmyra is allowed to ferment, a process which takes but a few hours, a sweet liquor or toddy is produced.” Both the sweet and the hard toddy were sold locally for cash by the tappers, but in the regions of the palmyra forest, where the industry was the foundation of eco- nomic life, most of the palmyra juice was boiled into a hard, coarse sugar called jaggery, or into palmgur candies. This was the work of the Nadar women, who collected firewood and boiled the juice over a slow fire in large earthen pots. When the juice thickened, it was poured either into coconut shells or into pits dug in the ground for the purpose. The hard, black jaggery cakes were often eaten as the midday meal of the tappers, but most of it was sold, either for low-grade sugar or for the distillation of arrack, the native “gin.”

The work of the panaiyeri, or climber, begins before daybreak, and in the course of the day, working until noon and then again from late afternoon until night, he will ascend thirty to fifty trees, climbing each twice–sometimes three times to extract the juice.

During the season in which the sap flows, from March through the hottest months of the year until September, the tapper can never leave the trees unattended, even for a day. As a dairy cow must not be left unmilked, so the palmyra-proverbially “the Shanars’ cow” -will cease to yield its juice if untapped. The sap of the palmyra is drawn from the flower stalk at the top of the tree, which when bruised or sliced yields, drop by drop, about one pint of juice each day. The flow is received in small earthen pots attached to each stalk. The sap is then collected two or three times during the day by the climber, who with each climb trims the stalk to allow free flow of the juice.

Climbing the palmyra is both dangerous and arduous. Each year, many of the climbers, no matter how skillful, fall from the trees to die or to remain crippled for life. In ascending the tree, the climber clasps the trunk with joined hands, supporting his weight with the soles of his feet, which, held together by a short span of rope, bend inward like grasping hands. Then in a series of springs, in which both hands and feet move together, the climber ascends the tree as rapidly as a man could walk a distance of equal length.37 In years of climbing, the body of the tapper becomes twisted, his powerful chest scarred, and his hands and feet like the enormous paws of some animal.

The season in which the sap of the palmyra flows is only six months in length, and the yield varies with the rainfall. The climber owned neither the land nor the trees which he tapped- only the sharp, tappers’ knife, a few earthen pots, and meager clothing. His home was a palmyra-thatched hut, and if the palmyra tope, or grove, was situated far from his own village, he would leave to take seasonal residence with his family among the trees. The tapper received no money for his labor, but a share system gave the produce of alternative days to the climber and to the owner. Whether in the districts to the north of the Tambraparni, where the owners of the lands were Maravars, Naickers, Vellalas, or others of high caste, or in the barren palmyra forests of Tiruchendur, where the Nadans held the land, the climber was bound to the trees by tradition and an accumulation of debts. The profits of climbing were small and usually exhausted by the panaiyeri two or three months after the end of the season, and, even with the cottage industries from the by-products of the palmyra, such as mat- or basket-making by the women, the climber had little recourse other than to seek the enfettering advances from the owners.38 Even in the best of yields, the climber led a marginal existence, his poverty “as deep as that of the Pariar and Puller slaves in the rice-growing districts.”

Tamilians are not the only ones to extract and value the toddy palm’s sugar. All along the Malabar coast, taal and talgud are well known and as loved as they are in the south, though I don’t know if they carry community-caste associations as much in those regions as here. On the road to Banteay Srei in Cambodia way back in 2015, we came upon women cooking the sap down into a much more golden jaggery than I’ve ever seen here, and setting them in small rings fashioned from palm leaves. The strikingly lighter color possibly owes to the use of bleaching chemicals. I’m told that they make rice cakes with fruit pulp, rice, and jaggery, too.

Caryota urens: KITHUL hakuru

The fishtail palm is Thippili pana in Tamil [literally, long pepper panamaram owing to the long pepper-like appearance of its flowers and fruits] is native to Sri Lanka, India, Myanmar and Malaysia.

Although the fishtail palm grows all along India’s Coromandel coast, in the Western Ghats, it is not tapped as fervently as the panamaram–at most just for local, family uses. Otherwise, it is used just ornamentally: I’ve seen it in many a common hotel parking lot. My photographs below are mostly from a tree I found at the Auroville Botanical Garden, profusely showering its flowers at its base, and dotting the leaves of saplings growing below with yellow pollen.

It is in Sri Lanka, however, that the palm acquires a cultural and culinary centrality that mirrors that of the toddy palm in Tamil Nadu’s southern districts, and here Yvonne Everett’s 1995 ethnobotanical study of “The Kithul Palm” in highland Sri Lanka provides the best overviews of the palm’s landscapes and its traditional tapping. I quote and excerpt from that work at some length:

Caryota urens is native to lowland rain forests of tropical Asia including Sri Lanka. The genus Caryota has 27 species found across tropical Asia to the Malay archipelago, Australia, and New Guinea. The name Caryota stems from the Greek karyotes, meaning “nutlike.” This is in reference to the small, hard fruits of the palms. Urens translates as “burning,” and is linked to the irritating, needle-like crystals found on the outer shell of the fruits. A tall, unarmed palm, kitul grows to an average height of 15-20 m and diameter of 30-50 cm. It has a sparse crown of very large bipinnate leaves, often 2-3 meters long and 1-2 meters wide … the leaves are glabrous, dark, green and shiny. The fishtail-like shape of the outward-turned 15 cm long leaflets give the palm its English name [162, 164].

In Sri Lanka kitul palms are common in the mid and low country interior up to 1,500 m. In the lowlands, the palms occur predominantly in the natural forest. In contrast, in the largely deforested mid-elevation highlands palms are managed in small holder forest gardens. These planted gardens are dense stands of uneven- aged, mixed species of perennials surrounding individual family homes … Tree canopies on adjoining plots commonly blend together into neighborhood patches of forest-like vegetation.

This vegetation structure provides a suitable habitat for the 17% of garden trees that are remnants of the native forest flora and are not specifically planted but rather persist as self-seeding or animal dispersed “volunteers”. The kitul, dispersed by civet cats (Civettictis sp.) and only occasionally transplanted, is one of the most common volunteers. [165] […]

Unlike some other sugar palms, kitul is not easy to tap. The process of tapping the sensitive kitul flower and maintaining the flow of sweet sap requires skill and experience. A specialized occupational caste of tappers has emerged as a traditional cottage industry of sugar and alcohol producers in Sri Lanka. In some areas, a unique set of tenure relationships between palm owners and tappers developed. In the past, tapping was a major source of income for many people in the lowlands, particularly in villages bordering the forest. Many tappers traditionally gleaned their toddy from palms inside the forest. […]

In the highlands, a different culture of tapping has emerged. Typically there will be several people in each village known as tappers who tap all of the palms in their neighborhood. Here the palms are found in privately owned forest gardens. In this case, the tree belongs to the landowner. When a palm approaches flowering, the owner notifies a tapper. In general, from the time of the first sweet toddy production, the tapper and the tree’s owner then share the yield equally by alternating days. [166]

The tappers’ skill lies in maximizing the sap flow to the inflorescence while retarding flower extension. When a palm is about to flower, the inflorescence becomes visible in the tree top. About two months after a young inflorescence first emerges, the tapper climbs the palm and carefully removes the outer layers of the sheath or spathe protecting the flowers. As discussed below, tapping activities are typically carried out by men. The tapper ties a forked stick into place under the inflorescence to replace the spathe’s supportive function. Next, he gently cuts and removes the very hard, protective interior spathe layers covering the inflorescence. Tappers say that the number of layers indicates the number of individual flowers to come from the inflorescence, ranging from one to twelve. The tapper makes a roughly 15 cm long, 5 cm wide, and 2 cm deep incision in the side of the flower.

Tappers apply a special “medicine” in this cut to stimulate sap flow. The exact recipe for the medicine is the individual tapper’s secret. In the Welimada area, the ingredients include chilies, pepper, salt, garlic, mustard seed, ginger, cloves, coconut grounds, citrus fruit, and vinegar. Salt, lime, saffron, and lime juice are used in other areas. The ingredients are ground to a pulp, rolled into a ball, wrapped in a banana leaf, and briefly placed in the hot coals of a fire. The tapper applies the resulting paste in the incision on the flower and tightly packs the hole with fluffy fibers from the inside of the palm bark. Tappers report that the paste seals the cut and keeps the area clean; thus, rotting is reduced. The tappers say that the medicine’s function is to “soften” the flowers.

Once he has applied the paste, the tapper gently taps the flower stalk with a special mallet to bruise the area between the stem and the incision. He inserts three needles made from kited, citrus wood, or bamboo on top and on the two sides of the flower between the palm stem and the hole. More of the medicinal paste is spread over this area. Next, he takes strips of cloth and tightly wraps them around the flower base and up over the incision. Agave fiber, kitul, or coconut twine are then wrapped around the cloth. Then he places four 30-40 cm long sticks cut from kitul leaf stalks on each side of the flower, tying them tightly to give the inflorescence support and avoid wind breakage. Beyond the first hole and tied area the tapper cuts a new incision … Again, he applies the medicine in the hole and carefully inserts a needle of citrus, bamboo, or kitul through the flower at the incision point. The hole is tightly sealed with fluffy fiber. To keep the flower stalk from further flowering, the tapper wraps cloth tightly around the inflorescence. Then he cuts off the end of the inflorescence (about 30 cm) and a bit of sap flows out. Three days later the tapper climbs the tree again and cuts a thin slice from the end of the inflorescence. The next day the tapper checks his work. If he finds a small 1/2 cm shoot emerging from the cut, or if the cut is covered with small droplets of sap, the tapper has succeeded. If on the other hand, a longer shoot has emerged, then the treatment has failed and repairs must be undertaken. In the latter case, the tapper takes three needles soaked in salt water and rubbed with coconut oil and inserts them around the second incision. He then waits for three more days in hopes that he will block further growth. If the process is successful, a clay pot covered with wire mesh to keep out insects and squirrels is hung below the end of the inflorescence by tying it with kitul or coconut coir rope to the leaves. The tapper then cuts a thin slice off the end of the inflorescence every evening. He climbs the tree twice daily, in the early morning and in the late afternoon to empty the pot which fills with sweet toddy in the interim.

The quality and quantity of sap flow differs considerably with geographic location, season, site quality, and probably with as yet unstudied genetic variation in the palms. Results based on interviews with tappers and farmers in two climatic regions indicate that palms begin to flower sooner and give higher yields in the Kotmale area than in the Welimada area [16-167].

Kithul sap is boiled down into a syrup or treacle or kithul pani as it’s called locally. Even further boiling produces a jaggery that will set and keep: kithul hakuru. This kithul is the taste of the classic Sri Lankan watalappam and the kiri pani: yogurt (made from buffalo or cow milk), set in earthenware kiri hatti that you see in the accompanying images and drizzled with kithul pani.

Phoenix sylvestris (L). Roxb: KHAJUR GUD

Khajur [or Khejur] gud is the undisputed queen of them all. “Almost all the palm sugar produced in Bengal is made from the wild date (Phoenix sylvestris). In certain parts of the Sunderbans a small amount is produced from the palmyra palm (Borassus flabelliformis),” reports Annett in 1913 (284). He adds: “Date sugar has always been a favorite luxury with the native population… preferred in its own districts to cane sugar” (285). Unlike the rough crudity of the palmyrah palm, matching much more the elegance of the tall fishtail palm, the Khajur tree is a beautiful one. “Khejur bag choto ghar/ eita hoila Jasahar,” goes a saying in Bangladesh, indicating that Jessore of Bangladesh is famous for graceful beauty of Phoenix sylvestris [quoted in Bandhopadhyaya et al. ND: 691]. In truth, the tree grows almost all over India, though it is tapped for sugar primarily in Bengal and becomes there the stuff of emotion and poetry. Ratna-di, as close to a Bengali aunt from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as I ever had, used to make Nolen Gurer Sondesh for us, and would laugh about the special-ness of such sweets: only from that one tree, only in that one season. Its rarity was its wonder. [Pictured above right: a sondesh variety that hides a small portion of pure liquid gur on the inside, brought by the same Kolkata Auntyji from whom I learned to make Gaund ki laddoos]

Indeed, the enthusiasm of Bengalis from both sides of the border for khajur gud is hard to capture without efflorescence. A Bengali riddle reported in Bandhopadhyaya et al. ND: 691 provides some indication of this jaggery: Kanta bhara anga heri sudirgha aakar/ pran aache shire tar kesher sambhar/ jihobar agrete madhu· bindu bindu jhare/ jurai rasona khani pan kari nare: I’m tall with a spiny body/ I have vitality only in my head full of hairs / honey dews fall from the tip of my tongue/ humans beings are satiated by my juice–who am I? And a a saying from Hooghly district in West Bengal [Bandhopadhyaya et al. 692], which Hardgrove perhaps unwittingly echoes in his likening of the palmyrah palm to the Nadar’s milch cow, is quite plain: Kather gai matir dona/ buddhi thake to due khana–there is a wooden milch cow and earthen milk container, if you have any intelligence you will milk and drink!

