Author: anuchenji

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Ridged gourd chutney: A billion litres of beer, loofahs and chutney

“Beerakai? You mean there a vegetable which gives out beer? Hahaha! ” Which Telugu hasn’t heard this hoary old one when a non-Telugu hears the word “beerakai” for the first time? But just last week there was an article in the Hindu with liquor consumption statistics across India and among the bigger states, AP (the undivided one) tops the list by far with 34.5 litres per head per year, far outstripping Kerala which was undisputed liquor king for years!!
At a population of 50 million, that works out to 1.75 billion litres a year which is many times the amount of milk consumed by all of India in a year! (I tried doing the maths – so many metric tonnes of milk to litres of beer but somewhere along the way, the numbers – and the milk – got curdled!) Hmmm…wondering whether there is something to the beer and beerakai naming after all???
Wow, we Telugus take our beer and our beerakais seriously!
This staple – cheap and best- vegetable – is what has helped millions of homemakers tide over the end-of-the-month-pocket-is-empty-what-to-put-on-the-table blues for generations.
Okay, to put the rest of you out of your misery, beerakai is the Telugu name for what is called a ribbed or ridged gourd – one of those you have to bribe your kids to eat. See photo above by scrolling.
Like the coconut in Kerala, there is no part of this super-‘umble veggie that is not used. You make a tonic to darken your hair – did you know that???! Bet you’re regretting saying ‘yuck’ to beerakai pappu for the nth time when you were a kid, right? The fibrous part that is peeled away is used to make loofahs to scrub yourself free of all the ‘yucks’! The thrifty Telugu housewife uses even the peel of this vegetable to make the most delicious “thokku” or chutney.
Beerakai chutney
Wash and peel two large beerakais. Reserve the beerakais for use later. Just now, we’ll make only the chutney with the peel.
Chana dal – (Bengal gram dal) – 2 tbsp
Urad dal – 1 tbsp
Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
Asafoetida- 1 small pinkie-nail sized lump
Red chilies – 5
Green chilies – 3
Tamarind – small marble -sized ball
Jaggery – 1.5 tbsp
Coconut – 1/2 cup
Sesame oil – 2tbsp
Salt – about 3/4 tsp
Heat the oil in a pan. Add mustard seeds and wait till they crackle. Add chana dal and roast till golden brown. Add urad dal and chilies and stir for a couple of minutes more. Add the peel and stir for 3-4 minutes till they shrink slightly. Add the coconut and stir again for a couple of minutes. Add the tamarind, jaggery and salt and switch off. Let cool and grind to a rough chutney adding a little water.
This chutney goes with most everything – rice, rotis, idlis, dosas, plain!
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Stuffed snake gourd or potlakai: Of “Snakes” and oil baths, Vit.D and childhood tortures

“Ooooooohh, snaaake, snaaake!” Three kids, oiled from top to toe waiting for the dreaded Sunday morning mandatory “oil baths”, decide to make the most of it by chasing each other round and round the garden clad in bare necessities and armed with long, green, snakelike gourds in their hands – potlakai, podalanga, parval, chichinda – the various names by which this vegetable is known in India are nowhere near as descriptive as it’s English title – the snake gourd. Being the youngest at about 5 or 6 years old, I half believed it was a snake !
That Sunday morning ritual was dreaded for many reasons. First the process of being oiled meant you got kneaded and pummelled and squashed and your nose got pulled – to make it longer – well going by the length it reached, the rest of my face caught up with it only in my 30s!!! I had one aunt whom i shall not name here but who i think used to pummel us more than the others – maybe the frustrations of her existence got too much for her by the weekend (!) and the oil massage used to be accompanied by a rising crescendo of howls of despair and many complaints to mom later!
The best part of it was when were let out – makes us sound like a pack of dogs, doesn’t it? – to run about and play in the sun for a while till the water was heated in an old copper boiler. What a deadly dose of Vit D we must have absorbed in the running around – whether we played “snake” or not. Then followed the agony of having your skin almost scraped off with “nalugu pindi” (a mixture of chickpea flour and turmeric): “GOOD FOR YOU”!
Your hair and very likely much of your head was nearly pulled out by the “sheekai” (soapnut powder), a brown and in my opinion “kaaram”(chilli-hot) substance which inevitably leaked into our eyes and made the howls even louder. And all this with boiling hot water from the “anda”!
It was some kind of torture system devised to take a perfectly happy, reasonably clean kid and designed to turn him/her inside out in the adult’s quest for that stray particle of dirt which might cause you to… what? Die? I never found out! End of process you came out smelling like a pakoda from all the flour and turmeric, eyes streaming and a feeling of deep gratitude that you did not have to face this again for another blessed 168 hours (7 * 24) and the incurable optimism of childhood that something, anything might happen to prevent the next one! Alas, that hope was very rarely realised…
And what happened to the snake which allayed the agony of Sunday baths? Many things were made out of it – in my memory it was either overcooked into a mush or under-cooked so that it tasted like a sharp-ish cucumber. Then I grew up and learnt how to actually cook it!
Here’s one which my family loves – stuffed potlakai – my way.
Stuffed potlakai
1 long, tender snake gourd -wash and cut into pieces about 2″ long With your pinkie or a narrow spoon, remove the insides – seeds and tissue. These are tender so easily removed.
Mix together:
Roasted and powdered sesame (til) seeds – 1 tbsp
Roasted chickpea flour(roasted besan) – 1/2 cup
Jeera powder – 1 tsp
Dhania powder – 1.5 tsp
Kasooti methi (dried fenugreek leaves) – 1 tsp
Coriander leaves – chopped – 2tbsp
Chili powder – 1 tsp
Turmeric – 1 large pinch.
Salt – about 3/4 tsp
Oil – 1 tbsp
Stuff the pieces with this masala powder. Heat oil in a large, flat pan and add the pieces. Cover and cook, turning over occasionally for abut 12-15 minutes till the vegetable is tender. Open and cook for a few minutes more.
Serve hot with rice. Don’t forget to have your oil bath before this otherwise how will you make FULL use of the potlakai – to scare the littlest kid with and to get your dose of Vit. D????
P.S: Wonder what they did with all the besan they washed us with?? Recycled as… no, no perish the thought. It’s too yucky!
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Green chilli pickle: Of chillies and bookworms, lessons in humility

