There aren’t many plants that can kill you. Unlike poisonous mushrooms which can be deadly even in microscopic doses, with most plants you’d have to eat a huge amount of an often extremely bitter toxic leaf or root to suffer anything more serious than an upset stomach.
Rosary pea or Abrus precatorius though is different. The small and exquisitely coloured seeds it produces, which are also called Love Beans, contain one of the most lethal plant postions, abrin. Ingesting even one of these hard seeds, either by chewing it very well or powdering it, could easily kill you. There are historical accounts of people using them as a secret weapon with which to kill cattle, or people. In South India it is a favoured by those wishing to commit suicide.
As dangerous as they are, those seeds are also pretty and people have long made necklaces and earrings out of them. I remember reading about them in a 13th century Sanskrit poem – the seeds adorned tribal women in the hills of Kerala. They were also interestingly used as a standard weight to measure gold.
Lethality aside, the leaves of Abrus precatorius are quite delicious. Eaten raw, they taste rather like licorice. In fact, the root can apparently be a licorice substitute although it too contains a tiny amount of abrin. I’ve also read that the seeds – which also have medicinal properties – can be eaten as a food if cooked sufficiently to remove all toxicity but don’t try this at home.
It was hard to resist collecting the bright red and black seeds when we found the plant growing outside our Airbnb place in Goa. Although with a two year old around, I’m not sure I’m going to make them into a necklace right now.
Have you had this beautiful red tea or maybe juice?
Hibiscus sabdariffa, or Roselle, is a shrub belonging to the Malvaceae family.
Nowadays, being cultivated for a lot of reasons, Rosella is termed as a wonder plant. It is known to have its origins in areas between India and Malaysia.
Rosella is known to be packed with antioxidants and contains compounds that may prevent cancer. It is also known to lower blood pressure, boost liver health, promote weight loss, and fight bacteria.
We are fascinated with a few uses of rosella. The stem of this plant when dried works as a substitute for jute fiber. The leaves are famous for the Hyderabadi Gongura Pappu (dal). The flowers or fleshy red calyx and bracts that surround the green seedpod of the plant are the actual ingredients to make tea.
We have made its tea, juice, and jam.
To make the tea, boil the calyx of one flower in two glasses of water. Strain it into a glass. Add sugar or honey as desired.
To make the juice boil 250 gms of calyx in two liters of water for about 20 minutes. Strain the liquid and add half a kilo of sugar and the juice of one lemon. Boil it until the sugar dissolves. Once cooled, pour it into a bottle and store for about 2-3 months. To serve, add two tablespoons into a glass and top it with water.
To make the jam separate the calyx from the seed pods. Wash them separately. Add about 250 gms of green seedpods in a saucepan and put enough water to cover the pods. Boil for about 5 to 10 mins until they go soft and the water gains a slightly sticky texture from the pectin released from the pods! This is completely natural and will mean you do not have to use a setting agent. Strain the liquid and discard the pods.
In another saucepan, put the Rosella calyxes and cover with the pod liquid and a little bit more water if necessary to keep the petals covered. Simmer for around 5 to 10 mins until the fruit is soft and an almost syrup-like texture forms, add to this mix even amounts of sugar. You will see the consistency become very jam-like and thicken. Remove from the heat and put in your prepared jam jars or glasses and let cool before putting in the fridge. Enjoy your preserve!
We’ve been eating the leaves of this tree for a while. We initially named it the Pranav-Uppu soppu, because it was they who first introduced us, via a cowherd, to its edible leaves.
Soon we were spotting the tree on all of our walks, it seems to grow literally all around us. It is quick and easy to collect a great bunch of leaves, and a matter of minutes to strip each twig, wash the leaves and then turn into a dry stir fry with roasted daals or peanuts. Instant favourite.
