FOOD SPECIAL....DRUMSTICK..TOMOROW'S SUPER FOOD!

Drum Up Excitement 

Often overlooked, yet an important ingredient in Indian cooking, the homely drumstick has enough virtues to be hailed as tomorrow’s super food

    It is interesting watching a foreigner find a drumstick in a dish of sambhar. What is this bone-like substance doing in a vegetarian dish? It is fibrous rather than osseous, but is clearly not edible. With no one to instruct them — outside south India and parts of western India, it is surprising how few Indians really relish drumstick pods — the little green tubes pile up untouched on the sides of their plates. I, on the other hand, always have to restrain myself from sweeping them off other people’s plates. When serving myself sambhar I have a bad habit of fishing around for all the drumstick pods, which I then proceed to eat before the sambhar itself — either sucking out the savoury greyish seeds and pulp or, since this is liable to leave you with a burned tongue, splitting the pods lengthwise and scraping out the seeds and pulp.
Back to the Roots
If I had enough patience I might try making the elaborate dish given by Colonel Ken Herbert in his Culinary Jottings of Madras (1878). The Colonel’s magnum opus is probably the best Raj era cookbook there is and much of it is concerned with recreating European food in India. But he also declares that “I have the highest regard for country vegetables,” and moringakai, as he called drumsticks (derived from their Tamil name, muru gakai), are one of the most typically co try or native Indian of all vegetables come from the moringa tree, a plant indigenous to the subcontinent — its long hard pods seem to be cooked almost nowhere else. (Another unique use for the tree, which has almost disappeared, is of the root. It has the pungent flavour of horseradish).
    The Colonel prefaces his recipe for baked drumstick seeds with cheese with the encouraging words, “If you summon up the courage to order this homely dish, it is likely you will often order it again.” He directs you to boil lots of pods, then split and scrape out their seeds. Stir in some cream, or milk beaten with a couple of egg yolks, add salt, pepper and anchovy essence (a seasoning which the Colonel used extravagantly), then put in a pie dish, cover with grated Parmesan cheese and bake. For an elegant appetiser, he suggests baking and serving this mixture in silver scallop shells. I have tried a simpler recipe by him, using the boiled seeds and pulp cooked with eggs and cheese and served on toast.
Taking Stock
This is worth making, particularly because — a trick that the Colonel missed — the water in which the drumstick pods are boiled makes an excellent vegetarian stock. You just need to scrape the pods a little, to prevent too much of the bitter green taste coming from their skin, and the stock that results is lightly vegetal and ury, full of that elusive fifth avour called umami.
I don’t know if the Japanese laboratories that specialise in testing for umami have ever analysed moringa, but just going on taste, it seems to be a quality the tree delivers in plenty. Apart from the pods, the flowers and leaves also seem to have it, along with such a cornucopia of nutritional benefits that there are NGOs devoted to promoting its growth for the purposes of nutrition across the developing world.
    The Asian Vegetable Research and Developmental Centre notes that ounce for ounce, moringa leaves have “more beta-carotene than carrots, more protein than peas, more vitamin C than oranges, more calcium than milk, more potassium than bananas and more iron than spinach.”
Nutritional Power
At the Slow Foods conference in Turin a couple of years ago, I had the odd experience of hearing farmers from places like Mali extolling the virtues of this plant that delivers leaves through the year with minimum maintenance required. Urban activists explained how moringa could be planted on wastelands in cities and pruned to remain as shrubs, a method that made harvesting the leaves easier. These leaves can then be made into nutritional powders that could be given to babies, or baked as biscuits, or cooked into porridge and much more.
    I kept waiting for someone to talk about the deliciousness of drumstick pods, but they never did. Perhaps this is something that only Indians value, though even here they rarely become the main dish in the way the Colonel suggested, but are usually added to give a background flavour. However, there is a Parsi dish of drumsticks cooked in toddy (tari ma sekta ni sing) that I’ve never managed to cook because of the near impossibility of getting toddy in cities these days.
    Bilkees Latif in her Essential Andhra Cookbook has a recipe for kodi kuna munakai or chicken with drumsticks and this is also ideally made with toddy, but she notes that beer can also be used. (She also has a simpler vegetarian munakai igguru or drumstick curry). I have made this and it was a delicious, spicy, yet hugely savoury curry. Between the chicken bones and the drumsticks, it did take some effort to eat and the plates were covered with debris at the end. But as a way of celebrating the deeply savoury pleasures of such a uniquely Indian vegetable, it was an experience that was hard to beat.

:: Vikram Doctor ETM120916