The season for extracting sap from the Indian sugar date palm is winter: October to January, which is notably before the flowering season which starts in January. [For palmyrah palms it is March to June, and after the emergence of inflorescences.] Trees grow wild or are cultivated, but the date palm takes 10-12 years to produce sap, palmyra palms take 12-15.

Here is Annett again, describing the tapping process [1913: 297-8]:

The tapping is a delicate operation commenced in October and done in several stages. With the heavy claws, all the old leaves are cut off below the crown, and all the leaves from one side of it leaving only a few at the top, the bases of the petioles and the sheaths being carefully removed. Then with the lighter daws [bill hooks] the outer zone of the loose soft tissue is pared off in long slices leaving only a thin covering of it over the sap-supplying inner zone which corresponds to the woody zone in the older wood of all palms. Very great care most be taken not to expose this inner tissue at this stage: otherwise the tree is sure to rot and die, as often happens when the operation is entrusted to inexperienced hands. The experts at this work are called Siulis [Seulis] or Gachis [also a caste nomenclature, not unlike Nadar]. After this first operation-the trees are given about 8 days rest, by which time the fine covering of soft tissue gets a little hardened and begins to crack. The second operation consists in removing this covering, great care being taken not to cut into the inner zone, which is now for the first time simply exposed. Then comes a rest of 12 to 14 days which brings us to the beginning of November. The Gachi as a rule divides his trees into six convenient groups called palas, each containing 50 or 60 trees, the number which he can operate on in one day, 300 to 400 being the total number which one man can manage. Next after midday he cuts two eye-shaped notches 3-4 inches long and about 1 inch deep at the base, their lower sides being straight and converging to a point, below which a split bamboo spout is driven into the tree. About 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon an earthenware pot is suspended under the spout and the juice which trickles down is collected. The pots are removed early next morning, at 6 or 7 A.M., before the sun gets on them, and the juice boiled into sugar. On the following night juice is again collected generally without renewing the cut though the surface is as a rule cleaned with the hard stem of a palm-leaf. A much smaller quantity is generally obtained than on the first night. On the third evening also more juice is, as a rule, collected, but it is only small in amount and of very poor quality. Each night’s juice has a distinctive name given to it. That of the first night is called Jiran (rest), of the second night Dokat (second cut) and of the third night Tekat (third cut). On the fourth and fifth nights no juice is collected. After six days the cut is renewed a little, and for three days juice is again obtained, being given the same names as before. The tapping process goes on in this way throughout the season. The first 2-3 weeks’ supply is very valuable, for the gur produced from it, called Nolen-gur [“new gud”], has a very pleasant smell and is much appreciated by the consumers. It fetches a high price.

Of course it is not to be supposed that in all cases such a regular system of tapping is carried out. Sometimes the trees are cut for 2-3 days in succession, and sometimes they may be cut every fourth day. But such frequent tapping soon destroys the trees.

In other regions where Phoenix sylvestris (L). Roxb grows, fruits sometimes come to local markets. These are small red-yellow dates which turn black as they ripen further, not commercially prized but a on-your-walk-home munching snack that nonetheless dots many a childhood memory of people and place. The demand for patali gur is such that the khajur trees in tapping areas are rarely allowed to fruit, so these can only be found in markets like our own, where they are sold as Echampazham.

Likewise, adulteration with cane sugar in the market for patali gud, as khajur gud is known in its solid form, is widespread, according to some–so it pays to obtain this from a good, trusted source. The taste of a true Bengali sandesh is this jaggery, as is the flavor and color of a classic payesh.

Note: Khajur/ Patali/ Nolen gud is a product of the Indian sugar date palm, also called the silver date palm or the wild sugar date palm. This is Phoenix sylvestris (L). Roxb, NOT Phoenix dactylifera, which is the date palm of origins further West of us, introduced in India possibly by Alexander or the Arabs in the 3rd or 7th c., but which is far more valued for its fruit to be tapped for toddy and sugar. Many online sources confuse the two, including reputed ones like the Locavore.

Cocos nucifera: madda god, suri god

Coconut trees, of all palms, are the ones with the most valuable fruits. Coconut cropping is primary, though the mentions of cocoanut liquor in old texts like Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsa [Canto IV, v. 42] and the Visnudharma Sutra (100-300 CE), suggest that tapping has been an ancient activity for this palm, too. In present times, however, jaggery production is more secondary, generally reserved for older and less-producing trees which become “sap trees,” though these are often the tallest.

Here is Drury’s 1873 account of tapping and jaggery production, much briefer than others as it happens in much the way the palmyra is tapped:

The mode of extracting the toddy is the same as that used in other palms (see Borassus). Spirit distilled from the toddy is called arrack. Good vinegar is also made from it, particularly at Mahe. One hundred gallons of toddy yield 25 of arrack. To procure the sugar or jaggery, the fresh toddy is boiled down over a slow fire, when the syrup is further evaporated to the brown coarse sugar. This jaggery is mixed with chunam for making a strong cement, enabling it to resist great heat and to take a fine polish. The toddy is called Tenna-kulloo, and Narillie in Dukhanie. If taken before sunrise it is very refreshing and delicious. The native doctors recommend it in consumption; and it is said that if regularly taken, it is good for delicate persons suffering from habitual constipation. [Drury 1873: 150]

It is perhaps no surprise that coconut jaggery is today known best in Goa, where it is madda god or suriche/suri god/सुरी गॉड [presumably: su-ruchi, or good tasting gud] is pyramid jaggery because it’s shaped in pyramidal moulds, or Goan jaggery, used by Goan Catholics in recipes where jaggery is required. Goa is after all, is ex-Portuguese Catholic country where brews of coconut wine and fermented cashew apple feni could once be found in most homes, much as rice wine is common in Coorg. Coconut toddy shops abound in Kochi’s backwaters, but it’s unclear if the jaggery as such is so common there, too

Post Script

Cane jaggeries, for their part, deserve separate treatment — if jaggeries like Kerala’s Marayur are any indication, even cane sugar production is a hyperlocal activity, producing varied results from place to place. Marayoor jaggery and Central Travancore jaggery, both of which are cane sugars, have been awarded local GI-tags.

I’ll end with an image of three cane jaggery types: our local “mandai vellam” (for its head-like shape), a cane jaggery from Northern Nigeria called mazarkwaila, sent to me by my very dear friend Ozoz Sokoh of Kitchen Butterfly, and of course Mexico’s piloncillo, from Mi Tienda in Houston, which gets its name from the pylon-shaped moulds used to pour and set. This one is dark (oscuro) not blanco likely because it’s made from purple sugarcane rather than green–here we would say Pongal karumbu because the purple-stalked one is what we use for Pongal-time offerings, as opposed to aalay karumbu or factory cane. The sugar cane farmer in the image below is the one who helped me understand the difference, back in Thanjavur in 2021, by juicing each and making me taste the flavor difference.

SOURCES CONSULTED

1. Raghuvamsa of Kalidasa. 1922. trans. Moreshwar Ramachandra Kale. Bombay: Gopal Narayen & Co.
2. Ahuja, SC, Siddharth Ahuja, and Uma Ahuja. “Coconut – History, Uses, and Folklore.” Asian Agri-History Vol. 18, No. 3, 2014 (221–248).
3. Annett, H.E. 1913. The date sugar industry in Bengal- An investigation into its chemistry and agriculture. Agriculture Research Institute, Pusa, India. Chemical Series II, 6: 281-389.
4. Bandyopadhyay, Monanjali, Kalyan Chakraborti, Arunava Samanta and Apurba Bandyopadhyay. ND. “Date-Sugar-Palm Based Folklore Of Bengal.” International Seminar on “Multidisciplinary Approaches in Angiosperm Systematics
5. Drury, Herber. 1873. The Useful Plants Of India. London: William H. Allen and Co.
6. Everett, Yvonne. 1995. “The Kitul palm, Ethnobotany of Caryota urens in highland Sri Lanka, Journal of Ethnobiology, 15(2), Pg.161-176.
7. Hardgrave, Robert. 1969. The Nadars of Tamilnad: the political culture of a community in change Berkeley: University of California Press

I’d been gutted a day before over the loss of a true peppermint plant that I’d grown from a 1” pinched-off stem and safeguarded for 15 delicate years, to last year’s merciless cyclone and an utterly thoughtless gardener’s overzealous weeding near a patch of turmeric at Sankranti time. Why do you do this? I’d railed to the Gods that watch such wild gardens as our own. Such a little plant, struggling to revive—why did you let it go? Do you even care? Are you really here?

So then maybe it makes sense that coming upon the Senkanthal in glorious bloom on an unexpected visit to a remote spot beyond Irumbai felt like a terrific reassurance. Dense forests and tangled thickets of vigorous vines and bushes full of thorns and textures that catch and trap you—these are Siva’s worlds.

Sambandar in his 7th c. Tevaram verses saw in such bowers Sivan ash-smeared and wearing a chaplet of konrai; so different from the world; the “கனல் ஆடி/kanal aadi,” the dancer in fire–and there in such presence the Malabar glory lily blooming like so many opened cobra hoods. Exactement, because the plant is poisonous, unless you know how to use it medicinally, as all the old vaidyars did. Do you dare stay? They seemed to ask. But I was transfixed by that flower’s cobra gaze. How could I not?

Digital Tevaram, 1st Tirumuṟai, 1:045, trans. V.M. Subramaya Aiyar

கந்தம் கமழ் கொன்றைக் கண்ணிசூடி–Civaṉ wears a chaplet of koṉṟai of spreading fragrance.
கனல் ஆடி–who is the dancer in fire.
வெந்த பொடி நீற்றை விளங்கப்பூசும் விகிர்தனார்–who is different from the world and smears well-burnt power of the sacred ash.
கொந்து அண் பொழிற் சோலை அரவின் தோன்றிக்கோடல் பூத்த அந்தண்பழையனூர் ஆலங்காட்டு எம் அடிகளே–is our deity in Ālankāṭu adjoining cool and beautiful Paḻaiyaṉūr where the gardens and natural jungles in which there are bunches of flowers where the red species of malabar glory lily blossom flowers like the cobras hood

Image: Carrying Sambandar in a palanquin, sculptures from the Thirukadaiyur gopuram

No camera in hand, I begged the husband for a second visit—which took his morning and his great zoom lens and ALL his patience, but I meant it when I said in my floral manifesto for Bruite Magazine that I risk all for such moments. Besides, I had my mother-in-law’s blessing: once, in the great temple of Thiruvarur, we three spotted a magnificent Siva Rishabha bronze in a corner. “I want Him,” I told the husband, leaving it cheekily unclear whether I meant the bronze or the man. “Well, you’ll have to choose!” came the equally cheeky reply: which man? Then Amma, who’d been listening to our exchange, piped in decisively: “You should always choose Him”, she said, pointing to Siva, “because he”—pointing to her son—“will always come back.” How we laughed. How I have held her words near my heart.

And he did take me there, and he did “come back,” and really in the end there was never a choice to be made except to return for the flowers.

The Senkanthal is also kodal, presumably because it is a climber, and karthigaipoo because it blooms in the month of Karthigai [mid-November to mid-December] and into the cooler months of the winter. In Coorg, it is the thok poo, or the “gun flower,” used in the worship of weapons. In Maharashtra, it is agnishika, drawing from the Sanskrit agnimukhi, important in the Gauri and Ganpati poojas. In coastal Odisha, it is langalangalia, with great significance on Gamha Purnima, the birthday of Lord Balaram for which the flower is used in making ropes and garlands to worship the bullocks and cows. And in Sanskrit it is langali, known to Ayurveda practitioners as an upavisha or a poison-containing plant and therefore treated to purify by specific methods prior to use in therapies–wounds, skin healing, poisonous animal bites and the like. [Compiled with thanks to those who commented on this post.]

I believe I speak for both my co-authors when I say that this was perhaps the happiest, even most joyous, piece of writing & creating we ever did. And for me, it was preparation for a visit to Kedarnath and Badrinath in the Garhwal Himalaya, where I met the very daruka trees that create one of the most profound settings for Siva’s dance, rudraksha, and more. That was a yatra, not an ethnobotanical foray–but still, the cycle was complete.

