FOOD SPECIAL... Cool as a Cucumber

 Cool as a Cucumber

Snake cucumbers may never be a major crop but are definitely worth trying while they appear on the streets

    When a friend of mine accidently left a honeydew melon next to the vegetables, the cook simply cut it up and used it with the regular masalas. My friend only realised this when she got home and found a rather strange tasting sabzi waiting for her. One could imagine the cook thinking that young people ate such weird foods, and that this must be one of them.
    I am reminded of this incident every time I see carts on the street piled with the long, curling, pale green, ribbed shapes of snake cucumbers. The cook wasn’t totally wrong. These cucumbers have a lot in common with the melon; Cucumis melo var flexuosus being their botanical name. Melons are plain Cucumis melo, while cucumbers are Cucumis sativus, so the families are close, but while most melons move to the sweeter, fruit variety, these flexible snaky kinds are closer to their cucumber cousins in taste and texture, though they retain a faint melon-like sweetness.
Global Connections
They are also termed as Armenian cucumber, which is a bit confusing since there is little evidence that they came from Armenia in particular. Snake cucumbers seem to have been grown in the swathe of land from Armenia through Turkey, down the Eastern Mediterranean to Egypt. Gil Marks, in The Encylopedia of Jewish Food, suggests that it was these, along with another unsweetened, round type called chate melons, that were what the Israelites longed for when they found themselves stranded in the desert of Sinai after Moses lead them out of Egypt.
In one bout of c o m p l a i n i n g against their leaders, the Israelites remembered, “the fish, which we ate in Egypt for nothing; the cucumbers, and the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.” Marks notes that what we call cucumbers today originated in India and probably arrived in West Asia later, but evidence from seeds and pictures found in Egyptian tombs points to unsweetened melons being what was grown there, which got confused with the Indian cucumbers when they appeared there.
    Indian Links
What makes this plausible is the fact that snake cucumbers are sparsely grown today in West Asia as much as in India. They are supplanted by Indian cucumbers, which are, in truth, a more pleasing fruit. Real cucumbers are juicy, cooling and filling — compared to them there is something evanescent about snake cucumbers. They are more textural and offer plenty of crispness, especially since they don’t need to be peeled. Their flavour is so mild to be almost imperceptible.
    So why are snake cucumbers still grown at all? Why do they make an appearance on our streets regularly, about twice a year — once just as the summer begins to set in, and then around Diwali, after the monsoons have gone? The simple answer is that they are an exceptionally fast growing crop, which can thrive even in poor soil. This is probably why the Israelites, who were slaves in Egypt, prized them, since like the other foods in their complaint, they would have been available even to the poorest people.
    This is still largely the same in India. Vegetable vendors in the marketplace rarely sell snake cucumbers; they are generally sold in carts along the streets and are meant for immediate consumption, not to be taken back home to cook (though they taste nice enough in salads).
    Since they grow quickly, they are one of the first to show up. Later in the season these carts sell watermelons, guavas or tadgola (Palmyra palm fruit) or the sour drink made from black carrots in north India, or the large cucumbers and green mangoes that are sliced and plastered with chilli powder and salt.
Street Speciality
Most of these vegetables that double as snacks sold on the streets seem to have a slightly different cultivation system than the regular produce. The main commercial growers aren’t interested in these at all, so they are left to be cultivated by smaller farmers, usually close to those areas where they are consumed. Somewhere near our cities a few farmers are growing the long vines from which the snake cucumbers grow — if the vines are trained on trellises, the cucumbers grow hanging down and straight, but curve if grown on the ground. The snake cucumber will never be a major crop, but is a pleasing niche one, well worth trying while it appears on our streets.

:: Vikram Doctor ETM130526