Ice Apple
The Palmyra yields many food products..
.Nungu, Tadgola, Nira, Jhalbara…
It seem height of
scorching here Tamil are of places Nadu summer definitely . The than , sun but
this the beats at more coast can the on unlikely the rocks with near-unbearable
intensity, the heat surrounds and suffocates you and nearly all vegetation
seems shrivelled away. The most visible signs of life are the Palmyra palms
(Borassus flabellifer) which seem as dried out as everything else. Unlike the
delicate fronds of coconut trees, Palmyra
leaves look hard and spiky, a jagged crown on top of the tree trunks.
And yet these spiky leaves hold the perfect antidote to the heat — the immature pods of the Palmyra fruit, known as nungu in Tamil Nadu. Growing in tight clusters, these glossy dark balls are a bit like fossilised round brinjals which have to be opened with a wickedly sharp crescent knife whose tip is used to lever off the top to reveal the three pods snuggled inside. More carving and prising is needed to remove the brown-white pod, a bit like a small dinner roll. Peel the skin and inside you have translucent white flesh, a quivering gelatinous lump that does its best to slip through your fingers.
If you've managed to keep it whole, this is now the key moment — put it in your mouth and bite. And if you're lucky, a cool, sweetish liquid wells out of the centre. There's just about a teaspoonful, and not all fruits will have them. Yet when you get it, nothing can be more refreshing. The British called Palmyra fruits ice-apples, which suggests how reviving they can be in the heat of south India. In Mumbai, where they are known as tadgola, they are a pleasant seasonal treat, but somehow rarely seem as magical, so either the varieties that grow on the Konkan coast are less luscious, or this really is dependent on a particular time and place to appreciate it to its fullest (part of the attraction, I think, is a way of selling them which I've only seen in the south, where the Palmyra leaves are bent into a shape like a Chinese lantern to provide a truly elegant, ecological and appropriate container for the fruits).
It's said that the Palmyra fruit's surprise of liquid inside its flesh inspired the Bengali sweet called jalbhara, where syrup bursts out of a sandesh casing. I can't find any confirmation of this, but taal trees, as they are known as in Bengal, are certainly found in the countryside near Chandannagar where jalbhara is said to have been invented, so it's possible. Taal is known more there for the sweet pulp of the mature fruit, which Chitrita Banerji notes in her book Life and Food in Bengal, is so cloyingly rich that it can only be eaten cooked with milk as a kind of kheer, or mixed with flour and grated coconut and deep-fried as small round taal-boras.
Palmyra's most famous food product is, of course, more accurately, a drink — the sap from the flowers that is called nira when fresh, and toddy when fermented, which it does so rapidly that selling nira is actually a problem. It used to be sold on railway platforms in Mumbai, with strict injunctions against taking it away in a bottle since it was assumed you'd want to make toddy out of it. The railways now seem to have stopped allowing its sale altogether, but you can still buy it from small stalls along the highway out of Mumbai (though again, these seem to shut by noon).
This same sweet juice is what is boiled down to give the delicious fudgy tasting palm jaggery (which also comes from other palms). And yet another food product is got when the mature seeds are planted and allowed to form thick roots. These are uprooted at around three and a half months and eaten as a vegetable, or dried into a starchy food known as pulukkodiyal in Tamil. This is, in particular, the great speciality of Sri Lankan Tamils who use Palmyra products in so many ways that, according to Nessa Eliezer's book Recipes of the Jaffna Tamils that the people from that community are jokingly called panang-kottai, or Palmyra seeds.
This is one of the most quietly moving cookbooks I know which, without overt political statement, paints a picture of this repeatedly devastated community through memories of its food. Eliezer writes of how the Palmyra's leaves were used to thatch roofs and for fencing, for "mats, fans, baskets, nesting boxes and winnowing fans, baby's rattles and door hangings…" She recalls the refreshment of green mangoes cut up and put in nira (called karupani there), a kind of sweet made with the dried fruit pulp and a dish of the roots cooked with crabs, prawns, beans, tapioca and drumstick tree leaves about which a famous Jaffna poet spontaneously composed a poem after trying it.
In all these uses the simple delights of the nungu fruit get rather overshadowed, but Eliezer does suggest making a payasam by cooking the fruits in milk with sugar, nuts, and a little gram flour for thickening. Another good way of enjoying them is to mix the chopped up fruit with coconut water, whose similar taste helps bring out its delicate flavour. But perhaps the most amazing use I've ever had of them was when my grandmother, in a fit of inspiration, once made a cold soufflé from coconut milk, eggs and gelatine in which chunks of nungu were suspended. I keep wanting to recreate it, but tadgola is both too hard to find in Mumbai, and somehow never soft and luscious enough. I just may have to dare the heat of high summer in Tamil Nadu to get a taste of nungu at its refreshing best.