1. Kuśasthalī, or the forest in time

NAture as botanical material, constituted of plants, flowers, leaves, trees, whole gardens or entire forests, plays an abundant role in Hindu narrative and worship traditions—but is rarely the focus of specific scholarly attention. Attending to that gap, this essay seeks Śiva’s garden or, more accurately, a botanical landscape in which to place Śiva, because forests, plants, and flowers can be called upon to present particular views of Śaiva or Śiva-centric cosmology. Śiva takes many colourful forms in Hindu stories: he is the wild and fierce Rudra who glows in fire-reds; the great mountain-dwelling ascetic, white and pure; the blue-throated swallower of poisons; the compassionate and beautiful God bedecked with garlands of golden yellow karnikā. What if botanical stories and insights from Śaiva texts could be gathered—what would gardens grown of those plants look like? And what might these tell of Śaiva ways of knowing and being?

No sooner had we posed the question than we found ourselves in a forest. Methodologically, this was simply the immense and dense thicket of Saiva texts through which we now needed to chart a course. Śaiva literature is comprised of a vast number of works of varying length and complexity, accrued over centuries from different parts of the country, encompassing several lay and initiate traditions, and including devotional expressions as much as doctrinal and practical exegeses. We have tended to rely less on texts expounding Śaiva philosophies and more on literary, devotional, and practice-oriented sources, as it is largely there that engagements with the plant world gain importance. We draw mostly from Purāṇic sources, rich in story and mythology, and on Mantramārga [‘the path of mantras’] sources within initiate traditions, particularly Śaiva Siddhānta [‘the conclusive truth about Śiva’] and (generally South Indian) devotionalism, as each has shaped what we could call ‘everyday Śaivism’ and each contains, as we read it, a garden. We also reference Vedic and other ascetic traditions were pertinent.

The real forests, Śiva’s forests, appear within these texts and story traditions sometimes as a backdrop for a divine pageant, sometimes as though part of the cast therein, sometimes as both. In that last category is Kuśasthalī, an exceptionally heavenly forest, rich in variety and bloom, in which white nāga flowers are studded with bees as though they were black pupils in white eyes, yūthika creepers rise up “fanning flower-laden branches,” trees and creepers are entwined in lovers’ embraces or bent over by the weight of flowers and fruits as though in gracious offering, shining Arjuna trees stand as “excellent men” draped in white silk garments, tilaka and aśoka are a noble gathering “exchanging friendly gifts” [SkP vol 12, 5.5-36]. Each leaf, flower and filament is alive, touching, communing, dancing, rising. The forest reverberates with birdsong. Into this sylvan grove enters Śiva with his kapāla: the ash-smeared ascetic-mendicant with a skull as his eternal begging bowl. He enjoys the trees who bow to him, offer obeisances, and ask Him to be present in this forest for all time. Śiva replies that he will indeed be present but the trees may go anywhere, assume any form, and always yield fruit. So saying, Śiva stands in Kuśasthalī for a thousand years and the forest becomes the Mahākālavaṉa: the great forest beyond time and death.

But then he places the kapāla down, and the three worlds shake. Trembling devas and asuras approach Brahma, who instructs them to find refuge in Śiva in the Mahākālavaṉa. When they approach this splendid forest with shining bowers, however, so certain of Śiva’s presence there—He is nowhere to be seen. Śiva “cannot be seen by one who is not properly initiated,” Brahma reminds them; once they are in constant communion with him, he will “know the proper time” [SkP vol 12, 5.49-72, 6.1-14].

There are other, prior extolments of Śiva as “Lord of forests,” for instance in the Śatarudriya and the Śri Rudram-Nāmakam of the Ṛg and Yajur Vedas respectively, which enumerate the epithets of Rudra lengthily. The Mahākālavaṉa episode stands out for its detailed and lyrical descriptions of how this botanical association came to be and for its placement of Śiva’s forest as beyond time. Time in Śaiva texts is itself neither linear nor historicist, and the mingling and melding of ideas and practices across different schools equally have the effect of collapsing centuries or transcending them. We therefore regard the ‘forest in time’ as constituted by a series of moments, the ‘when’ of which are best known only to Śiva himself.

The Kannada poet of the Vīraśaiva tradition Allama Prabhu offers a riddle of sorts, illuminating this thought:

Were was the mango tree,
where the koilbird?

when were they kin?

Mountain gooseberry
and sea salt:
              when
were they kin?

And when was I
kin to the Lord
of Caves? (trans. Ramanujan 1973: 149)[1]

Spring is when the koel and mango are kin; the bird feasts so eagerly on tender mango blossoms that the poet Kālidāsa imagines that its voice must become clear only after it has done so [Kumārasambhavā, 1.14]. Gooseberries and sea salt become kin in summer pickling jars—and Śiva alone knows the appropriate moment when he should appear, always in the forest for the forest is where Śiva is, to make kin of those who seek him. This essay finds five such landscapes and five such moments of “kinship,” waiting, yearning, searching, propitiating, speaking of and speaking to Śiva. Flowers, leaves, plants, and trees become metaphors, media, and means to invoke and discern his presence or determine the import of his emergence.

[1] ettaNa maamara ettaNa kOgile ettaNiMdetta saMbaaMdhavayyaa?
beTTada nellikaayi samudradoLagaNa uppu ettaNiMdetta saMbaMdhavayyaa?
guhEshvara liMgakkeyU enageyU ettaNiMdetta saMbaMdhavayyaa?

2. Dārukāvana, or the forest of transformations

MAnifesting eternally in Kuśasthalī, Śiva only ever visits Dārukāvana or the forest of pines [Cedrus deodara]. The Himalayan devdaru forest is a “place of passage” (Kramrisch 1981: 292), perhaps also of sport. But of what kind?

[…]

3. Puśpāraṇya, or the forest of prayers

ŚIva in the forest is constantly changing, transforming, leaving the seeker with an unpredictable deity who may assume the terrible form of Bhairavā, the compassionate Natarajā, the unmarked Bhikṣāṭana or the formless mūla liṅga of bamboo shoots and mangrove roots. Which Śiva will seekers find? Alongside such wild forest uncertainties simultaneously grew a Purāṇic and Āgamic garden, in which flowers, fruits, and select botanical offerings become media by which the devoted may commune with Śiva, and invoke his particular forms with greater certainty. Maintaining a flower garden becomes an aspect of kārya, worship using the gross physical.[1] Then from the sylvan witness and symbol of constant transformation, plants as offerings become active agents of invocation—so that via “offerings of leaves, flowers, and in particular karavīra flowers, he [Śiva] becomes the bestower of boons” (SkP vol 1, 5.89).

[…]

[1] kārya, kriya, yoga, gñāna are the four paths held by the Śaiva Siddhāntins in such texts as the Sivaprakāsam and the Śivagñāna Siddhiyār Supakkam of Aruṇanti Śivācāriyar.

4. Bilvākṣaraṇya, or the forest of devotion

VArious everyday Śaiva traditions of worship have adapted botanical myths and practices from the Purāṇas and Āgamas and turned them into defining devotional practices, premised on the notion that certain plants have arisen from Śiva himself. When Mahādeviakka declares to Śiva, “You are the forest,” her words pithily summarize Dakśa in the Vāyupurāṇa as he elegises Śiva in his botanical element: “You are the creeper, the winding plants, the grass, the medicinal herbs; you are the animals, beasts and birds; you are the beginning of substance, activity and attributes; you are the bestower of flowers and fruits” (VP Vol 1, 30.238). In such articulations, plants offer a language of devotionalism beyond ritual forms. Two plants speak best to the variable character of this adoration: rudrākṣa and bilva.

[…]

5. Vistaravaṉa, or the spreading forest

YAkśas are the fierce beings who dwell in the roots of trees, tutelary gods of the natural world—but the yakśaswarūpa is Śiva’s alone, as though to remind that aspects of Rudra endure in the body of a deity now made accessible by devotion. Just as Śiva flouts convention, finding not defilement but the greatest purity in burning grounds, turning ash into the water in which Pāśupata ascetics must bathe in Atimārga traditions—so also does the “wild and incorrigible [devotee], unquenchable in his yearning” (Subramanian 2014: 9) challenge the advantages of wealth and position to turn his body into a temple and offer single leaves and favourite flowers without ritual or ceremony in the Mantramārga. Yet, the procedural conventions put in place by the Āgamas and the dharmaśāstra ideas elaborated by texts of the Śivadharma corpus (cf. Kafle 2021: 240), work in tandem with Purāṇic, folk and bhakti traditions to pull ideas into devotional contexts, creating wide interpretive latitude.

[…]

Glossary of plants

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

1. CM, Chidambara Mahatmyam. Trans. E.A. Sivaraman. Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1993.
2. DT, Digital Tevaram. Trans. V.M.Subramanya Ayyar, 1984. Available online: https://www.ifpindia.org/digitaldb/site/digital_tevaram/
3. DBP, The Devi Bhagavata Purāṇa, trans. Swami Vijñanananda, 1921
4. KĀ, Kāmikāgama. Trans. Dr. S.P. Sabharathnam Sivacharyar. The Himalayan Academy, Hawaii, US, 2020
5. Kumārasambhava of Kalīdāsa, trans. M. R. Kale. Bombay: Standard Publishing House: 1917
6. PS, Pāśupata Sūtra with Panchartha-bhyasa of Kaundinya. Trans. Haripada Chakraborty. Calcutta: Academic Publishers, 1970
7. SkP.T, Skandapurāṇa. Trans. G. V. Tagare. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1992.  
8. SkP, Skandapurāṇa. Trans. J. L. Shastri, G. P. Bhatt, N. A. Deshpande. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2012
9. SP, Śivapurāna. Trans. J. L. Shastri Motilal Banarsidass, 2014
10. Tiruvarutpayan of Umāpati Civācāriyār, trans. J. M. Nallaswami Pillai. Published according to the orders of His Holiness Sri-la-Sri Subramanya Desika Gnanasambanda Paramacharya Swamigal 25th in the Holy Line of Dharmapuram Adhiuam, 1896 [1945]
11. Tirunelveli thala purāṇam of Nellaiappa Pillai/ Nellaiappa Kavirayar (1829). trans. Handelman, Don and Shulman, David. 2004. Siva in the Forest of Pines. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 114-143.
12. VP, Vāyupurāna. Trans. G.V. Tagare, Motilal Banarsidass, 1987

Secondary Sources

1. Aldrich, Michael R. (1977) Tantric Cannabis Use in India, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 9:3, 227-233
2. Davis, Richard H. 2000. Worshipping Śiva in Medieval India: Ritual in an Oscillating Universe. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass
3. Donaldson, Thomas E. 1986. “Bhikṣāṭanamūrti Images from Orissa.” Artibus Asiae 47(1): 51-66.
4. Ganesan, T. 2009. Two Śaiva teachers of the sixteenth century: Nigamajñāna I and his disciple Nigamajñāna II. Pondicherry: Institut Français de Pondichéry
5. Handelman, Don and Shulman, David. 2004. Śiva in the Forest of Pines. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
6. Kramrisch, Stella. 1981. The Presence of Śiva. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
7. Kafle, Niranjan. 2021. “The Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda of the Śivadharma and its network.” In Śivadharmāmṛta: Essays on the Śivadharma and its Network. Ed. Florinda De Simini. Napoli: Unior Press, pp. 233-254.
8. Ramanunan, A.K, trans. 1973. Speaking of Śiva. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
9. Smith, David. 1996. The Dance of Śiva: Religion, art, and poetry in South India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
10. Subramanian, Arundhati. 2014. Eating God: a book of bhakti poetry. New Delhi: Penguin.

For starters, here’s Julia Morton’s summary and a bit of science from her encyclopedic Fruits from Warm Climates (1987):

Tamarind seeds have been used in a limited way as emergency food. They are roasted, soaked to remove the seedcoat, then boiled or fried, or ground to a flour or starch. Roasted seeds are ground and used as a substitute for, or adulterant of, coffee. In Thailand they are sold for this purpose. In the past, the great bulk of seeds available as a by-product of processing tamarinds, has gone to waste. In 1942, two Indian scientists, T. P. Ghose and S. Krishna, announced that the decorticated kernels contained 46 to 48% of a gel-forming substance. Dr. G. R. Savur of the Pectin Manufacturing Company, Bombay, patented a process for the production of a purified product, called “Jellose”, “polyose”, or “pectin”, which has been found superior to fruit pectin in the manufacture of jellies, jams, and marmalades. It can be used in fruit preserving with or without acids and gelatinizes with sugar concentrates even in cold water or milk. It is recommended as a stabilizer in ice cream, mayonnaise and cheese and as an ingredient or agent in a number of pharmaceutical products. [Morton 1987: 115-121]

Indeed, tamarind seeds possess “the characteristic property of forming sugar-acid-jellies” [Bhat 1955: 9]; the polysaccaride jellose present in TKP forms jells with sugar. “Unlike fruit or other sources of pectin,” however, “the seeds comprise nearly 60% of the gel-forming polyose. The gel strength is so high, that it is not suitable for use as such in food industries.” The patented process referred to in Morton’s summary above “relates to a modification in the gel-forming constituent [jellose] of TKP so as to give a product comparable to fruit pectin in its jellying properties and thus provides a cheap substitute for fruit pectins” [Bhat 1955: 9].

