Aam Achaar Party
The mango pickle is a warm
childhood memory, a handed-down recipe, a tarted-up adventure, but its avatars
are many -from chhundo to avakkai
It's not usual for poets to
write paeans to pickles, but you would have to agree that the mango pickle,
with its tart flavour and heady aroma, deserves that extra bit of praise. In
fact, scholar KT Achaya in his book, Indian Food: A Historical Companion, mentions
a couple of lines written by Annaji in Soundara Vilasa, about a domestic meal
way back in AD 1600. “There was mixed rice, kattogara and kalasogara; a sweet
payasam... a pickle of tender mangoes, the stalks of which had not even lost
their fresh green colour,“ Annaji writes in Kannada. Over centuries, the mango
pickle has evolved in households across the country, with each region adding
its own special touch to the preparation -from the marma lade-like chhundo in
Gujarat to the fiery avakkai of Andhra.
The very mention of aam ka
achaar triggers a physical response -lips puck ering at the recall of brine and
teeth tee tering on tanginess -but also a plethora of memories: of courtyards
filled with a gaggle of women, exchanging gossip and news over heaps of raw
mangoes, of running across the terrace as a child and slyly picking up a pale
yellow slice, left out to dry. “All our memories of train journeys and school
lunchboxes are redolent of aam ka achaar, duly stained with turmeric and
spice-infused oil,“ writes Sangeeta Khanna in her popular blog, Banaras ka
Khana.
It is no wonder that when
Rushina Munshaw Ghildiyal , an author, consult ant and founder of the APB Cook
Studio in Mumbai, organised an Aam Achaar Day on April 22 -the first in a
series of Indian food observance days that she has initiated to celebrate
seasonal pro duce and timeless dishes -it became hugely popular on social
media. When Ghildiyal did a hashtag assessment, she found out that
#AamAchaarDay had reached out to 4,75,000 people on Twit ter and had got 8 lakh
impressions on Facebook. A Facebook Live video of half-a-dozen food bloggers
and home cooks making various pickles had reached out to 1 million people. “On
social media, they were telling stories, reliving memories, sharing pictures
and documenting old recipes,“ says Ghildiyal. While one person wrote about the
khatti kairi his Nani used to make, another posted about Andhra Pradesh's
signature pickles.\
Hullaballoo in the Mango Tree
If you were to embark on a
mango pickle trail through the country, you would find the route peppered with
rare heirloom recipes and heartwarming stories around the pickling process.
For instance, food blogger,
Harini Balakrishna Prakash remembers learning different variants of the aam
achaar as her father got posted in various parts of the country. “My father was
an officer in the defence estates service. Wherever we lived, the local cooks
would teach my mother the regional fare, including pickles,“ she says. Her
childhood memories evoke flavours of the avakkai, which was made in the third
week of April when absolutely firm mangoes hit the market.The spicy pickle
would liven up a meal of hot rice, doused with sesame oil, and fried appalams
on the side. “The Tamil version is not as spicy as the one in Andhra Pradesh.Another
popular pickle, which we had to have, is the vadu manga -tiny baby mangoes
marinated in a spicy brine, which i s made in mid-March as that's when tender
mangoes appear,“ she says. Another variant is the manga thokku, which is more
of an instant pickle and is very easy to make. “Raw, hard mangoes are shredded
or finely diced, and cooked in a medley of spices and oil,“ says Prakash.
Getting people to reminisce
about their favourite mango pickle throws up revelations, like the
Maharashtrian Saee Koranne Khandekar's mohricha loncha, which is a rare recipe
that her greatgrandmother standardised. “It is considered a rite of passage in
our family. All the children were introduced to this, when they reached a
pickle-eating age,“ says Khandekar, who is a food consultant and author of
Crumbs! Bread Stories and Recipes for the Indian Kitchen. The recipe features
chopped mangoes and finely ground mustard, which is then mixed with water that
is boiled and cooled and jaggery.
Then there is the Parsi
buffena, made with whole ripe mango and a special sugarcane vinegar, which used
to make an appearance in shops in South Mumbai for a brief period at this time
of the year.
A pickle is an heirloom and
an adventure. Even as a recipe is passed down, every generation is tempted to
wrap its ladle around a new pickle. If Ghildiyal swears by a hing achaar,
typically made at her in-laws' home in Garhwal, her mother Heena Munshaw
reminisces the Gujarati chhundo of her childhood.
It's not just recipes that
are bequeathed but songs on pickling as well.For instance, Prakash hums the
lines of a rustic Tamil song that used to be sung during the pickling process,
the snatches of which she learnt from her grandmother: “Mela irrukkum thol,
kashakum maadhalalMella kathiyaal, cheeva vendume (On top is the skin, which is
bitter Peel it delicately with a knife, sister).“
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Avantika
Bhuyan
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ET14MAY17
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