It came as a surprise then last week when I asked our taxonomist friend Dr Datchanamoorthy if he recognised this soppu to find we’ve been eating the leaves of none other than the Sandalwood tree.
flowers and leaves of Santalum album…
…and the fruit
Indian Sandalwood (Santalum album) is so intertwined with tradition and culture here that it’s difficult to know where to start. The fragrant heartwood and roots have for centuries been an integral part of Hindu rituals; they have been turned into various types of sweet-burning incense; and also made into cooling pastes to be applied for religious, cosmetic and medicinal reasons. Sandalwood oil and all its spinoffs are also now major commercial products, especially in Mysore. Indeed Santalum album and Karnataka are so closely connected that the state’s film industry is called Sandalwood…
Sandalwood is also synonymous with the great bandit of the south, Veerappan. Veerappan famously poached the precious trees from jungles in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala, when he wasn’t busy that is killing policemen and kidnapping filmstars.
Luckily – for us at least – the trees we have been harvesting from are all small and of no interest to poachers; it could take decades for them to reach the stage where the wood matures enough to have value. Apparently so endangered are the trees, and so lucrative with sandalwood oil retailing for lakhs of rupees per litre, that laws allow land owners to grow but not cut or harvest the wood.
What really puzzles me though is that no one seems to eat any part of the tree, at least in India. There are references to traditional and contemporary consumption of the fruit and nuts in other countries, but even there there’s no mention of the leaves being eaten. So it’s odd that in a village like ours which has lost most of its knowledge of wild edible plants the seemingly arcane practice of eating Sandalwood leaves has persisted. I can only suppose it’s because the trees are so common and the leaves make such a quick and good dish.
What stories do I have of these berries? Not many. But I do have fond memories of picking these bright berries for their meager yet soft sweet flesh. They grow a lot at our riverside farm. Hence when I spent time reading a book on the warm river sand, these were a quick snack. While you read this, you may wonder if the Ixora in your garden ever had ripe red berries? Most probably not. Many known Ixoras are cultivated for their ornamental use. While the ones that I talk about are wild.
Ixora growing wild among river rocks.
The tender shoots and flowers of this plant are used in chutneys. The flowers are used fresh or dried as condiments. The berries are of course eaten by wild kids like me. The leaves, roots, flowers, and bark are medicinal. The leaves can be used to externally treat sores and ulcers. The roots are antiseptic, astringent and provide relief in abdominal pains. The flowers have milder properties as the roots.
Ixora Coccinea: Other names – West Indian Jasmine, Flame Flower, Rangan, Rookmini, Gudda Daasala, Maale Gida, Hole Daasala, Cekki, Cetti. Do you know this plant? Have you ever eaten these berries?
There are two huge, peculiar-looking trees in the jungle behind us. They are about 40ft tall, extremely straight with short, horizontal branches that have giant-sized dark green leaves. Long ago Bharath told us this is girke and that it produces an edible fruit. This winter for the first time we found a few ripe, half-eaten fruits lying below the tree. They were sweet and slightly sour, and smelt of mango. Before we could investigate much further a herd of elephants took up residence in exactly this spot and we didn’t dare go in.
Last week, with the departure of the elephants, Uppu and Bharath went to collect some more fruit. Bharath is a brilliant climber so rather than gleaning the fallen stuff he shimmied half way up the trunk and started shaking the fruit of the branches while Uppu ran around collecting it and trying not to be hit. In half an hour they had a gunny sack full of it. Jam time.
As we still has no idea what the fruit was and couldn’t look it up, I used my standard jam-making recipe: half a cup of sugar for every cup of fruit plus the juice of one lemon. As it was fairly chunky I roughly blended it once cooked and then brought to the boil again before bottling. The result is an aromatic and quite tart jam that reminds us of mango.
After much fruitless googling, I got in touch with Dr Datchanamoorthy who runs the herbarium at the wonderful FRLHT in Bangalore. I had met Dr Datchanamoorthy a few months ago and he kindly offered to help us identify tricky plants. Pat came the reply: Garcinia xanthochymus.