The part that’s important for the home cook-forager-eater to understand: unless you are using jellose derived from tamarind seed, beware of the seed’s gelling capabilities. They are indeed terrifically strong. This explains why even the whole seed, well-cooked for several whistles in a pressure cooker after overnight soaking, will still have a rubbery-chewy-sticky mouthfeel. This means also that your vadas will never break apart if you add tamarind seed to them–the seed in ground batter will act like a powerful binder. And the corollary: adding tamarind seed makes for a dense vada, which will need to loosened in one of many ways to make it palatable.

I tried each method, one at a time, and wound up with three vada possibilities, with the last one being my favorite.

Processing the tamarind seed

Extracting the kernel is a process that involves roasting the whole seeds, then pounding them in an ural or “bashing” them with a stone and using a winnow to separate kernels from seed coat. Save the seed coat to dye some fabric, and pick out the kernels. They’ll be hard as nails as they are so don’t try to eat them–you’ll risk a visit to the dentist for a broken tooth.

Instead, soak the kernels overnight. Drain them the next morning (they’ll still be rubbery, but you can pinch them into bits at this stage) and powder in a blender. Yes, they will powder even though they’ve been sitting in a water bath for 12 hours or so. Thirsty little devils.

You could if you want also pressure cook–drain–and then powder. But with this route, you won’t get a dry powder but more of a meal. This stores well enough, refrigerated so it’s an option if you prefer to ensure that your kernels are cooked really well before using them to make vadais.

Three kinds of tamarind seed vadais

1. Embrace the density, make a masala vadai.

The classic masala vadai is a combination of three dals: chana, toor and urad in equal measure (though there are many who will just use chana). These are ground with no/very little water into a rough batter, and onions, green chillies, curry leaves, ginger (all minced) plus jeera, hing and salt added in. To this, I added about 1 cup of ground tamarind seed. To loosen? Well, baking soda. No Indian cook likes this option, but many secretly use it on occasion, just to ensure that all the effort that goes into making vadais isn’t ruined with hard, unpleasurable outcomes.

• 1/2 cup chana dal
• 1/2 cup toor dal
• 1/2 cup urad dal
• 1 small onion, minced
• green chillies to taste, minced
• 1″ginger minced
• a sprig of curry leaves, torn into bits
• 1/2 teaspoon jeera
• generous pinch of hing
• salt to taste
• 1 cup or thereabouts ground tamarind seeds
• 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda (optional)

Soak the dals for an hour or so, until each lentil type can be bitten through. Grind with no water or very very little water into a coarse paste. Add in all the other minced ingredients and spices; mix well. Add the baking soda, if using, just before frying. Shape into patties and fry in hot oil.

2. Break the gelling bonds completely, make a medu vadai.

This method is akin to what happens when you add flour to light, fluffy, whipped egg or egg whites while making some kinds of meringue-based cakes. Urad dal is soaked well and ground until a blob of it floats–there’s no fermentation, but the mucilaginous, hydrophobic nature of the dal itself is what is employed to create fluffiness.

• 1 cup urad dal, without skins–soaked for an hour or so and then ground with minimal water into a fluffy and light batter.
• green chillies to taste, minced
• 1/2 teaspoon crushed black pepper (not powder)
• 1/2 teaspoon jeera
• salt to taste
• 1 cup ground tamarind seed (same proportion as the urad dal kept to soak)

Soak the urad dal for an hour or so, and grind with just enough water to make a smooth batter. The griding process is also a whipping, so the batter incorporates air and becomes light. The test of aready urad batter: a small blob of batter floats on water. To this, we add 1 cup (about the same proportion as dal used) of ground tamarind seed. Some green chillies, some lightly pounded fresh black pepper, some cumin seeds and salt. Mix well, drop in small tablespoon-sized handfuls into hot oil. Enjoy just like that or with a coconut chutney on the side.

3. Loosen things up with chickpeas and jackfruit seeds, make a desi falafel.

I love adding jackfruit seeds to hummus. Chickpeas provide just the right creaminess to complement the jackfruit’s more robust nature, and absorb it perfectly. This vada is a bit of a riff off that idea, but here we’re adding cooked jackfruit seeds and cooked-and-pulverized tamarind seed kernels to merely soaked chickpeas. Grind them all together with garlic, coriander, cumin seeds. Deep fry into little balls — and now you can have them as the are, or stuff pitas with them. Whatever route you pick, make sure you have them piping hot. They’re crunchy and soft and just the most delicious pulled straight out of the fryer.

• Equal proportions, or 1/2 cup each chickpeas (soaked overnight), jackfruit seeds (cooked; see here how to prep them), and ground tamarind seed
• a few cloves of garlic
• green chillies, to taste
• fresh coriander leaves, chopped
• 1-2 spring onions, green tops included, chopped
• 1 teaspoon roasted and powdered jeera
• 1 teaspoon roasted and powdered coriander seeds
• salt to taste
• 2 tablespoons maida or white flour

Soak dry chickpeas overnight or until softened. Prep and cook the jackfruit seeds in a pressure cooker for 1-2 whistles. Drain the water (reserving the cooking liquid), allow to cool, and transfer to a blender jar. Add the soaked chickpeas and all the other ingredients (except flour) one by one pulsing to obtain first a coarse paste and then pulse again to make the paste as smooth as possible. Add very little of the reserved cooking water only if needed to make a thick, smooth batter. Now transfer to a bowl and add the flour. Shape into small balls and fry in hot oil.

Make sure you enjoy these piping hot!

Sources

1. Bhat, S.G. 1955. “Tamarind Seeds—an Indigenous Material” The Bombay Technologist, Vol. 5 (March), pp. 8-11.
2. Morton, Julia F. 1987. “Tamarind.” In: Fruits of warm climates. Brattleboro, VT: Echo Point Books and Media. p. 115–121.

The tamarind tree was quiet. So I climbed it as I would as a child sometimes in search of fruit and sour leaves and looked, up in the canopy and between the branches. But I found still only the same hints on leaves and flowers and tints on the seeds. Where is the rest of it? I asked again.

Still, the tree was silent. I decided to consult the sources instead.

The ~ind in tamarind

The first the Western world heard of tamarind was probably from Marco Polo in the 13th century, who found in the Great kingdom of Gozurat idolators who were “the most desperate pirates in existence, and one of their atrocious practices is this. When they have taken a merchant-vessel they force the merchants to swallow a stuff called Tamarindi mixed in sea-water, which produces a violent purging. This is done in case the merchants, on seeing their danger, should have swallowed their most valuable stones and pearls. And in this way the pirates secure the whole” [Chapter XXVI, “Concerning the Kingdom of Gozurat,” 392]. The episode is recounted nearly all subsequent translations of the Venetian’s voyages. Tamarind entered western imaginaries as a “sorte de laxatif” [a sort of laxative] for pearl and diamond thieves.

Before that, tamarind had been a date on account of its “stones.” Garcia da Orta wrote his 1563 Colloquies that the “Arabic name is Tamarindi, for Tamar, as you know very well, is Tamara, or, as the Castilians call it, Datil, so that Tamarindi means the Tamara of India. This was because the Arabs could find no other name so appropriate, and not because the trees or fruit are alike … The Arabs who trade in this land call them tamaras de India because they have stones, and not because they are like dates” [1895: 422, 426].

“The origin of the name is curious” the Hobson-Johnson Glossary concurs in 1886. “It is Ar. tamar-u’l-Hind, ‘date of India,’ or perhaps rather, in Persian form, tamar-i-Hindī. It is possible that the original name may have been thamar, (‘fruit’) of India, rather than tamar, (‘date’)” [1886: 680].

So the tamarind tree, native to tropical Africa (some say Madagascar), but “discovered” in India would acquire the Latin name Tamarindus indica, making it from here in some sense though it is not, as a violent purgative and a date-like fruit.

But none of them remarked on the tree’s red. They may not have even noticed it.

The ghost in the tamarind tree

Ghosts live in tamarind trees, they say, calling it a superstition. A superstition? asked the vaidya [physician] of the man who proclaimed it so, and asked him to travel to a nearby town to consult another doctor there, for a second opinion, as it were. On the way were tamarind trees, underneath which the man slept each night, and by the time he reached his destination, he needed the doctor for more reasons than one. From where did you come? asked the second vaidya, studying the man’s symptoms, and where did you sleep? When he got the answer: aaah, he exclaimed, and prescribed no medicament. Go home, he said instead, but this time take the road lined with neem and sleep under those trees instead. The man did, and slept in his own bed when he returned, a healthy man again. [Sheetal Bhatt told me this story her father used to tell, one afternoon in Ahmedabad on an autorickshaw ride from somewhere to somewhere else.]

In a time long after the vaidyas taught this nameless man the difference between tamarind and neem, Sir Richard Burton [the explorer Orientalist] discovered for himself the same truth, in the same way. “The natives have a saying that sleeping beneath this “Date of Hind” gives you fever,” he wrote in 1877, “which you cure by sleeping under a Nim-tree (Melin Azedirachta), the lilac of Persia. Once, and but once, to shame them out of this notable superstition, I tried the experiment on my proper person; but, sir, like the prejudice-hating commercial gentleman and his ship Friday, I caught a “chill” in the cool, damp shade, which made me even more credulous upon that point than my informers were” [Burton 1877: 92].

[Note that Burton mis-identifies the neem as Melia azedarach and then incorrectly calls that the “lilac of Persia” [Syringa × persica] which also it is not. Neem is Azadirachta indica; Melia azedarach resembles the neem so much that in Sanskrit it bears its name: mahānimba or parvatanimba as it grows in the hills.]

But neither the vaidya nor Burton remarked on the tree’s red. Perhaps they didn’t notice it either.

I was getting nowhere with the sources. They all led in different directions and not one towards red. I spoke again to the tree, thinking this time to ask permission. I’d like to see where you keep your red. Help me?

The tree still said nothing but I found myself with a handful of seeds.

The kernel in tamarind

Hard as they are to extract, tamarind seeds have their place in rural Indian food which fears not the difficulties of extraction–from the intimidating naattu vadumai or sea almond, the almost wholly unapproachable junglee badam or wild almond [Sterculia foetida] and, indeed, from common tamarind. A family I met here in Pondicherry, migrants from the more rural Bahour, spoke fondly of roasting, soaking, and extracting the “paruppu” or kernel of tamarind to eat. Really, at some point in all our pasts, we did this with everything, from potatoes to jackfruit seeds to any other. It was memorable, it was logical, but it wasn’t easy. Everyone romanticizes rural pasts, but they cannot have been easy ones, and if rural communities are the first to switch away from the laboring life and to easier, more aspirational foods like pizzas–it’s at least partly because in some sense the tamarind kernels were that difficult to extract, and the life that made that extraction necessary and even logical was a tough one.

Bearing that in mind I followed the sepia-toned lead, and went in search of the puliyankottai paruppu, the seed kernel. The proper process would have involved roasting-shelling-soaking in that order, but I tried a shortcut: a long soak and then a long cooking, as we would for any dry bean or grain. The first route is more conventional, and it discards the shells. The second, my shortcut, taught me that the easiest way to extract color was to work with the shells.

Tamarind seeds are just super funny-weird when soaked outright. The seedcoat that you think is so hard, turns soft and almost pulpy, like the fruit itself.

Cooking the soaked fruit doesn’t give you soft, mushy kernels–in fact, it’s near-impossible to get tamarind kernels to soften enough to make for pleasant eating. They do need the “double cooking” of the traditional method of extraction, which is to say that roasting the tamarind kernels is not just about loosening the shell enough to get it off, it’s a first stage of cooking the paruppu. I’ll save the rest of that story for my next post.

But there in the cooking water of the strangely pulpy soaked tamarind seeds was the color red. Beautifully bright and vibrant, and made visible only by accident and a method which did not achieve its intended outcomes (to obtain cooked tamarind kernels!) but found red instead.

There you are then! I exclaimed, as I would to the boys when they were little and had appeared suddenly in hide-and-seek games. Now what shall I do with you?

The red in the seed coat

A length of slub cotton–acquired many years ago with the intention to dye with natural colors, forgotten in a cupboard, recovered thanks to a cleaning spate brought on by the sighting of silverfish–presented itself.

I needed more colorant than my cooking mistake had given me to do justice to that length of slub. Figuring that roasting the seeds would get me both properly extracted kernels and properly separated dyestuff, I went about it the traditional route this time. Here is the process I followed, and what you might do, too, if you ever have an inkling to search out the red of the tamarind tree.