And yet these spiky leaves hold the perfect antidote to the heat — the immature pods of the Palmyra fruit, known as nungu in Tamil Nadu. Growing in tight clusters, these glossy dark balls are a bit like fossilised round brinjals which have to be opened with a wickedly sharp crescent knife whose tip is used to lever off the top to reveal the three pods snuggled inside. More carving and prising is needed to remove the brown-white pod, a bit like a small dinner roll. Peel the skin and inside you have translucent white flesh, a quivering gelatinous lump that does its best to slip through your fingers.
If you've managed to keep it whole, this is now the key moment — put it in your mouth and bite. And if you're lucky, a cool, sweetish liquid wells out of the centre. There's just about a teaspoonful, and not all fruits will have them. Yet when you get it, nothing can be more refreshing. The British called Palmyra fruits ice-apples, which suggests how reviving they can be in the heat of south India. In Mumbai, where they are known as tadgola, they are a pleasant seasonal treat, but somehow rarely seem as magical, so either the varieties that grow on the Konkan coast are less luscious, or this really is dependent on a particular time and place to appreciate it to its fullest (part of the attraction, I think, is a way of selling them which I've only seen in the south, where the Palmyra leaves are bent into a shape like a Chinese lantern to provide a truly elegant, ecological and appropriate container for the fruits).
It's said that the Palmyra fruit's surprise of liquid inside its flesh inspired the Bengali sweet called jalbhara, where syrup bursts out of a sandesh casing. I can't find any confirmation of this, but taal trees, as they are known as in Bengal, are certainly found in the countryside near Chandannagar where jalbhara is said to have been invented, so it's possible. Taal is known more there for the sweet pulp of the mature fruit, which Chitrita Banerji notes in her book Life and Food in Bengal, is so cloyingly rich that it can only be eaten cooked with milk as a kind of kheer, or mixed with flour and grated coconut and deep-fried as small round taal-boras.
Palmyra's most famous food product is, of course, more accurately, a drink — the sap from the flowers that is called nira when fresh, and toddy when fermented, which it does so rapidly that selling nira is actually a problem. It used to be sold on railway platforms in Mumbai, with strict injunctions against taking it away in a bottle since it was assumed you'd want to make toddy out of it. The railways now seem to have stopped allowing its sale altogether, but you can still buy it from small stalls along the highway out of Mumbai (though again, these seem to shut by noon).
This same sweet juice is what is boiled down to give the delicious fudgy tasting palm jaggery (which also comes from other palms). And yet another food product is got when the mature seeds are planted and allowed to form thick roots. These are uprooted at around three and a half months and eaten as a vegetable, or dried into a starchy food known as pulukkodiyal in Tamil. This is, in particular, the great speciality of Sri Lankan Tamils who use Palmyra products in so many ways that, according to Nessa Eliezer's book Recipes of the Jaffna Tamils that the people from that community are jokingly called panang-kottai, or Palmyra seeds.
This is one of the most quietly moving cookbooks I know which, without overt political statement, paints a picture of this repeatedly devastated community through memories of its food. Eliezer writes of how the Palmyra's leaves were used to thatch roofs and for fencing, for "mats, fans, baskets, nesting boxes and winnowing fans, baby's rattles and door hangings…" She recalls the refreshment of green mangoes cut up and put in nira (called karupani there), a kind of sweet made with the dried fruit pulp and a dish of the roots cooked with crabs, prawns, beans, tapioca and drumstick tree leaves about which a famous Jaffna poet spontaneously composed a poem after trying it.
In all these uses the simple delights of the nungu fruit get rather overshadowed, but Eliezer does suggest making a payasam by cooking the fruits in milk with sugar, nuts, and a little gram flour for thickening. Another good way of enjoying them is to mix the chopped up fruit with coconut water, whose similar taste helps bring out its delicate flavour. But perhaps the most amazing use I've ever had of them was when my grandmother, in a fit of inspiration, once made a cold soufflé from coconut milk, eggs and gelatine in which chunks of nungu were suspended. I keep wanting to recreate it, but tadgola is both too hard to find in Mumbai, and somehow never soft and luscious enough. I just may have to dare the heat of high summer in Tamil Nadu to get a taste of nungu at its refreshing best.
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