The Garcinia family includes our much-loved kokum and also mangosteen. Garcinia xanthochymus is known as false//sour/yellow mangosteen and also Mysore gamboge. Interestingly the gum it produces, named gamboge, is used to dye the yellow robes of Buddhist monks.
I’m guessing it would make a delicious cordial and might also work well in Mangalore-style sweet and sour sambars, similar to wild mango.
Clitoria ternatea, hence named as its flower resembles that part of the female anatomy. This gorgeous flower is served as a premium spa drink in Thailand for a reason – or many.
Known as Aparajita, Shankapushpa, Sangu poo – this perennial plant is a creeper that is also a nitrogen-fixing plant. The leaves of Clitoria are often dried and powdered to avail the numerous health benefits. The pods are edible when tender.
The magic, though, lies in the flowers. We had this magic drink at Gowri’s house. We have made it often since then and the magic is exciting to see and show every time.
Steep 3-4 flowers (fresh/dry) in hot water for 5-10 minutes. Add honey if desired. Pour in transparent glasses. In front of your guests, squeeze a few drops of lemon juice in each glass. Now see the tea change color!
This delightful drink is not just magical. It purifies blood and works as an anti-ageing drink – in particular glycation (a protein damage caused by an increase in sugar molecules). A very good detox drink too. A 2015 research says that it could help with cognitive functions of boosting learning and memory.
When we bought this land along with some friends a few years ago, nine out of the 16-odd acres was planted with Arabica coffee. Initially we tried to look after the coffee plantation using organic methods – jivamrta, intercropping, that kind of thing. Nine acres is a huge area though. Our hands were more than full with building structures and setting up community life on the jungle land, and we didn’t want to hand over the maintenance of the plantation to anyone else as we knew they would use conventional chemical methods. So we increasingly left the coffee to fend for itself.
Five years on, the soil is covered in a rich leaf litter; creepers, shrubs, baby trees and brambles have covered every conceivable gap; and our coffee plants are tall and spindly rather than broad and bushy. They are also fighting for survival with the jungle’s native animal inhabitants, including the elephants who spent most of the Christmas and New year’s break camping in our jungli plantation as well as our jungle land. The coffee plants don’t give too many cherries but the few that are produced are wonderfully sweet and juicy compared to those of our neighbours’ manicured estates.
With such a small harvest we decided to pick the coffee ourselves this year, with the help of friends and volunteers. One of the perks of harvesting is snacking on the cherries while you pick. We all enjoyed the fruit so much I started to think of ways to preserve it.
Coffee processing in Sakleshpur usually follows one of two methods: dry hulling, where the whole cherries are dried in the sun for ten days and then hulled and wet hulling, where the fresh cherries are passed through a special machine with plenty of water to separate them from the bean. In both, the fruit is not used at all, except to make a mulch after the wet-hulling method. It seems such a waste not to use something so sweet, and it turns out the coffee cherry also has some serious health benefits. Move over kombucha…
After two and a half hours of squeezing coffee beans out of the cherries though I was beginning to understand why people don’t bother. It’s fiddly and takes a hell of a long time. Still, once de-beaned, the coffee cherries are fairly versatile and can be made into all kinds of things or dehydrated for later use.
So far we have managed to make coffee jam and coffee jelly; recipes below. I see there are companies selling coffee fruit tea from the rehydrated fruit and coffee extract. Apparently even Starbucks had a coffee fruit latte at one point. But that’s all a bit out of my league.
Right now I am content to bask in the fact that we are creating a super food out of a waste product.
Coffee Jam: Remove beans from fruit. Boil 3 cups beans with 1-1.5 cups sugar and 1-2 lemons and enough water. When water has reduced and is syrupy, blend roughly. Then boil again (should change from red sludge colour to strong dark red) and bottle.