STEP 1. MORDANTING

Weigh your fabric and note its WoF or “weight of fabric.” Mine was approximately 200g). Powder alum or padikaram until you have 12% of the WoF, and measure out 3% soda ash or washing soda [I keep a stock of the latter to make a basic home cleaning powder].

Dissolve each in separate containers first, in a little water. Prep a stainless steel container large enough to accommodate the fabric and allow it to swim around easily, and add some water to that, too.

Now hold the alum solution in one hand and the soda ash solution in another, and pour them both into the large container. The mixture will froth and bubble. Allow the reaction to subside. Then add the fabric here, too, and enough water to submerge. Mix with a stainless steel spoon or dosa thippi. Don’t use wood.

Leave the fabric in this mordant bath for about 3 or 4 hours, or up to overnight. Then remove the fabric and squeeze it until it’s not dripping wet. Set it aside, but do not allow it to dry.

Note that the mordant bath can be re-used, so save it and label it if you intend to do so.

STEP 2: DYE EXTRACTION

1. Roast the tamarind seeds in a cast iron wok on very high heat for about 10-15 minutes, turning them constantly to ensure an even roast. [I had about 3 cups of seeds.] Once the seeds have darkened a shade or two, turn off the heat and allow them to cool in the same pan. They’ll start to pop and crackle as the temperature drops. Listen to them talking!
2. Shell the seeds. Once they’re cooled enough to handle, the easiest method would be to put the seeds in an ural (stone mortar meant for pounding), and pound until the shells are broken, and maybe all the kernels, too! Then use a winnow to separate the materials by weight. If you don’t have an ural, however, as I didn’t either, then you will have to resort to tapping each seed with a pestle–on its side works best, I found–to get the seed coat to pop off.
3. Weigh the seed shells. Not mandatory, but gives you an idea of how much gives you what intensity of dye. [For reference, I had about 2 cups or about 300g of tamarind shells. That’s what I used and it turned out to be quite a lot–I could have used just that to dye the length of a sari.]
4. Boil the shells in sufficient water for about 30 minutes. Then add 1 teaspoon of salt, and 2 more of soda ash and continue boiling for another 30 minutes. [As an experiment, I added a small amount of seed coat+water to an iron kadhai, and dyed a handkerchief sized cloth there. Iron mordants are well-known to dull color, so the result of that was a beige-brown. The added soda ash in this step seems to help make the dye a little more vibrant, red-purple-pink. If you prefer, you can skip the soda ash in this step.]
5. Take the pot off the heat and strain out the dyestuff. If you prefer, however, you can also just add the fabric to the vat with the dyestuff directly–this will result in a blotchier coloring (also nice!) and will allow the tamarind shells to continue to deepen the dye as the fabric soaks.

STEP 3: DYE THE FABRIC

Add the fabric to the dye bath. Mix it well and keep turning it about every once in a while, especially if there’s dyestuff still in there.

Once you are happy with the color, take it out — this could be anywhere from a few hours to overnight. Rinse in cool, fresh water to get rid of any excess dye and sticky dyestuff, and shade-dry.

Enjoy the deep satisfaction of having pulled a hidden and entirely unexpected dusty rose color from something as ordinary as tamarind seed discards such that you can wear it.

Why you secret romantic, you, I said to the tree who’d never said a word; you with dusty rose? But I sat in its shade and with the rustle of its leaves and hundred birds being noisy and placed the cloth on its branches and said: you beautiful thing, thank you.

Sources

1. Burton, Richard F. 1877. Sind Revisited. London: Richard Bentley and Son.
2. Marco Polo and da Pisa Rusticiano. [1298] 1903, 3rd edition. The Travels of Marco Polo: The Complete Yule Cordier Edition. Trans. Sir henry Yale, Ed. Henri Cordier. Volume 2.
3. Morton, J. 1987. “Tamarind.” p. 115–121. In: Fruits of warm climates. Julia F. Morton, Miami, FL.
4. Garcia da Orta. Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (Portuguese: Colóquios dos Simples e Drogas e Coisas Medicinais da Índia). 1895, New Lisbon Edition. Trans. Sir Clements Markham. London: Henry Southeran and Co.  
5. Yule, Henry, Sir. [1886] 1903. Hobson-Jobson: A glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive. New ed. edited by William Crooke, B.A. London: J. Murray. Tamarind entry: 1886: pp. 680-1/ 1903: 894-5.

These cookies are a mark in space-time. On some simple level, they’re just a shortbread sandwich with jam in between–conventionally milk jam or dulce de leche, but I’ve used jackfruit jam instead–rolled a bit in desiccated coconut (usually) and (maybe) dusted with powdered sugar. Not all that different from the Austrian Linzer cookies in shape and form, but texture and sweetness-wise, worlds apart.

Andalucia, alajú, alfajor, Argentina

But alfajores were not always this. Once upon a distant time, they were apparently an idea the Moors brought along with several others to the Iberian peninsula during the time of Al-Andalus, 8th century onwards. I could find no preparation akin in the Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook of the 13th century [trans. Charles Perry], suggesting they were likely a later innovation. The Moors brought a great many confections to Iberia, and the Alfajores of Medina Sidonia are thought to be one such, though they bear little resemblance to the “cookie” that the alfajor would later become in its Latin American life.

Medina Sidonia in Cádiz, southern Spain, has a tradition for confectionery going back several hundred years, some say to the 15th century. Its alfajores are among its best-known confections and have had a GI tag for some time now. These are pastries made with pure bees’ honey, almonds, hazelnuts, flour, breadcrumbs, and spices–shaped into elongated ‘cylinders,’ coated with sugar powder and cinnamon and wrapped like toffees. These, along with amarguillos [little almond+bitter almond cakes] and tortas pardas [also almond cakes filled with cabell d’àngel or a thread-like confit of the fig leaf gourd, Cucurbita ficifolia] represent a sort of prized triumvirate of Asidonense pastry. Note that Cucurbita ficifolia‘s native range is from Bolivia to Peru even though it is sometimes called the “Malabar” squash, so tortas pardas had to be a post-colonial (in that sense) innovation, an outcome of what gets politely called the Columbian exchange.

The recipe being used to this day seems to track back to one recorded by the Spanish philatelist Don Mariano Pardo de Figueroa [who wrote under the nom de plume El Doctor Thebussem] in his 1882 booklet Los Alfajores de Medina Sidonia–which he discovers in an anonymous 1786 pamphlet entitled “Recetario Práctico De Guisados Y Dulces. Medina Sidonia.” So the recipe is at least 240-ish years old [and you can find Mary Ann Boermans’ translation of this into modern weights and measures here].

Many sources present the alfajor as but another word for alajú, probably derived from the Arabic al-hasu [“filled”] though that is now properly a Castillian cake in its own right, made with almonds, breadcrumbs and other ingredients common to the alfajor. But the alajú is sandwiched between wafers, making it in a sense a closer cousin of the turrón-nougat. Whatever the lineages, alfajor and alajú are not identical confections; their interchangeability may in fact be the result of a “semantic confusion,” says the researcher-priest Francisco Gómez Ortín [2009]. The fact that Doctor Thebussem uses the words “alajú” and “alfajor” interchangeably in 1882, he says, allows him to deduce not that they were the same thing, but that alajú must have been much more widespread in Andalucia, though later alfajor would prevail.

And just how they did prevail! I’m not sure how the cylindrical alfajores of Medina Sidonia or any other alfajor version extant at the time became the Latin American sandwich cookie alfajores–or when; many sources say it was as late as the late 19th c. and thanks to a chemist named don Augusto Chammás who started a small confectionary in Buenos Aires. The jam fillings perhaps came into vogue here, because what is dulce de leche if not a milk jam? And so much a part of gastronomical heritage in the Río de la Plata that links Argentina and Uruguay.

Then of course El Libro de Doña Petrona provided in 1934 the recipe that Argentines at least now hold as classic, relying heavily on locally used cornstarch for the cookies’ characteristic softness, color, and crumble. Other regions will have other stories, but it does all go to show that regionalism, the tipicita of a region’s cuisine that we see also expressed in La Cassata Siciliana, is not just a Mediterranean distinction, but something of a global truth. Now there’s an alfajor for every place, the taste of its innovation and its terroir and its colonizations (how else would coconut have become so prominent in dressing the Argentine alfajor?). The home industry got an enormous boost in the 1950s from commercial manufacturing; in the days before the internet, I suppose that’s how things “went viral” and became matters of national economics and pride.

An Afternoon with Ruby

So then, having made these cookies the classic Argentine way with silky-delicious dulce de leche from The Farm in Chennai more than a few times, as my images will attest, I thought why not a Pondicherry version?

I love the fact that the tipicita of at least some Latin American alfajores is the cornstarch in the cookie dough, corn being among the most important starches of that place in the world. I kept that element, and really only swapped out the filling which here is nothing but the equally dulce de leche-like chakka varatti or jackfruit jam a bit modified for this filling, for reasons soon to be clear.

Now, that recipe for chakka varatti went into this absolutely lovely jackfruit cheesecake along with the idea for its use in alfajores–and Ruby Talreja, working as a baker with Marc’s Coffee in Auroville at the time, picked up both and put at least the cheesecake on the menu, with a few minor spice-flavor variations. Kutti cheesecake cups with jackfruit jam on top were there this last Saturday morning, and I imagine will be every jackfruit season.

Ruby and I got together to try out the alfajores with jackfruit jam filling, and almost all the photos in this post are from that afternoon we spent together. She’s trained as a pastry chef and had all the meticulous precision that I neglect in my baking. So, her cookies were absolutely perfect–dough no trouble to roll to a perfect and even thickness, baked to perfection.

But the jam wasn’t quite right. It was fine for cheesecake but much too “wet” for these cookies, which then did not store well at all. It would take me until the next jackfruit season to tackle this problem, which I’ve done now in two ways.

• First I increased the fat content by adding coconut milk and ghee to the jackfruit jam the way it’s done with chakka pradhaman or the “twice-cooked” [because jackfruit is cooked before being cooked again] classic Kerala payasam-like preparation. [Payasams are cooked once only and therefore suitable to be offered as temple naivedyam or ritual offerings. Pradhamans come in as many forms and have their place in the classic Onam Sadhya, but since they typically involve the use of some other ingredient that is cooked first, they’re unsuitable for ritual offering. See Sandhya’s post on this for more.]
• Second, I cooked the mass down a lot further almost to halva-thala-thala, or a jelly set. The result is a thick, brown jam that’s so hard to make look as attractive as that red-rich flowy dulce de leche because it just lacks the same viscosity–so you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that it’s every bit as delicious and then some, especially when you add tiny coconut bits fried in ghee.

The alfajore recipe I followed was Paula Montenegro’s from The Vintage Kitchen, because it was cornstarch heavy and because at least she’s Argentine. It’s not about “authenticity” as much as it is about acknowledging origins. But I then made several modifications to suit our ingredients and temperatures, as the dough became a little too sticky to handle easily.

Alfajor Assembly

Here’re images of the alfajor assembly process–self-evident, really, but also the most fun to photograph, especially to capture the precision of Ruby’s various expert movements. The recipe follows, just after.

Sources

1. Francisco Gómez Ortín. UN CAPÍTULO DE LEXICOLOGÍA GASTRONÓMICA. PRECISIONES DIATÓPICAS SOBRE LAS VOCES ALFAJOR / ALAJÚ. Tonos Digital; NÚMERO 18 – DICIEMBRE 2009.
2. Don Mariano Pardo de Figueroa, El Doctor Thebussem, Los Alfajores de Medina Sidonia, 1882

I was introduced to the Yung Sing Pastry Shop by a friend who would later become my husband’s cousin—she took me on a tour of sights around the University of Toronto, most memorably sneaking me into the stacks at Robarts library with the aid of an old ID card, and then we walked south towards Baldwin and got Yung Sing’s very famous, very cherished tofu buns and ate them while walking all over downtown Toronto. There were others: fried rice buns, vegetable buns, barbecue pork buns, bean paste buns, those terribly guilt-inducing (I mean, who could eat just one?) but deliciously crisp-chewy jian dui or deep fried golden sesame balls, and more. But Chinese food in a bun was what Yung Sing was mostly all about, and whodathunk it? Dim Sum redefined. Dim Sum in a paper bag. It was just brilliant.

When I became a student myself at U of T, I made beelines for Yung Sing. The tofu buns were a buck-seventy; dollar options were many. A whole lunch under $5? For a college student? Gosh yes!

