To start with, there was tamarind.
Initially carried to the subcontinent from Africa by merchants, its identify alone is emblematic of its deep roots in India—drawn from tamar-i-hind (“the fruit of India”) and so-called by early Arab merchants presumably “due to the brown fruit that resembled dates,” write Harini Nagendra and Seema Mundoli of their ebook Cities and Canopies: Trees In Indian Cities. Virtually as shortly because it arrived, tamarind grew to become intimately and irrevocably tangled within the nation’s delicacies.
Scroll all the best way again to the Sanskrit Brahma Samhita scriptures of 1,200-200 BCE and also you’ll glimpse mentions of the tamarind tree. Hopscotch forward a couple of centuries into the Widespread Period, and Indian meals historian Okay. T. Achaya notes that rice wearing tamarind had already change into an everyday dish within the southern components of the nation. Dip into the 15th century recipes of the Ni’matnama—a cookbook of Ghiyath Shahi, Sultan of Mandu (now Madhya Pradesh), and his son, Nasir Shah—and one entry particularly intrigues: a royal recipe for rice and meat spiked with nuts which have been barbed by a dunk in tamarind syrup. Mughal emperors, who reigned over swathes of northern and central India from 1526 to 1858, favored the tree for its dense shade and planted many to supply weary vacationers with a nice place beneath which to stretch out.
This love for tamarind prolonged even to guests to the nation. The Portuguese doctor and herbalist Garcia de Orta, who lived and labored in Goa (a Portuguese territory on the time), printed a treatise in 1563, Colloquies on the Simples & Drugs of India, which yields a complete effusive chapter on the plant, noting, “I consider that tamarind is an excellent digestive and purgative, very nice to the style.” In 1878, Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert—a British colonel stationed in (erstwhile) Madras who would later return to London to begin a profitable culinary faculty—penned the verbosely titled Treatise in Thirty Chapters on Reformed Cookery for Anglo-Indian Exiles Based Upon Modern English and Continental Principles with Thirty Menus For Little Dinners Worked Out in Detail. Within the ebook, he praises the locally-made tamarind chutney and goes on to supply a recipe for a tamarind preserve—“pound collectively one table-spoonful of tamarind pulp and one in all inexperienced ginger, season it with salt, a tea-spoonful of minced inexperienced chilies, and one in all mustard seeds roasted in butter; combine totally and serve.” The British grew to become acolytes of the fruit in surprising methods, too; their iconic brown sauces, HP and Worcestershire, are each fed by it.
So obdurately has the plant fixed itself into India’s culinary canon that Achaya notes in his Indian Meals: A Historic Companion that the Tamil phrase for tamarind has change into the final phrase for bitter within the language: puli.
So obdurately has the plant fixed itself into India’s culinary canon that Achaya notes in his Indian Food: A Historical Companion that the Tamil phrase for tamarind has change into the final phrase for bitter within the language: puli. Unsurprisingly, India is now the biggest producer of tamarind on this planet.
Even at present, each a part of the tree is valued. Shucking off its brittle carapace reveals seeds caped with a sour-sweet sticky pulp, generally eaten as is; generally chunks are divested of their fibers and seeds, softened in scorching water, then sedulously mashed and strained. The leaves are remodeled into chutneys, chopped into chapati dough, and added to sambar. “Mangaloreans actually have a conventional recipe for roasted tamarind seeds (pulinkote), eaten after eradicating the laborious coat,” write Nagendra and Mundoli. “Watch out in case you do this at house—this requires sturdy enamel and you might crack yours if you’re not cautious.” (For many who would slightly not harm a molar or dedicate hours to prep, ready-made pastes, powders, and concentrates are additionally simply present in shops.)
However maybe essentially the most quotidian ingredient is the pulpy a part of the fruit. Tamarind and date chutney kind the center of most chaat dishes—pani puri, bhel, ragda pattice, aloo tikki and mashlamuri. In Eating India: Exploring a Nation’s Cuisine, author and meals historian Chitrita Banerji remembers making a detour along with her pals on the best way house from faculty to frequent two street-food purveyors. “One served the quintessentially Bengali snack, mashlamuri. Puffed rice (muri) was expertly tossed up with finely chopped onion and inexperienced chillies, roasted brown chickpeas, tiny items of coconut, mustard oil, salt and a swirl of skinny tamarind paste. The person had an uncanny sense of proportion and knew precisely how a lot to make for 4 or 5 – 6 prospects. As soon as the blending was achieved to his satisfaction, he poured out the mashla-muri into paper cones-filling every proper to the brim-and handed them to us. We resumed our stroll, munching fortunately, eyes watering from the chillies, noses quivering with the sharpness of the mustard oil, tongues shivering from the depth of tamarind.”
Maharashtrian pantries give satisfaction of place to tamarind (chinch) and jaggery, spooning them into dals such because the chinch-gulachi amti (tamarind and jaggery dal). In Pangat, Saee Koranne-Khandekar’s cookbook in regards to the flavors of Maharashtra, she writes that the fruit is used to steadiness the “flavors and mouthfeel of itchy meals comparable to colocasia and yam.” Typically, it’s sunk considerably invisibly into the Parsi dhansak dal, affording a mellow frisson of brightness, slightly than an entire conquest of the dish.
Its boisterousness scythes via South Indian dishes comparable to sambar, rasam, Pondicherry-style fish curry and Mangalorean pork curry. Archana Pidathala, in her cookbook Five Morsels of Love, speaks to how integral even a dip of tamarind is to the delicacies of Andhra Pradesh, likening it to having salt within the pantry, “Each morning Ammama would soak a big, lime-sized ball of tamarind in heat water, earlier than sitting all the way down to get pleasure from her tumbler of South Indian filter espresso. This was her each day routine, even earlier than the menu for the day was determined,” she writes.
Its extra freewheeling iterations have discovered their manner into Mumbai eating places comparable to Bombay Canteen, which attire crisp-fried colocasia and inexperienced radish pods with tamarind and yogurt, and into cookbooks comparable to Nik Sharma’s current The Flavor Equation, which elevates a plain tomato soup with tamarind, chile powder, sugar, and peppercorns, and suggests serving a tamarind chutney over recent or grilled fruit served with sweetened crème fraîche for dessert. At house, I usually lend brio to my salads with a slick of tamarind chutney—this, particularly for a sallow mung bean, tomato and cucumber salad, with a crumble of peanuts crisp from the pan. That is extra snack than supper although, so for one thing extra filling, the chutney additionally works nicely when painted over grilled, spiced rooster as a glaze. You would possibly even commerce the poultry for greens; its chew will counter the blandness of stir-fried carrots and pumpkin. Something actually, that begs extra forthright flavoring or perhaps a light shiver of bitter.