Coffee Jelly: Boil 2 cups whole berries, with beans, in 3 cups water. Squeeze out berries and then strain. Mix 1/3 cup pectin with 4 cups sugar and add to the mixture, stirring vigorously. Add 1/3 cup lemon. Then heat until boiling up to top of pan. Boil for one minute and bottle.
” i have come across you many times but then you were just a pretty plant. Until one day, you became useful. Then some day delicious. ”
Ananthnul or ananthmool (H) is named after the never-ending root this plant has. In konkani we call it dudhval (dudh – milk, val – creeper). A plant that gives a milky sap from its leaves or a plant that helps in the production of milk in lactating mothers.
Having 110 Sanskrit names,43 in Kannada, 41 in Sanskrit, 33 in Telugu and 12 in Hindi, this plant seems to be pretty popular. I’ll list out its virtues later. But the part of this plant that is edible is its – root.
Hemidesmus Indicus or Indian Sarsaparilla is now cultivated in some places for its medicinal use. You can find it in ayurvedic shops or online in dried root and powder form. Some shops sell the ‘mix and drink’ version.
One interesting thing I found out while searching the term sarsaparilla is a product called ‘Sarsaparilla Root Beer’. While the root is from a different plant (sassafras root bark) from Central America, there are similar products made from Indian Sarsaparilla too.
We have this plant growing wild all over the place on our farm. I have dug up a couple of looking plants, but getting the thick roots out was a little difficult.
Indian Sarsaparilla
In the current trend of having processed, preservative filled, bottles juices, tasting something home made, fresh and earthy is refreshing. So, I got some ananthmool roots from the local ayurvedic shop. Rinsed the roots in water and dried them. The next day I coarsely ground them using the small bowl of the electric mixer.
The ground powder (about 100 gms), 250 gms jaggery, and a tsp of salt were put into a steel vessel and topped up with a liter of water. This mixture was left to soak for about an hour. Then, on slow heat, we boiled it until the liquid was reduced in half. Once cooled, we strained the mix and poured the liquid into a bottle.
We have tried this with water and nut milk. We loved it both ways. The kids preferred the cashew nut milk mix.
Make it, enjoy it for its taste. While you do, remember that this is also a cooling drink to have in the summers. It is a known body coolant. Hence, ‘ushna’ body types will find health benefits in its regular use. While the leaves have wound healing abilities, the root can be used to treat ulcers, fever, asthma, wounds, purify blood, treat urinary tract infections, and rheumatic joints.
As I plunged into a pond to pluck some long water lily stems, the word ‘lotus-eaters’ floated to the surface of my mind. The lotus-eaters appear in both Homer and Herodotus; a race of people addicted to the oblivion that the lotus plant brings. No one is sure where this land was – but I’m guessing not India given that Odysseus stoped there on his wandering way home from Troy to Ithaca. The plant in question hasn’t been positively identified either.
In the Indian tradition, the lotus has very different associations. The lotus is beautiful and pretty women are compared to them. The lotus is sacred and goddesses are enthroned upon them. It is a mainstay of all Indian art and also India’s national flower and the symbol of the right wing BJP party. It certainly isn’t primarily thought of as a food.
Both lotuses and water lilies – both of which are meant when the blanket term lotus, and its Indian language equivalents, are used – though do indeed have edible parts.
I haven’t yet been able to find any wild Nelumbo nucifera, the ‘true’ lotus. Water lilies though are growing around here and from what I’ve been able to find out there are at least four or five different types of water lily in India with culinary and/or medicinal properties.
Nymphaea nouchali is perhaps the most common and well known water lily in India. It is sometimes given the name ‘Blue Water Lily’ but can in fact be several other colours as well as blue-purple. We have the white ones growing here and this is the season for them to bloom, after the rains have stopped.
Nymphaea nouchali
Apparently the rhizome is edible, but as I haven’t yet figured out how to dig underwater in a muddy pond (where’s gillyweed when you need it?) I can’t vouch for that.