I got to loving their fried rice buns because they held up for a day or two better than the Tofu/veggie ones, and I planned my walks home from classes at U of T accordingly. I always walked, wind, rain or snow, partly to save on subway tokens, partly because the city was just friendly like that, wanting you to walk. And it was a sad day when I got to Yung Sing too late, and they’d run out. They were that popular, so they often did.

I took my boys to the shop in 2007, my younger one still baby-in-a-sling. I’m so glad I did—the pastry shop closed in 2009 “for renovation” and hasn’t opened back since. I’m not the only one who misses the place; many have mourned its loss. But not so many have tried to keep the Yung Sing legacy alive by recreating those buns, so I thought: why not? There is a cookbook, David Ko’s 1982 Yung Sing Dim Sum Recipes (A Chinese Snackbook), apparently self-published (by Ko’s Dim Sum Cooking Centre) but only on reference hold at the Toronto Public Library so felt for a long while up to me and my memory of things and tastes to get them right.

Then I found Sacha Chua, who had posted a recipe for Gai Mei Bao or Chinese Cocktail buns with a coconut filling, and between her notes for dough and the recipe she very kindly sent me from the cookbook–this is about as close to that remembered original as I suppose I’m ever going to get. It doesn’t help much that David Ko does not provide instructions, which aren’t hard to infer from the ingredient list I suppose, but each act of interpretation adds a sliver of extra distance from the imagined “original.” And of course there are ingredient variations: bamboo shoots not being the same here, bean sprouts hard to reproduce, and who knows what “onion flakes” are? And by the way how wet can the filling be to hold up in that dough?

I’ve made these buns four times now, so I think I have them down, and they’re both every bit the original and completely from my Pondicherry kitchen. But they do make me recall vividly that young undergrad walking about that lovely city which nurtured me in that exciting phase of life when all things were yet open and waiting to be learned, and the world was a place of wonder and inspiration. Really in the end perhaps that’s all the taste and texture that matters.

Below are images of the process, which mostly speak for themselves.

The dough after the first rise, punched down, and cut into 16 bits which are now waiting to be filled. The dough bits at this stage always resemble the sacks of laundry we used to prepare to be sent to the dhobi ghaat, while still in [Rishi Valley] school.

Rolling out to a hand-sized round, filling, and pinching the edges into a ruffle to close:

Tuning the stuffed dough ball over and rolling just slightly to make it smooth, allowing to rise a second time, brushing with beaten egg so the baked breads get this lovely golden hue you see below to the right:

And finally the “Choy Bow” recipe from David Ko’s book, kindly provided by Sacha Chua, for all you purists out there who want the authentic original. My recipe follows below, and it’s mostly the same but with veggie and other minor egg modifications plus cup measurements rather than metric, which I find so impossible to follow while working quick-quick in the kitchen.

The correction of two major botanical mis-identifications concern me here: Tamalapatra [Sanskrit] or Tejpatta [Hindi] or Brinji elai [Tamil] are not “bay leaves,” and cassia bark [dalchini in Hindi] is not cinnamon [tvak in Sanskrit]. These count among some of those persistent, annoying confusions that are so sedimented and so confidently written into cookbooks that they feel impossible to root out.

I have to hope for hope, however. Indian cookbooks by even acclaimed authors until recent times called saunf or perunjeeragam [fennel seeds] “aniseed,” leading veteran blogger Anita Tikoo of “A Mad Teaparty” on this thread to remark wryly that “My Kashmiri food must taste like strong mouth freshener to all those following that ‘acclaimed’ cookbook. Just because the Hindi name for the two very different spices happens to have the word “saunf” in it…” But the fact that (1) many know this error and complain about it and (2) that this error doesn’t appear in other more recent and better-vetted books, or that people at least raise questions about the translation of perunjeeragam [as saunf is called in Tamil] into “aniseed”–is heartening. So, I join a chorus of others who’ve been complaining a long time as I am about to now.

Back to the Bay: part of the problem is that we are really dealing with two genuses of the family Lauraceae: Cinnamomum and Laurus. Bay laurel leaves belong to the Laurus genus, while the genus Cinnamomum contains

• tvak (त्वक्) or tvaca (त्वच) or true cinnamon [bark]
• dalchini or cassia [bark], and
• tamalapatra or the Indian Bay Leaf [leaf!]

The first two are barks, the last is the leaf. So maybe it is that tamalapatra gets grouped with other sort-of-similar aromatic leaves of the second genus Laurus, in which true bay leaves belong.

At least some of the problem is one of mis-translation and unnecessary Anglicization. If we had just stuck to using native terms–in which tvak [as native] and dalchini [as coming from near China regions] are specifically distinguished and in which “tamalapatra” had just remained itself, we may never have wound up confusing things at all.

The True Bay

If you grew up reading Asterix comics as I did, you actually know true bay leaves already. Ceasar’s laurel wreath? Made from aromatic bay laurel leaves and fashioned into a chapelet, which are a Mediterranean species of the family Lauraceae, genus Laurus: Laurus nobilis. Fittingly, of course, because the laurel was a symbol of triumph and victory in sport, war and intellectual and artistic endeavors alike, the origin of the idea of the “laureate” and the phrase “resting on one’s laurels.” It also features widely in European architecture, sculpture, and on coats of arms and shields and the like. Long and intimate associations such as these indicate of course, where the plant is natively from.

That’s the bay laurel, but note that there are many substitute species that also go by the folk label “bay”–possibly owing to similarities in leaf morphology or aroma or both, or because “bay” [like pepper] had become its own point of reference:

1. Cinnamomum tamala/Indian bay (but of course)
2. Litsea glaucescens/Mexican bay,
3. Pimenta racemose/West Indian bay,
4. Syzygium polyanthum/Indonesian bay,
5. Magnolia virginiana/Florida bay,
6. Umbellularia californica/Californian Bay

This last, the Californian bay, is the “headache tree” because it causes, well, headaches; other laurels can be toxic and not to be consumed. Just because something is called “bay” doesn’t make it a spice addition to your food.

The True Tamala or the Indian Bay

Cinnamomum tamala is our tamalapatra, tejpatta, brinji elai –if you want to measure it by the “bay” then it’s qualified as the Indian bay leaf. Of the Family Lauraceae, genus Cinnamomum.

Depending on who you consult, tamalapatra has a higher proportion of the volatile eugenol [Rana et al. 2011] or 5-(2-propenyl)-1,3-benzodioxole [Wang et al. 2009] in its leaves than other Cinnamon varieties–so it’s hard to pin down what gives it its subtle signature taste or its insect-repelling properties at a household grain-storage level. Whatever its key volatiles, it’s not to be substituted for or used interchangeably with the true bay, which is of course Laurus nobilis.

C. tamala is from the Himalayan foothills and much more widely used in Northern and North-influenced cuisines than in the south. The Tamil “brinji” is the name for the leaf used to aromatize brinji pulaos–in our homes, these were vegetable preparations made most importantly with small fried pieces of bread which were like gold nuggets to us children to dig for. The word and its use in a dish are both likely indicative of Persian origin [“berenj” is rice in Farsi] coming south via North Indian and Muslim routes.

Of course then there’s C. malabatrum, a wild cinnamon, used to adulterate tamalapatra [Kumar 2013]—because of course botanical confusions are great for wily merchants who rely on the carelessness of their customers to get by. These two species are not easy to distinguish, however, so I wonder often if we know what it is we are using. Knowing sources and trusting growers, is the only way to go.

The point, however, was that “Indian Bay” uses the Bay Laurel as reference point for naming, but it looks different, grows differently, and imparts a different spectrum of near-camphorescent flavors to whatever you choose to add it to. Tejpatta and tamalapatra–these native words associate it more with cinnamon than with anything Mediterranean. For us, then, this is a type of cinnamon leaf, hardly “Bay” at all. We’d do well to keep our own natural associations and stop mis/translating it.

SIDEBAR: here is also Cinnamomum camphora–Camphora officinarum, the source of white, crystalline edible camphor or paccha karpooram [raw camphor] which I know I encountered on “Camphor Avenue” in Kirstenbosch in Cape Town and which we were sure had been planted in our yard by the birds a long-ago-once-upon-a-time-in-Houston, until Michael Allen indicated to me that most European trees and probably American ones were mis-identified as C. Officinarum when they are likely just Cinnamomum parthenoxylon.

The True Cinnamon

The genus Cinnamomum is 250+ species large, many with culinary and commercial value, distributed all over South and East and South East Asia, and Australasia, too. I’m focusing only on a small subset of familiar ones here, known and used in India, and of course here we’re shifting from speaking of aromatic leaves to aromatic barks. Or, I should say, bark in the singular because at some point before the arrival of dalchini from farther East [see below], there was really none other. The Sanskrit [tvak] means just “skin” (or rind or peel) and the Tamil [pattai], itself probably of Sanskrit origin, indicates flatness and could refer to anything from palm leaves to feathers, plates, paper, cloth (hence du-pattai or dupatta), well, aromatic barks (thanks to @algutierlorene for the linguistic insight). The point being that the names seem to point to general qualities, rather than offering clues to specific identification. 

Cinnamomum zeylanicum or C. verum is [the best] Ceylon cinnamon–the stuff which Michael Ondaatje evokes in the sensorium that is his poem, “Cinnamon peeler.” It is native to Sri Lanka, the “cinnamon isle,” as a Dutch captain reported in the early 1600s, “The shores of the island are full of it … and it is the best in all the Orient: when one is down wind of the island, one can still smell cinnamon eight leagues out to
sea” [cited in Braudel 1984: 215]. Notably, the major volatile in this finest stem bark is cinnamaldehyde, and this is in highest percentage in C. verum, making it the truest cinnamon. The major volatile in leaves is eugenol, also present in bark, but that number is on the lower side for C. verum [Liyanage et al., 2017: 274]. Delicate and thin, it rolls easily into quills and is most often sold as such.

Leaves may be used locally as substitutes for tamalapatra, but likely not. In general, tamalapatra are more commonly used in the cuisines of the North. Pattai, barks are more ubiquitous sans the tamalapatra pairing in the cuisines of the South. They appear in just about every sambar powder I’ve ever known–whereas even the name “birinji” for tamalapatra suggests its use came with other, external influences.

Cassia or Chinese Cinnamon

Cinnamomum aromatica or C. cassia, also called Chinese cassia or Chinese cinnamon because it is from southern China! Which is why we, in [northern] India, know it as dalchini—chini meaning Chinese, or of Chinese [or Vietnamese or Indonesian] origin.

Cassia bark is hard, tough, and not nearly as sweet or delicate as true cinnamon [C. verum]. It is also called dalchini tukuda, or dalchini pieces because it barely rolls into quills like true cinnamon. It’s also ‘poor man’s cinnamon’–cheaper by far than the prized, subtle cinnamon from Ceylon, and at times even preferred for its stronger, more obvious tastes, for example in biriyani masalas like this one. But it’s known to be far higher in coumarin content than true cinnamon, and can do damage to livers if consumed in quantity–so it cannot be treated really as a substitute for true cinnamon from a health point of view.

Tamil names when specific are useful: கருவாப்பட்டை/karuvaapattai or “pencil karuva” is the closest we have to a proper shape-type distinction between cinnamon quills and cassia pattai, in the Southern districts of Tamil Nadu (Sumaiya @readingtv tells me). In the Western Ghats, it’s சுருள் பட்டை/surul pattai or pattai surul, distinguished from cassia bark (thanks to Vijaya @thenipookal for this insight). Don’t be confused by the references to இலவங்கப்பட்டை/ Ilavaṅkappaṭṭai out there; that’s clove bark and another confusion of aromatics in the making, stemming (ha!) from the pairing of pattai-kraambu, cinnamon-cloves so common in our cookery. When just the shortened “pattai” becomes a daily use word to stand in for all cinnamons, however, boundaries expand and cassia is easily included.

Likewise, dalchini comes to stand in for tvak [or taj with short “a” sound in Gujarati] in Hindi speaking belts because it is a similar taste profile, because it is cheaper, and because it has been the most available in that Hindi same heartland or even to us here in Tamil country–while Ceylonese cinnamon was long being carted away by the shipload by the Portuguese or the Dutch or whoever else wanted in on the lucrative maritime spice trade. The commonness of cassia and the frequent substitution for true cinnamon owes to that colonial legacy, too. And they return us to the singularity of being just undifferentiated “aromatic bark.”

Sources

Braudel, Fernand. 1984. Civilization and Capitalism: The Perspective of the World Vol III. Trans. Sian Reynolds. London: Collins.

Sunil Kumar KN. Macro-microscopic examination of leaves of Cinnamomum malabatrum (Burm. f.) Blume sold as Tamalapatra. Ayu. 2013 Apr; 34(2):193-9. doi: 10.4103/0974-8520.119677. PMID: 24250130; PMCID: PMC3821250.