“Are you sure, paapa, that your mother asked you to get this?” the vegetable woman at the corner store asks me. I draw myself up to my full height of 4 feet nothing – as  haughtily as an eight-year old can manage: “Of course. You think I don’t know what my mom asked for?!”
I pack the stuff and stalk off home only to return some twenty minutes later with my tail tucked securely between my legs and asking in a barely audible voice: ” My mother said she didn’t want one kilo of  green chillies. She actually wanted a kilo of onions – so please can I exchange this?”
Having had my head in some Enid Blyton cloud, I hadn’t quite heard what my mother wanted and… bought the wrong stuff. Now if only I’d had the sense to mistake it for a kilo tomatoes or potatoes – of which we got through prodigious quantities, i could have wriggled out of a most embarrassing situation, but I HAD to choose green chilies instead! Considering how much I hated “khaaram” or spicy food when i was a kid, you’d have thought I’d know that it had to be something else but you’d have underestimated the cloudiness of a bookworm’s fuzzy brain!
End result: Gales of laughter from the other customers in the shop – thankfully no one from my school was around! The vegetable vendor, happily for me, happened to be mom’s patient and a very kindhearted soul in the bargain, so she hid her amusement till i left the shop – salvaging the dignity of an 8-year old is VERY important! I had  tried to wriggle out of the exchange scheme: “Please, mom, can’t Lakshmamma (our faithful old retainer who’s saved me from many a contretemps!) go instead of me?” But no, my mother was a firm believer in clearing up after one’s own messes so off I went!
I still can’t handle the spiciness that any Telugu is supposed to be able to handle but yes, i do make green chilli pickles!
Green chilli pickle
(and don’t feed it to an eight-year old bookworm!)
Green chillies – 20- 25 – cut into 1″ long pieces
Lemons – 2 large – cut into eight pieces each (alternately the juice of 2 large lemons will also do)
Coriander seeds (dhania) – 2.5 tbsp
Aniseed (Saunf) – 1.5 tbsp
Mustard seeds – 1 tbsp
Fenugreek seeds (methi) – 1 tsp
Dried mango powder  (amchoor) – 1 tsp
Turmeric – 1 tsp
Mustard oil (preferably) – 4 tbsp
Salt – about 1.5 tsp
Powder the spices together – not too smooth. Heat the oil in a pan and switch off. Let it cool for a minute and add the ground spices and mix well. Add the chillies and the lemons or the lemon juice and mix again. Bottle and store in the frig for a couple of days before use. This lasts for at least 2 weeks in the frig if you eat it sparingly. If you don’t go buy a kilo of green chillies for your mother!
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Anything goes salad: Chinese checkers and mongrel pets, salads and superstars

