#indiancookbook

[harvardfineartslib]

October is National Cookbook Month. This is a cover of Parsi-Gujarati cookbook from India. On this cover, a Parsi woman in traditional dress is cooking on a primus stove. By the way, it’s snowing here in Cambridge, Massachusetts this morning! We’re already thinking about lunch now.  Something hot and good to keep our body warm and our spirits up. What is she cooking? 

Cover of Parsi-Gujarati cookbook Indian 1899-1999 HOLLIS number: 8001252407

[resiliencethinker]

Banana blog

The tribal connection to this banana blog

After a project visit to some tribal villages in Odisha, India, it levitated that everything that nature has to offer is precious. Forest dependent communities have done it for generations. They need to make the best use of what is available and use it wisely for it to be available in the future. Are they succeeding at it? That is a quest to be taken up by researchers. 

The purple flower

Our garden has a banana tree that my mum planted last year. It now bears fruit. I saw a beautiful, purple flower hanging from it. I had heard of banana flowers as food. But nothing that had ever been cooked at home (at least in my presence) or something that I had eaten outside. Until today!

The flower was huge and it was getting bigger everyday. “If I don’t cook this now, it will fall to the ground.” Off I went to the YouTube world to look for recipes. Before that I also looked for how to cut the flower from the banana plant. Yes, it is a plant and not a tree. 

I also read that it was wise to cut off a second flower hanging from a bunch of bananas so that the plant does not have to invest energy in fruiting it, having little left to sweeten the existing bananas.

Opening the flower

After a few videos and reading online, and 2.5 hours later I was ready to cook the banana flower. I had never actually interacted with something like this before. Opening the flower requires immense patience. 

In this banana blog I will share with you how to open and cook the flower. A large flower can serve upto 4 people. 

Oil your hands and finger tips. The sticky liquid from the flower can create a tough layer otherwise. 

Get rid of the first couple of layers. You may want to save the large petals as a serving/eating bowl. You want to make sure you are picking succulent and softer florets. So you take the florets from inner layers. 

Open a single floret (see illustration). Remove the stamen. Remove the shortest translucent petal of the floret (labelled something). And the rest of it should be edible. Repeat the process all the way for each floret and keep unrolling the flower till you stop seeing distinctive florets. You will be left with a soft bulbous inner flower whose petals are tightly snug to it. It will be a pale yellow. Chop it up small. Chop the cleaned florets up in small pieces as well and soak everything in cold water. 

Put this to boil by adding some salt. 25 minutes on a pot/4 whistles on a cooker.

Other ingredients

Don’t worry about exact quantities. Put more of stuff that you like! I got mine from combinations of Bengali and Maharashtrian recipes I believe. 

2 large onions diced 1 tomato chopped 1 small bowl/200 gm moong dal

In a shallow pan and some oil and fry the moong dal for 5 minutes while stirring. Add enough water and some salt to immerse completely. Cover with a lid and let it boil for 10-15 minutes. You are aiming for cooked dal enough to dig your teeth into. If you like it softer and water boil for a longer time and add more water.

Pound paste: 10 garlic cloves 1 large green chilli  1 tiny piece of ginger (size of a single garlic clove)

For the tadka: 2 large spoons of cooking oil Cumin seeds Mustard seeds Kadhi patta or curry leaves (lots)  Add the pound paste after the above is cooked, then add onions until cooked. Add chopped tomato.

Then add: Corriander powder Turmeric powder Red chilli powder Salt Add moong dal to all of this and mix. You have yourself the tastiest dry kind of dal prepared.

Hello banana flower

By this time you may have forgotten a little bit about the boiled banana flower (or not, since that took some effort to get through). If you had not, by this time expect yourself to have drained all the water. You have also surely tried to bite into the florets with and without boiling. If they are extremely bitter I’d say it’s okay. Eventually when it is mixed with the rest of the stuff the taste grows on you. It’s something you harvested or at least unpetaled. It all begins to taste really sweet with that thought. Mix in the chopped banana petals to your dal and add water and salt according to preference and boil a little more. 

Serve in a petal and gorge with roti or rice! 

This was my banana blog. It took me all of this to get started with work. Harvesting and cooking is one of the most inspirational things for me!