Liyanage, Thushari & Madhujith, Terrence & Wijesinghe, K.. (2017). Comparative study on major chemical constituents in volatile oil of true cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum Presl. syn. C. zeylanicum Blum.) and five wild cinnamon species grown in Sri Lanka. Tropical Agricultural Research. 28. 270. 10.4038/tar.v28i3.8231.

Rana VS, Langoljam RD, Verdeguer M, Blázquez MA. Chemical variability in the essential oil of Cinnamomum tamala L. leaves from India. Nat Prod Res. 2012;26(14):1355-7. doi: 10.1080/14786419.2011.599806. Epub 2011 Oct 18. PMID: 22007840.

Wang, Rui, Ruijiang Wang, and Bao Yang. Extraction of essential oils from five cinnamon leaves and identification of their volatile compound compositions, Innovative Food Science & Emerging Technologies, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 289-292. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifset.2008.12.002.

This is a recipe from one of the husband’s very favorite aunts–at whose table and through whose care over the years came not just food but nourishment. Abundances of each, large welcomings and life-long embraces. First grandchild that the husband was, he had many mothers who doted on him and took him as their own. So, when we married in 1995, among the first instructions given to me as a new daughter-in-law was to “Write those recipes down!”–I think not so much because they were inherently special, which they are, but because they held so much that could not ever be satisfactorily, wholly, finally said. Food can be large like that, much larger than words. Like the hot oils of a good tempering, the best carriers of flavor and feeling.

I’ve learned a great deal from the husband’s favorite aunts–directly and obliquely, their presence in my life and in the husband’s affective memory has made me the cook I am. This post about meatballs is one story of just how.

Most folks who chance on this page and my social media profile make one fundamental assumption about me: that I’m vegan, a plant-based eater, or at the very least vegetarian. When they find a chicken soup recipe tucked in here, the response has at times been shock, withdrawal, and sometimes a spit of spite: your happiness depends on killing animals? It’s time to put this matter to bed–though I realize it’s like getting the kids down for as long as they were kids, necessary to do so night after night.

I grew up vegetarian, and in a family that cultivated a strong moral distaste for any other sort of eating. Travel abroad was fraught with anxiety and obsessive label-reading. My more enduring memories of visiting the great monuments of Europe with my parents are interspersed with remembrances of finding meats in prepared foods innocuously labelled “spinach” and going without dinner because it was too late to go out to find anything else. When a KLM flight from Amsterdam to Kano once got routed to Libreville in Gabon because of the Harmattan dust storms that often clouded arial vision in northern Nigeria, we were served fish–because that’s not meat, right?–and were forced to make do with dinner rolls and butter.

I inherited a great many invaluable things from my parents, but these distastes and these anxieties were not prime among them. Then, love opened other doors, shall I say? Chapter Two of growing up was after marriage, when I came into other tales of village life and legendary cooks whose treasured recipes I’ve started documenting here under the “Balareddipalle” tag. And much of that involves meat. Not much caring for the physical sensations that fear brings on, not being fundamentally convinced of the logic of moral restriction or some notion of concocted traditionalism [I mean, there’s no meat-eating proscription in Hinduism, so it cannot be called good or bad by that logic alone]–I was relieved just to be able now to allow myself some curious exploration.

These meatballs are a marker on that journey. I recorded this and a handful of other recipes dutifully from Umatha (and other aunts) in the summer of 1995, and over the years became one of those cooks who would prepare the meat but eat very little of it herself. Being willing to work with all manner of different ingredients opens out worlds, endeared me to the affinal half of my family or at least didn’t set me apart from them–and while that process is of immense importance to me, the eating itself is optional, I’ve found. My own hunger gets satiated at many other points and in many other ways, not just at the dinner table. I remain, for better or worse, vegetarian at heart. Or, in the philosophical spirit of negation so unique to Indic traditions: not vegetarian, not vegan but also not non-vegetarian.

Eating is not what defines me. It is not a political act. Being curious and exploratory and unafraid and open, to people as much as to ingredients–why, that just makes me happy. I think it makes me a decent ethnographer, too.

The recipe recorded here is in fact a simple, nourishing, and very delicious preparation that leaves you with both hearty and versatile [and easily freezable] meatballs and a broth that can be had on its own or used as the base for other soups. A rasam by any other name? Those recovering from bad encounters with COVID-19 were often fed bone broths, which proved to be very restorative–this isn’t one, but it comes close.

We have as a family departed from heavier meat-eating village traditions considerably by simply not consuming much of it at all, but when we found so many butcheries in the Marché de Talensac in Nantes, so close to home, the weather so rainy and cold, each one of us a bit feverish with a kitch-kitch in the throat, I could only think of these meatballs and their light but deeply flavored broth. Eat the world in which you find yourself, they say. So, we did.

Having a kitchen that was not as extensively equipped as our own Indian one was no bar to producing this very Indian recipe, though we did have to leave out the grated coconut–and that I’d not always recommend doing, as the coconut is a bit of a game-changer.

Of course the butcheries at the Marché were quite beef-centered, and if we wanted ground lamb in a place where most folks only ground beef, the nice men said, we’d have to come back just at 1pm when the place would be shutting down and then they’d not mind clearing the machine to grind for us. So we ran over one day and got our half kilo agneau haché and ran back home to get lunch together pronto.

The process is incredibly simple, if a little time-consuming–but only to roll out the meatballs.

Step 1: Assemble ingredients

Step 2: Mix and roll out the balls

Step 3: Boil until the water is halved.

Step 4: Eat

You can fry the meatballs a little if you want, you can conjure a tomato sauce in which to dunk them, you can store some broth for later use–or all those or none of them. All that’s left to do at this stage, is to eat.

There’s not much of a recipe to report, more a bit of fun working with wild and unfamiliar (to us) things. To make sloe gin all you need is to combine sloes, some light gin (like Bombay Sapphire) and a bit of sugar in a bottle and allow that to sit for 2 months until it comes together as a deep red liqueur to which a few drops of added almond essence as said to highlight the flavor contributions of the sloe pits. We added a little sea buckthorn just because we had too little of it to do much else with; hawthorn berries, pine needles and dog rose hips might have gone in there, too. Learning that my French brother-in-law was also known as Jean de la dune, John of the dunes, owing to the location of his family home on the dunes, it was obvious that any infusion made from ingrédients des dunes would have to be known as gin de la dune. Gin of the dunes.

This, really, is how all the first gins were made–specific botanicals infused in a neutral grain alcohol (usually wheat or barley) either by direct steeping for a specific length of time or by vapor-infusing method of distillation. These days, gin can’t be called “gin” unless it’s had some juniper berries in it, but that hasn’t stopped quite many creatives from distilling, with minimal juniper, for example, South Africa’s lovely Inverroche from the unique flora of the Cape Floristic Region–in other words, fynbos. So, a good gin can well be a palette on which to collect and mix up local flavors, in the best ways. And although Vodka is properly not always distilled from wheat or barley, a decent distillate can serve as the base for such extraction [as it does for pure vanilla essence, which I’ve never bought after I started making my own].

But the recipe is hardly the point. The point is the walk through the dunes, the meandering, the wild world opening out as a sensory palette of colors and tastes, and a series of flavor possibilities. What you see here is just one outcome. There might have been a hundred others, each one its own sort of enjoyment.

Nor is the drinking the point here. We have a long and in fact respected history of reviling drink and drinking cultures in India–the lives, problems, habits, personalities that naturally draw from the consumption of spirits. I’m not trying to topple any of that [urbanites with too much spending money are doing all that post haste anyway] but I am here to note that if you don’t have to drink to understand the loveliness of a good vanilla extract, then the same applies in appreciating these flavors extracted in alcohol, too. There are many ways by which to receive the offerings of the natural world. Alcohol is mere medium, the easiest and straightest way really, to keeping and playing with complex flavors.

Finding the Dunes

It’s funny-sad to acknowledge that I live on a coastline and hear all the time from the environmentalists around me about coastal ecosystems and the importance of coastal wetlands as a protective buffer against cyclonic storms–but it took a trip to Picardie in northern France to actually walk the dunes and see first hand the successive bands of their movement inland, and the varied vegetation that characterizes and fixes more-and-more each one. Perhaps there are walks like this to take in Pondicherry, too, or up the coast to Chennai, but I’m yet to find a trailhead amidst all the fishing settlements and “resorts” clamoring for space and effectively stamping themselves over any prior existing natural ecosystem. Some stretches of coastline in this town have been completely destroyed by the building of a port and is now protected by the building of a “seawall” (a bit like in Galveston) and lining the coast next to us with tremendous rocks or cement structures (a bit like I’ve seen in Manila bay). It has taken much doing to get even a small bit of Pondicherry’s old beach back.

There might have been walks like this in Houston, too, or in Galveston, where we caught glimpses of dunes on the Galveston Island State Park and on drives to the Bolivar peninsula, but one got the sense there of dunes and beaches as being human-engineered responses to a rapidly eroding coast that were trying to protect human settlements rather than allowing the formation of whole ecosystems. In short, finding natural, organically formed things in the midst of nature itself has become something of a task in many of the coastlines I have known.

All this felt a bit different in Picardie, where the town is at least seasonal, shut down in the winter when we were there, and just that stasis makes the natural world more obvious, even if just by contrast. We started on the seashore with the coastal dunes, embryonic, shape-shifting, whipped by the wind, grabbed by tides, and hard to pin down.

Dunes blanches (Dunes à Oyats)

On their fringes are the white dunes, Dunes blanches or Dunes a Oyats, where Oyat/Ammophila arenaria grasses whose blades are sharper than the wind is strong and whose roots find deep strongholds beneath the shifting sands–these allow sand to accumulate, and are the first signs of stabilization. It’s also where the Germans positioned their bunkers in World War 2; some still stand with the grasses.

Dunes à Argousiers

After this come the Dunes grises, the grey dunes, pelouses dunaires or “lawn dunes,” stilled by distance from the shore and by the presence of low, matty plants which enrich the soil with humus, and quickly make room for the Dunes Arbustives, the shrub dunes characterized by the abundant presence of thorns: sea buckthorn, blackthorn, hawthorn and more. Their presence is a sign that here animal grazing might begin, and the thorns generally are a protective against that.

In this stretch where everything was almost at person-height, is where we found the most interesting berries, both edible and not. We spent most of our time here.

1. Sea Buckthorn

The common sea buckthorn we realized is a lot like us: it loves the sea and the mountains in equal measure. Hippophae rhamnoides is native to the cold-temperate regions of Europe and Asia, and found abundantly on this stretch of the Picardie coast [as l’Argousier] and equally abundantly in the Himalayas [as chharma], and followed there by Hippophae salicifolia [HS; willow-leaved sea buckthorn] and other sub-species depending on region [turkestanica, tibetana]. Its leaves are used to make teas, and its fruit–well, jams, juices, syrups, though as with a lot of such wild fruit, harvesting the tiny orange fruit from long thorny branches is challenging and the soft, very perishable fruit must be used up nearly at once: a fact which poses all manner of problems for those seeking to profit commercially from the abundance these present in the Himalayas.

2. Poisonberry

Little flashes of red called out from beneath the brush, beautiful bunches of red berries on slender vines that somehow appeared too perfect and too untouched to be anything but dangerous. We weren’t wrong; these turned out to be Solanum dulcamara, the bittersweet nightshade, climbing nightshade, poisonberry. We tasted–gingerly–and found the bitterness first so out we spat them. Had we waited, we might have found their sweetness, too, but it’s a good thing we didn’t because they’re toxic–mildly so, but they are. And apparently a risk for little children who find them exactly at their own eye-levels, and are easily tempted by them in just the ways we were. You’ve got to grant it, poisonberry or no, they’re strikingly beautiful.

3. Dog Roses

Beyond the distinct band of sea buckthorn, we found other thorny but larger shrubs, most of which have become common as hedgerow plants in Britain as much as in these parts. Dog roses were the most recognizable, in this season by their hips, which we collected in handfuls to make teas and jam.

4. Blackthorn. Sloes, Prunelles

Then was a long corridor with thorn thickets on either side, reaching branches laden with blue-black fruit. Prunes, said Shari-Ann, going by taste alone. Prunelles or plosse, the French call them; blackthorn, sloes, say the English, Prunus Spinosa.

In Ireland it’s told that the Lunantishees guard these sacred bushes, and one dare not cut branches down on the day of the blackthorn sprites, nor bring any blossoms indoors. Lucky for us, we had that day (November 11) in Nantes, marked there as in Canada as a WW1 remembrance day.

Prunelles are a globular little drupe “with a bluish bloom,” already shriveling on the branches when we found them, not so nice to eat because they’re tannin-rich and quite astringent, but the star ingredient of sloe gin because their flesh imparts tang and their pits an almondy essence, if left along long enough, making a nice, lightly sweetened liqueur. When picked after the first frost, their astringence is apparently muted, so a “hack” is to freeze them if one picks them too early, to mimic the effects of a first frost.