In the north, people eat the flower stems so it was this that we tried first. You peel the outer skin of the stems, as for colocasia stems, and then stir fry them with mustard oil, curry leaves, turmeric and poppy seed paste or, in our time-pressed case, just a simple tadka. They were crunchy and quite a hit when we served them on Christmas Day.
Locals here don’t eat the stem but they do eat the tiny red seeds in the unopened bud. These can be eaten raw, cooked or dried and ground into a flour. We ate them raw but weren’t overwhelmed by the taste and it seems an awful lot of work to collect and process them.
The flowers and leaves can also be eaten as a vegetable but we haven’t yet tried. Several resources also talk about the fruit being edible – can anyone tell me what the fruit of a water lily is?
Nymphoides indica
Nymphoides indica has a lovely English name: water snowflake. I have read that the young leaves, stems and buds are edible. We have tried the young leaves and buds but found them rather bitter. Perhaps there is a way of processing them to remove the bitterness.
Nymphoides hydrophylla or white water snowflake is similar and is meant to be edible but we haven’t yet found it in the wild.
I would love to know other ways of cooking and eating these two plants.
I haven’t read anything about Nymphaea pubescens – which can be white, red or pink, and is named the hairy water lily – being edible although it certainly has medicinal properties as do all of these. At any rate we haven’t seen it yet.
Nor so far have we experienced blissful forgetfulness, lotus-eaters though we now may be…
(Special thanks to Lawrence, Jessie and of course Uppu who braved pond and paddy in our quest for the white stuff…)
Lotus hunting
Got one!
UPDATE February 2020: I found a huge pond full of beautiful pink water lilies, almost certainly Nymphaea pubescens. These were much bigger than Nymphaea nouchali and with correspondingly thicker stems. I looked longingly at them but couldn’t ignore the filth of the water they grew in. Many a Sanskrit poet has played on the fact that the lovely flowers of lotuses and water lilies emerge from the mire – hence panka-ja, ‘mud-born’ – but good old honest mud is one thing and this sink of sewer water and beer cans quite another.
Forest Foods of Northern Region of Western Ghats is the only book I’ve seen so far in India to focus on edible wild plants, rather than medicinal, and at the same time feature high quality photographs to help the reader identify each plant. The authors have also included basic details of how to prepare and cook each of the parts of the plants listed.
I wanted a copy as soon as I saw it but like so many of these books it wasn’t available on Amazon. I got lucky though – I managed to get the phone number of one of the authors, Dr Mandar Datar, and when I spoke to him he kindly offered us a complimentary copy.
So far we have used the book to identify and eat:
Asparagus racemosus – each small plant has a large clump of roots which are sweet to eat raw. This is the famous shatavari of Ayurveda, used to promote healthy menstruation, lactation and female well being in general.
Canna indica – an edible root (raw or cooked), shoots that can be cooked as a vegetable, tasty young seeds and as a bonus you can use the large leaves to steam things in – we made steamed chocolate rice sweets
Costus speciosos – a very fibrous root but certainly edible if cut up into tiny pieces or processed to remove the fibre
Diplocyclos palmata or the lollipop plant – its leaves can be cooked and make a good side dish
Hibiscus furcatus – identified but not yet tried
Ipomoea nil – this is one of the morning glory plants and has edible leaves
Mucuna pruriens – we’ve tried its leaves which were slightly tough, and are waiting for the fruiting season to try the seeds
Nymphaea nouchali – covered in an upcoming post
Ripe fruit of the Physalis minima
Physalis minima – we have been eating the ripe fruit but didn’t know the leaves were also edible. When we tried them though (with a dry pumpkin subji) they were extremely bitter and nothing we tried could make them palatable.
The only drawback, from our perspective, is that the book’s scope is geographically limited. For anyone foraging in the Western Ghats though I would definitely recommend this.
Jungli Food 