Wild Side of Cherry KARONDA
India’s summer bounty brings with it the astringently delicious
karonda, a fruit that’s ripe for the pickling
Years ago, my father loved WIT
jams — the strawberry jam, made with Mahabaleshwar fruits, was his
favourite, but he also liked the carvandah jelly. It was dark purple-red
with a smooth texture, with none of the fruit chunks of the jams. It tasted
tangy sweet, with a faintly burned, bitter note that made it strangely
attractive. The name added to the mystery because carvandah didn’t seem to
be a fruit easily found — in fact I never encountered it anywhere other
than WIT.
Recently I called WIT about carvandah jelly. I
hadn’t seen it in shops for a while and I wondered if I could get it
directly from them? “Sorry, we stopped making it,” the lady at the other
end said. It had become too hard to get a regular supply of the fruit, she
said. Perhaps the problem was also that people are becoming increasingly
disinclined to try traditional Indian foods, even as they snap up highly
priced products from abroad. The space for WIT’s humbler local products is
vanishing, and carvandah may have become the first casualty.
Pickle Pick
I was puzzled though by why the fruit was hard to get. I had figured
out by now that carvandah was the same as karonda, the tart green berries
that appear as summer sets in. They are sold on the pavements by old ladies
with baskets full of similarly foraged seasonal foods like tamarind, amla,
carambola and jamun. In Delhi,
I had also found pickle made from the same green karonda. It seems to be
more of a North Indian taste, though even there I had to go into the depths
of Old Delhi’s
Khari Baoli market to find it, another sign perhaps that karonda is losing
out to other pickles.
But one of those old ladies confirmed what WIT had
said when I asked if she’d be getting the ripe fruit. No, she didn’t get
that, she said dismissively, and suddenly I realised why. The green fruit
is hard and stays well once picked, but the ripe fruit won’t, so it is a losing
proposition.
I hope it doesn’t vanish though because karonda is
an old Indian taste. Carissa Carandas, or Carissa Congesta as it is
sometimes called, is native to the subcontinent and able to grow on
some of our least forgiving
soils. Karonda takes
tough conditions and prospers, producing a thickly growing shrub that
explodes at regular intervals through the year with starbursts of
pinkishwhite flowers. It shows its toughness too in its thorns that make it
hard to get the fruit without sacrificing some blood or skin. Karonda has a
very high concentration of iron, which along with high Vitamin C levels
makes it a very healthy fruit.
Thorny Issues
Karonda’s thorns, in fact, have been rather more of a selling point
than the fruit. They make it an ideal plant for hedges, growing rapidly,
densely and needing little attention. The British made karonda a key
element in one of their most improbable feats in India — the creation of the
Great Customs Hedge. This was a living barrier of thorny shrubs that was
planted to prevent the smuggling of salt into the regions controlled by the
British. As Gandhi would later note, the salt tax was important for the
British, and they took extraordinary steps to secure it.
The history of the hedge was almost forgotten until
British writer Roy Moxham unearthed it from old documents in the India
Office in London.
For almost 50 years the
British planted and maintained a
hedge over 2,500 miles long,
from the foothills of the Himalayas
down to Orissa, an improbable feat that Moxham detailed in his book The
Great Hedge of India. One of the reports he found details the thorny shrubs
used: “the babool (acacia catecha), the Indian plum (zizyphues jujube), the
carounda (carissa curonda), the prickly pear (opuntia, three species), and
the thuer (euphorbia, several species).”
The hedge spread these plants efficiently, and their fruit would have got
used even if that was not the reason for their planting. Children would
have been the first consumers of the attractive berries, but the British,
with their love of jams and preserves, also realised their value. In Indian
Cookery General for Young House-keepers, a book whose author is given just
as An Anglo-Indian (later editions added her name, Mrs J Bartley), there is
a recipe for ‘Kurwunder Jelly’. It is simply made by crushing the berries
to extract the juice and then cooking it with sugar. Nothing else was
needed because the berries have good levels of pectin, which helps jellies
set firm.
Jam Session
Another use for the berries probably pioneered by the British, is the
one form of karonda that most of us must have eaten without realising.
These are the so-called glacé cherries, the hard candied ones used in fruit
cakes. In India
these are often made with karonda, which is sometimes called ‘wild cherry’
by the manufacturers, to make it more acceptable to cake-makers.
I have not been able to find out if these
manufacturers depend on wild or cultivated sources for their supplies, but
I would recommend their tactic to WIT if supplies can be found. If
carvandah jelly sounds too old-fashioned or weird for consumers, then
Indian wild cherry jam might just be the way to get people to buy while
ensuring that the taste of ripe karonda survives.
:: Vikram Doctor SET120617
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