I did this dutifully, both for reasons of possible taste-enhancement and also because carrying them home with me would be easier if the fruit was frozen rather than slowly fermenting, turning liquid, and/or spoiling in bags and trains and airplanes. I have no real sense that it worked for the taste, but it did get them safely home. It’s not traditional for sloe gin, but I added a handful of very carefully harvested sea buckthorn berries, too. I might have dropped in some pine needles, but I thought their tastes might overwhelm, so let that idea be.

5. Common Hawthorn

In the same area were common hawthorns, one-seed hawthorn, or single-seeded hawthorn, quickthorn (because they grow fast), whitethorn (because their flowers are white), Crataegus monogyna. These are Rosaceae family, so caught our attention for their likeness to rose hips. The berries (well, technically pomes) or haws are edible, used to make jellies, relishes, a haw ketchup, and hawthorn brandy. I might have brought some home with me, but left the branch behind in the rush of things.

These are also common hedgerow plants which create thickets and offer shelter to other thorn-less plants that seek their protection. Whole little plant ecosystems grow around them, as a result. “Mony haws, Mony snows,” say the Scotts, implying that haws in abundance are predictors of a snowy winter.

There’s a great deal of faerie lore associated with the hawthorn in England and Ireland, says Anna Franklin of The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Fairies [2003] fame: “their trysting places are under its shade. When the oak, ash and thorn grow close together it is a favourite haunt of the fairy folk and those solitary hawthorns growing on hills or near wells are markers to the world of the fairies.  Fairies are very protective of hawthorns, and a blooming tree should never be trimmed as it angers them, and always the tree should be trimmed east to west.  It is so potently magical that it is forbidden to bring it indoors except at Beltane.  Falling asleep beneath a hawthorn on May Eve may result in you being spirited away to the Otherworld.” 

6. Wild Privets

Just before the forest starts to emerge are patches of common privets which love the forest edges wherever they grow. This is Ligustrum Vulgare, as striking as poisonberry, but rather more toxic and marked as such, perhaps because they can be mistaken for blackthorn, if one is not paying attention. But as with all things toxic they are not without their medicinal uses: the leaves make mouthwashes for sores, to treat chapped lips and as a wash for skin ailments, and “Chinese privet” has a long history of use in herbal medicine [Source]. The common name “privet” arises from the fact that shrubs can be trimmed easily and grow back leafily and dense green: they’re common as hedgerow plants, used to screen off privy gardens. The Latin name “Ligustrum” makes reference to the supple branches’ use to tie bundles, deriving from the verb lige: to bind, to which Virgil makes reference. The fruits last on the shrubs most of the winter, and are quite beautiful.

Privets are a genus of 50+ species. We found them growing all over from northern France into the Netherlands; their distribution is much wider: through to Northern Africa and many parts of Asia. They thrive in disturbed landscapes, and are listed as invasive plants huge detrimental to forest health in many places beyond the European and Asian continents, including Virginia, Florida, and Texas.

7. Cotoneaster

Cotoneaster: the name is a portmanteau of the Latin cotonea+aster, quince+wild. It is another representative of the Rosaceae family which also includes Hawthorns and of course dog roses, “comprises about 500 species with a Eurasian distribution; the centre of their diversity is in the mountains of China and the Himalayas … The fruits [of Cotoneaster Medikus] are orange to red or black pomes, with one to five seeds, and ripen in September to October. In the autumn, the leaf and fruit colour draws attention, with dark green leaves and bright red fruits giving a showy blend of orange and red, which is a desirable decorative value of Cotoneaster species … a valuable source of plant materials, recommended in the traditional medicine of Iran, Turkey, Mongolia, and Tibet for the treatment of nasal haemorrhage, excessive menstruation, haemorrhoids, cardiovascular disorders, diabetes mellitus, neonatal jaundice, fever, and cough” [Kicel 2020]

8. Spindle berry

Euonymus europaeus, the European spindle tree, or common spindle is so called because of its straighter-than-straight stems, which (when peeled) dry perfectly white, and thus were once used to make spindles, knitting needles, butchers’ skewers and suchlike. It’s a beautiful hedge plant, and when it produces spindle berries in the fall all the more so–they’re hot pink and orange, and make you wonder how it was that plants understood how to produce the most striking and unusual color combinations.

But the berries are toxic! Dried and powdered used to kill lice [Source]–even toxics have their value. Pretty as can be though, especially when the pink berries pop and show off the orange seeds they’re holding.

Dunes boisées (Pinède)

We then come into the pannes dunaires or humid zones, where the forest starts to take shape. In depressions between dunes there may be a pond here and there, locally called a pan. These are the dune wetlands, a combination of small puddles and wooded areas of forest. Goats watched us with great attention and caution, from very safe distances.

9. Black pines

In this case the forest is characterized by the plantation of Laricio pines: Pinus nigra, owing to the dark grey-toned color of its bark, the Austrian pines. These were planted here in the wake of WW2, mainly to help hold down the dunes and are noted as a useful tree for just this purpose.

Back from the wild

Beyond the pine dunes, are other worlds entirely. It’s where our walk came to an end; home was just beyond. Of course what I’ve presented here as a straight line from shore inland wasn’t quite as straight as all that–you sometimes wander through a patch of forest before finding the shrub and thorn dunes again. But the forest marks the start of some other landscape, less wild and more farmed (with sugarbeets that are either for sugar or livestock feed or both) and homestead-like.

10. Common Snowberry

Most of the plants growing on the dunes are native to this region, growing wild here, maybe extending to Africa and Asia, maybe becoming invasive in the Americas. Then there’s the common snowberry, Symphoricarpos albus: Symphori+carpos, borne together or clustered fruits; albus is white. They’re also called Waxberries, White Coralberries. These belong to the honeysuckle/Caprifoliaceae family, with 15 species, most of which are native to North and Central America (one’s from western China) and have long been naturalized in Britain, and clearly across the Channel, too, in France. Of all the colored berries we saw, however, nobody felt like eating these. Was it the color or the sense of their being pretty but essentially inedible? I’m not sure, but turned out that was a good call–they’re toxic to humans.

These berries greeted us on arrival in Fort Mahon-Plage: they made up the hedgerow, these drupe-like, a-bit-squooshy, perfectly white berries that love open forests. They were the first things we saw and the last when we left it all behind.

PS: Sea Sage

Atriplex portulacoides or sea purslane doesn’t quite belong on this walk through the dunes as it’s a of the goosefoot family we found on something of a detour that took us to the salt marshes–an estuarine landscape. I can’t imagine leaving it out, however, even though it’s not dune vegetation, if only because it’s delicious. The plant’s leaves are very sage-like, the same color-shape-texture, almost a succulent, salty as the sea and favored by the local sheep, who then supply humans an equally tasty mutton.

Being rather done with meat-eating, however, we brought some home, fried it in browned butter with garlic, spread it liberally over red rajma beans–and wished I’d brought home with me a whole lot more. I don’t have an image of that to share, you’ll have to imagine it, but it sure did take us back to the Somme, Picardie, and that beautiful stretch of northern France that had fed us so richly.

Sources Consulted

Kicel, Agnieszka. 2020. “An Overview of the Genus Cotoneaster (Rosaceae): Phytochemistry, Biological Activity, and Toxicology” Antioxidants 9, no. 10: 1002. https://doi.org/10.3390/antiox9101002

Vedel, Helge and Johan Lange. 1962. Trees and Bushes in Wood and Hedgerow. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.

Poets celebrate sweet briars with leaves with the glands on their undersurfaces and edges that carried scents of green apple and grape, and wrote of “canker blooms” in the same lush hedges in which grew eglantine–all beauty and no truth, Shakespeare opined in Sonnet 54:

The canker blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumèd tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer’s breath their maskèd buds discloses;
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwooed and unrespected fade,
Die to themselves …

Kinder thoughts perhaps came from “Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200—1280), a Dominican friar and plant hunter who became bishop of Regensburg and an early authority on soil fertility,” who might have authored a riddle which, if not only about the dog rose, at least acknowledged it:

“On a summer’s day, in sultry weather
Five Brethren were born together.
Two had beards and two had none
And the other had but half a one.“
“The Five Brethren,” trans. Edward A. Bowles, cited in [Bernhardt 1999: 13]

What am I?

I am the 5 sepals of the dog rose, two with whiskered edges, two without [“two had beards and two had none”], and the 5th with one whiskery and one smooth edge.

“Many versions of this riddle are found in Latin, English, and German,” Peter Bernhardt tells us. “It’s older than Europe’s first printing press.” At the Hildesheim Cathedral in Germany, it’s the “thousand year rose”: Tausendjähriger Rosenstock, as the rose bush that grows on the Church’s apse is thought to be as old as its name says.

The root of the dog rose was, it’s also told, “in classical times, thought to cure the bite of a mad dog” [Knowles 2005: 302]. The witches briar, it was, rose sauvage, the French say églantine but really it’s not; the leaves have no fragrance and the pale pink-to-white flowers (I gather) just a light one.

If there is ambivalence in all this, not so in the poems of Robert Burns: “O my Luve’s like a red, red rose, / That’s newly sprung in June”–and Colin Will of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is convinced that Burns cannot have been referring in 1794 to the red rose cultivars introduced from China some years later [1798 at the earliest], but only to the dog rose’s vivid red buds [which lighten to pink-whites as the flowers bloom and age] abundant in Ayrshire hedgerows. A commemorative stamp issued in 1996 makes the specific botanical connection clear; see the image above (bottom right).

Getting to know the dog rose

Properly, Dog roses are 20–30 species and subspecies forming the Caninae section of the genus Rosa, with varying shapes and fragrances and colors, native to Northern and Central Europe, parts of western Asia, and North Africa. Elgantines [Rosa rubiginosa L.] are just a more sought-after variety–which may also explain the “red red” of Burns’ famous line and the fact that eglantines and dog roses are often confused with one-another–though they have famously become among the worst weeds in New South Wales, where they were introduced at the end of the 19th century as ornamentals.

These are deciduous shrubs, growing in dry woodland margins, disturbed areas like roadsides, on moist north-facing slopes as on dry dunes, and as high up as 2800m on Israel’s Mount Hermon. Dog roses will grow to heights of 1-3m or taller if given support. Its thorns are hooked: a climbing aid. Its hips are characteristically oval, elongated, and a deep red-orange. Along with the far more desired (and often confused) eglantines, dog roses act as invasives, colonising even, but only “cemetery fences, hedgerows bordering plowed land, and roadsides” [Bernhardt 1999: 218]. They appear to fertilize themselves, having not much need for companionship. “Charles Darwin was right when he noted that nature abhors continual self-fertilization,” Bernhardt remarks wryly, “We’ve wiped out plenty of plant species through greed and pure ignorance, but I suspect we will always have dog roses” [1999: 219-220].

Down to the hips!

Sepals, petals, roots, hedgerows–but who’s talking about the dogrose hips?

I didn’t myself come at a time when any roses were blooming, but the hips seemed to me every bit as alluring as any blowsy blossom, and perfectly attuned to the fall and coming Christmas season, quite late-season berry-like in their own ways.

It was November and rose hips had set plentifully everywhere, with often very distinct colors, shapes, and personalities. Here are several I found growing around Roomolenstraat in Amsterdam, though I have not expended the effort to try to work backwards, as I did with the dog rose, from hips to botanical identification.

Confiture et thé des dunes

I found the dog rose hips you see in this post as a dune plant, at the edge of the Dunes Boisées or the Pine dunes, alongside “thorn thickets” where blackthorn, hawthorn, sea buckthorn and maybe other similar plant markers of the Dunes Arbustives, the shrub dunes, proliferate. Going only by their sheer, striking beauty and the knowledge that rose hips are generally vitamin C power houses–though the commemorative stamp above is clear indication of a long history of medical uses not limited to just cold and influenza treatments–we collected enough to make a small jam and a few batches of warming tea.

The process is exactly as I followed for the Arbutus berry jam: boil the hips, strain out the pulp, add sugar, boil till a small amount mounds.

Add some hot water to the about-to-be-discarded rose hips, and strain out what will by then be a thinner extract. Add a little honey and an extra spoon of the jam maybe, and that’s a tea.

The easiest foraging-to-table ever.

Sources

• Bernhardt, Peter. 1999. The Rose’s Kiss: A natural history of flowers. Covelo, CA: Shearwater Books
• Elizabeth Knowles (2005). “Dog”. The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press
• Vedel, Helge and Johann Lange, 1958. Trees and bushes in wood and hedgerow. London: Methuen. p. 78