FOOD SPECIAL...ASAFOETIDA That Vivid Aroma

ASAFOETIDA That Vivid Aroma 
 

Forgotten in other parts of the world, asafoetida is still a popular ingredient in Indian cusine

Many of us will have seen friends from abroad having a melt-down over the spiciness of Indian food. Some of us may even have encouraged it by telling them pickles aren't as hot as they seemed (I'm not admitting, just saying). But for full-on freak-out you don't need to get them actually to taste something but just smell, which people are more willing to do than taste. After all, how bad can a smell be, they say, until you shove a lump of asafoetida (hing) near their nose, and watch them stagger and look sick. "Don't tell me you actually eat that," they moan, frantically looking for windows to open.
What I find in interesting is not that we do, since Indians know that when heated the ranker smells of asafoetida disappear, leaving a deliciously appetising fried onion aroma. Some don't even mind the raw aroma - I don't like the powdered form much, either in smell or taste, since I find it has a bitter edge, possibly due to the substances it is mixed with, like flour and gum Arabic, to dilute and keep it in powder form. But the lumps of pure resin have a wonderfully vivid aroma, of meat slow cooked with onions, until richly savoury and then spiked with the sulphurous pungency of black salt. I'm used to the smell though and this, as was noted by Garcia da Orta, the wise naturalist who lived near the islands that would become Bombay and studied the herbs and spices of India, makes all the difference: "The truth is there is a good deal of habit in the matter of smells," he wrote in his Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India, in a long discussion on asafoetida where he tries to convince a friend that while it may be "the nastiest smell in the world for me", it still has value in cooking, and that Indians are justified in using it so much.
    What is curious though is that Westerners haven't been willing just to let us get on with our hing habit, but have often shown a perverse fascination with it. It is as if they feel that, by some kind of reverse thinking, something so horrid and strong must have benefits. Far from being entirely unknown in the West, asafoetida crops up in unexpected places. In the 19th century it was tried as a flavouring for gin, giving it "a rich mellowness" according to the inventor (quoted in Richard Barnett's The Book of Gin). And surprising as it may seem, it is used in some classic perfumes like Cabochard from Parfum Gres, where a tinge of it is used, perhaps adding a contradictory earthy depth to the aroma.
    But the strongest use for it in the West has been as a medicine, particularly in the USA. I don't think MFK Fisher, the best of American food writers, ever wrote about tasting asafoetida, but in A Cordiall Water, a small book on folk remedies, she recalled a small girl in her school who had a strange smell: "It had a bitterness to it, rather rancid, and when I discussed this casually with my mother, she laughed in a remembering way, and said to see if my new friend did not wear a little cloth bag hanging under her dress round her neck." She did, and the bag held a bit of "assafeddity", which children, particularly from poorer families, were given to wear as a preventive against them catching diseases.
    This might even have worked since others would have avoided someone so strong smelling, and so they may not have got contagious diseases. In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, when Scout, the narrator, is taken to an African church, she remembers the smell as compounded of "Hearts of Love hairdressing mingled with asafoetida, snuff, Hoyt's Cologne, Brown's Mule, peppermint, and lilac talcum." But it was also used in more boisterous ways. College students would put it on the stoves used to heat rooms if they wanted to clear out a class, and a standard ragging ritual for those trying to join the exclusive college fraternities was to make aspirants eat raw asafoetida or, in an even more perverse twist, to eat raw chicken liver rubbed with it, which they were told was human flesh!
    None of these uses were culinary (though Americans consumed asafoetida when they seasoned Bloody Mary cocktails with Worcestershire sauce, in which it is a key ingredient). For the main Western culinary use of asafoetida one has to go back centuries to when the Roman empire used huge quantities of the stuff. It was a substitute for silphium, a mysterious spice from North Africa that, like asafoetida, was a plant resin, but which Romans had consumed to oblivion, the first food linked plant extinction ever recorded. Luckily, the armies of Alexander had encountered asafoetida in its homelands of Iran and Afghanistan and it was deemed an acceptable substitute. Even today, notes the Oxford Companion to Italian Food, those wishing to recreate the lavish, decadent dishes of Rome must use asafoetida.
    It is strange to contrast these lurid stories of asafoetida use with the austere, spotlessly clean kitchens of my Tamil Brahmin friends in Chennai, or Jain friends in Mumbai. Nothing is further from Roman excess than their food, but asafoetida is a common element, substituting its oniony aroma for the onions and garlic they don't eat. This might be seen as a bit of a cheat, but oniony aroma apart, asafoetida adds a deep, underlying savour to dishes, especially when it is boiled or steeped in hot water that is used to boil dal. I often add a lump of asafoetida when making stock, or even rice to up its savoury quotient - though the lumps never entirely dissolve and the fragments must be fished out or when eating they will give you an oniony explosion in your mouth, which I rather like, but others find unsettling.
    Asafoetida is such a constant in these vegetarian cuisines that some people assume it is never used with meat. But in fact it can be a very useful way to make dishes that have the savour of onions, but not the slightly unctuous, ulcer-unsettling richness of dishes made with lots of cut up onions. As an added bonus, these dishes are quick to make since you don't have to do that endless peeling and chopping of onions that can be a real drag at times. Asafoetida in such cases shows itself as a natural convenience food, helping you make really last-minute recipes like a really delicious dish of mutton cooked with turnips and asafoetida that, with a pressure cooker, I can turn out in less than an hour.
    Dishes like this are so good that I think it sad that more people don't use asafoetida these days. Only a few foreign food writers have got past the stink to try it, and they usually become converts. "Europe has forgotten it now, and India is left to show the world the pleasure and use to be derived from asafoetida," writes the classical scholar Andrew Dalby in Dangerous Tastes, his history of spices. Strangely, it is little used even in its Afghan homeland where the large quantities harvested are nearly all meant for export to India, though Helen Saberi, in Afghan Food & Cookery, notes ones use of it as a preservative, in gosht-e-qagh, strips of meat rubbed with salt and asafoetida and left to dry in the summer sun.
    We use asafoetida as a preservative too, in pickles like hing-aam-achar - Fabindia sells a version whose sulphur kick lifts the roof off your mouth! Even if foreigners can accept cooking with asafoetida, I don't think these uses of the near-raw resin will ever catch on with non-Indians. Few are ever likely to relish hing golis, those balls of asafoetida, jaggery, tamarind and other spices that we eat as digestives, but also as a kind of subversive candy. It seems like such an unbearable combination: the dark earthy taste of asafoetida mixed with sweetness and sourness, and it's true that part of the attraction is an almost shuddering sense of it being too much when you pop one in your mouth.
    But then all the tastes come to an improbable balance on your palate and as the goli goes down your gullet, you can feel, building up in your belly, the deep, gratified burp which is the best tribute we can pay to the wonders of asafoetida!
    

Vikram Doctor CDET130315