So why would people go out of their way to use a fruit that turns their
food mauve? For its fruit-sour kick for one
Indian food is known for its
spicy flavours but those who actually cook it know that sourness is almost
as important. Spices provide the fireworks, but sourness builds the
foundation from which to appreciate them, balancing the richness of the fat
used to fry the base, and stimulating the palate to appreciate the other
flavours better.
Each region of India
has one or two souring agents that set the character of its food. Tamarind
is a taste of south India,
as much as aamchur is that of the north, but within each region you will
also find the more local souring agents, like gongura in Andhra or
kudumpalli in Coorg. Communities also have their own souring agents, like
the delicious dark sugarcane vinegar brewed by Parsis in Navsari or Bengal’s wonderfully aromatic gondhoraj lime.
Kokam is the flavour of the Konkan coast, from Mumbai to north of
Mangalore. In Goa it is sometimes
considered as being the souring agent of Hindus, as opposed to Goan
Catholic vinegar. In practice though, few Goans of any kind would spurn
this dark purple dried fruit with a sourness that manages to be both
intensely fruity when you bite into it, yet happily mellow when it is
cooked.
This fits it to the cuisines of the Konkan whose
reputation for spiciness is not quite correct. People confuse the fiery
vindaloo of the UK
with the Goan dish from which it takes its name, but the latter is much
more restrained. Similarly, the Malvani food of coastal Maharashtra gets
mixed with the pungent flavours of Kolhapur
and interior Maharashtra, but in fact its
range is more savoury than spicy, coming from coconut and seafood, all very
simply cooked.
Colour Codes
Kokam is a key part of these dishes, providing a mild sourness that is
doubly deceptive. Because the colour that kokam imparts to liquidy dishes
is so distinctive, a mauve quite unlike in any other food, one tends to
assume it tastes as strong as it looks. Then you try it and don’t get the
acid explosion that you’re expecting, and would get with other souring
agents like lime and tamarind, and you dismiss the kokam as being more to
do with colour than taste, like the yellow of turmeric or red of Kashmiri
chillis.
But this is not correct (and also begs the
question, why would anyone go out of their way to make their food mauve?).
Sometimes late at night if I’m taking a cab home I stop at a small street
seller of Konkani food in Dadar, Mumbai, who makes the most incredibly
pungent sol kadi, the lassi-like drink of coconut milk flavoured with kokam
and, in this version, so much garlic you can almost eat your breath after
drinking it (this is why its best to drink it late at night when you’re not
going to meet anyone after!) So much garlic should, in fact, taste too raw
and pungent, but the kokam tames it to an acceptable whole.
Once you realise how effective the mild sourness of
kokam can be, it’s easy to get addicted to it. When I make dal, I often
find myself tossing in a handful of dried kokam into the pressure cooker,
safe in the knowledge that it will only complement, not overwhelm the dish.
But I didn’t realise why kokam has this balanced sourness until I found the
fresh fruit, which ripens around April. Its Latin name, Garcinia indica,
indicated that it was related to the mangosteen fruit, Garcinia mangostana.
And where mangosteens are so refreshingly tangy-sweet, the kokam pulp just
had an intensely fruit-sour kick. What we know as kokam comes from
combining these two types of sourness. As JS Pruthi explains in his
excellent Indian handbook Spices and Condiments, “the rind constituting
about 50-55% of the whole fruit, is repeatedly soaked in the juice of the
pulp during sun drying”. There is also a popular variant where the fruit is
dried whole and looks like black fossilised tomatoes and the pulp simply
dries inside the skin. Salt may or may not be added at the drying stage,
and this is one reason why you must always taste the kokam you are about to
buy (the intensity of sourness can also vary quite a bit).
Kokam complements other ingredients so well that it
rarely stars on its own, but it’s worth trying the few dishes in which it
does. Sol kadi, of the less garlic-intensive kind, is one. The peels are
candied into a pleasantly sweet-sour snack called kokam khajur. The fresh
juice is concentrated with lots of salt to make kokam agal, which is
diluted into a drink like salty lassi (purple coloured, of course). It is
also cooked with sugar, and warm spices like jeera to make kokam sherbet.
It took me some time to get used to the combination of sour fruit, warm
spices and sugar, but I’ve realised that this makes one of the best
pick-me-up drinks after a work-out, giving you the energy boost of sugar,
but in a properly balanced way.
You can also use the fresh fruit just by itself,
putting a few in a jar of water in the fridge. It tints the water a
delicate pink and gives a wonderfully refreshing sour tang, but without the
acid harshness of stronger souring agents. As long as the fresh fruit lasts
I always have this in my fridge, a beautifully balanced drink to prepare
you for an Indian summer.
:: Vikram Doctor SET120520
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