Salads, when we were growing up, were, at best, a distraction to the serious business of doing justice to a biryani or a bisibele… at worst, they were just clammy cucumber slices that had to be gotten through or to be quietly disposed off while mom’s eye was distracted by someone else not taking a third helping (almost indicative of criminal interest in her view)!
Unfortunately, the disposing off could not be done under the table to the ever-faithful mongrel Tommy as even he would turn up his nose at it! Considering what all Tommy did eat – he once swallowed a blue Chinese checkers ball from a set I’d just gotten for a birthday and I had to run behind him for a whole day poking at droppings with a stick till he eventually passed it! – useful to have a doctor mom – poured large quantities of various antiseptics over it until we could use it again – hey – NOT GROSS – remember these were the days of few – very few toys and almost no board games – so each was precious, though, now i come to think of it, wonder whether that tiny ball was worth THAT much!! So, if even Tommy wouldn’t eat them…
The kind of salads we did like were the koshumbris – the Marathi/ Kannada heritage of grated and seasoned combinations of carrots, cucumber and mango which elevated salads to something else. Realisation suddenly dawned in the third decade of life (don’t laugh, I’m a bit slow on the uptake!) one day that actually there’s almost nothing that you can’t put into a salad and then on, salads became superstars!
Here’s one that always a favourite at home and with guests and can be stretched to accommodate almost anything you have in the frig. Two “musts” though – apple and boiled chana (chickpeas). The rest you make up as you go along and it’s a meal in itself with a fresh-baked loaf and golden butter…
‘Anything-goes’ salad
Boiled chana – 2 cups (if you’re an Indian student in America use 1 can chickpeas)
Any crunchy apple – cubed – 1 cup (avoid the woolly ones – they taste yuck!)
Capsicum – any and all colours – cubed
Raw mango – if available – chopped – 2-3 tbsp
Radish – one – peeled and cubed
Cucumber – 1 – peeled and cubed
Tomato – 1 – chopped
Purple cabbage – 1/2 cup – shredded
Pomegranate seeds – 1/2 cup – optional
Juice of one lemon
Mint and coriander – 2 tbsp each
Chaat masala or Himalayan pink salt – optional – 1/4 tsp
1 green chili – very finely chopped
Salt
Mix everything together and chill before serving.

 

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Avakai: Summers and mangoes, pickles and Telugus!

A hardworking, run-off-her-feet doctor with an eager 6 year old daughter wanting to help her do a very grown-up thing indeed – make aavakai. The mom has time to do this only in the night, after her day’s work at the hospital is done and home chores are taken care of. So – as a special ‘treat’, the daughter is allowed to stay up till late- very late – like past 11 o’clock. I remember finding out just how hot chili powder could be on the skin when my hands started to burn and mom gave me cashewnuts to pacify me – i thought it was worth it to get burn-y hands for the sake of a handful of cashewnuts!  As for the lateness, considering that my bedtime, even today, at 50, is 9 p.m. – for a 6-year old me – this was a stretch indeed!
Aavakai – so dear to the heart of every Andhra – the making of it, the bottling, the de-bottling are all rituals that every Telugu approaches with reverence in their hearts. You might not say your prayers or light a lamp or whatever every day but you dare not violate the sacred rituals around aavakai making and bottling! For instance, you can’t make it if you or anyone in the house has an infection- what if a germ gets in THERE?;  Can’t make it if you haven’t washed your hair that day (what if some stray flake of dandruff falls into the mangoes? Can’t make it if you, your hands, your clothes are all less than squeaky clean; and finally, the one with which I’ve terrorised the Tamilian family into which I’ve married – DON’T BREATHE when i open the ‘jaadi’ (jar)!
Making aavakai every summer is a ritual that i look forward to – the process of shopping for mangoes – traveling to the ‘mandi’ early in the morning armed with buckets, cans of water (for washing the mangoes i pick carefully after pressing them and smelling them), the pile of cloths to wipe them, overseeing the actual chopping by the vendor, lovingly dropping them – gentle – you can bruise them! – into the bucket, coming home, wiping the pieces dry, mixing the spices and finally adding the pieces a few at a time with the masala and oil and dropping them into the big jaadis, which have been readied by washing them in hot water and drying them well in the sun. It’s like a spiritual awakening almost! Husband has always participated enthusiastically on these jaunts – including the injunction ‘don’t expect anything more than curd rice for lunch today – i have to make AAVAKAI, remember?’! The prospect of a year long supply of his favourite side is enough inducement!
Aavakai pickle
Mangoes- green, very sour and unripe, weighing about 150 -200 gms each. Feel them to make sure they’re not soft or bruised and smell them for that lovely sharp raw-mango smell. – 1 kg
Cut into pieces about an inch long and with a bit of the tenka (the hard nutty covering of the soft seed inside). Remove the soft seed (jeedi) completely and wipe each piece with a soft, dry, lint-free cloth. Let the pieces dry in the shade for about an hour.
Masala for 1 kg of mangoes
250 gm mustard powder
200 gm chili powder (ask for pickle chili powder)
225 gm table salt
225 ml gingelly (sesame) oil – get the best quality cold pressed oil – it’s worth it!
20 gm whole black chana
20 gm – methi seeds
1 tbsp turmeric powder
Variation 1
2 whole pods of garlic – peel, dry in the sun for about and hour and mix into the avakaya
Variation 2
250 gm of jaggery – powder and dry in the sun for about an hour and then mix well into the avakaya.
Bottle the avakaya – remember the bottle must be squeaky clean and sun-dried. Cover the lid with a thin muslin cloth and tie it with a nada (like a pyjama!). Open the next day – after bathing – we didn’t go to all that trouble with cleaning the pieces for nothing, did we?? Mix it well, check if there is oil floating on top otherwise pour a little. Cover again and repeat for two more days.
Kotthaavakaaya (new avakaaya), the words guaranteed to make a slave of any Telugu for life, is now ready. And pssst… while unnamed peoples in my Tamil family tend to desecrate it by eating it as a side with curd rice (total abhisthu!!), the only REAL way to eat it is at the start of a meal or as a whole meal – with hot rice and a dollop of ghee…