Finding mulberries (shahtoot) in Delhi

I heard that mulberries were being sold in the city, and so I asked my colleague Gaurav if he had seen any. Thus began Gaurav's hunt for shahtoot :) It took him all over the city, but finally he found this young boy selling mulberries in Old Delhi. 

There was no shortage of buyers. First there was a man in a white shirt.

And then a boy with his father on a scooter.

The sweet lure of shahtoot drew everyone to it. Shahtoot. What an interesting name, shah originating from the Farsi word for emperor, and toot meaning berries. The King's Berries. It is pronounced sheh, not shah, actually. Typically the fruits start to develop in April, and are seen in the markets up to May. 

The mulberry tree is originally from China, but it has grown in India for so long that it has become naturalised.  There are two types of mulberry usually found in Delhi - morus alba (white) and morus australis (darker berries). But the so called "white" mulberry tree produces fruits of all colours, ranging from pale yellow to very dark purple, so it's difficult to tell the two sub-species apart.

This batch of mulberries has all kinds of shades, but they
are all from the same white mulberry tree.

In fact, other variants, like morus nigra (black mulberry) and morus serrata (Himalayan mulberry) are probably here somewhere as well, quietly growing in some part of the city. But the fact that the white mulberry produces such a diverse range of fruit colours means that these other types are hard to identify when you see the fruits in the market.

Mulberry Tree growing in Sarai Kale Khan

Silkworms have been reared on the white mulberry tree in China for silk since antiquity. In Japan also, where silk is made from the mulberry tree, there are over 700 recognised varieties of white mulberry.

In India, the silk that we see in the market is primarily sourced through silkworms reared on mulberry trees. The major mulberry silk producing states are Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Jammu-Kashmir. These states together account for 92 % of country's total mulberry raw silk production. There are about 6 million workers in the silk production process, of which 60% are women.

A couple of years ago, I went to a weaver's house in Kanchipuram, in Tamil Nadu. They were a family of traditional weavers, and like all traditional establishments, it was a cottage industry with everyone in the family involved in the many activities. I saw silk thread (uncoloured) and also the thread coloring and weaving process.

Uncoloured silk thread. This is the raw material
which they purchase from silk suppliers 
(it comes from silkworms bred on mulberry leaves).

The weaver's family dyes the thread, and winds it into wooden spools.
Mostly this activity is done by women, and it is interspersed with
other household work like cooking and cleaning

The thread is placed on the loom as per the design (which is defined 
through a complicated pattern of vertical threads and knots).
It is then woven into cloth. The whole thing is a slow process, 
and the end result is a shining silk saree.

When you see the mulberry tree, it's difficult to imagine that such a beautiful glossy thread can come from it. But the process of rearing silkworms, and getting the silk from it, is far from beautiful.

http://www.designboom.com/history/silk1.html

There's an outstanding step-by-step set of photos here, if you'd like to see it. Very time-consuming, and  labour-intensive. And yes, for those of you who are squeamish, they do boil the cocoons to kill the chrysalis.

Apart from being used for rearing silkworms, the mulberry tree has many other uses. In rural areas, the bark of the tree is used to weave baskets. You can make a cool sherbet for summer. Nirulas in Delhi also sells mulberry jam. In the Unani medicine system, mulberries are popularly used for sore throats, and also as a cure for melancholia. Some scientific studies show that mulberry extract has "has anti–inflammatory, exudative, proliferative and anti-pyretic activities".

Next time you see shahtoot being sold, buy some and try making sherbet from it. Here's my version:

• Buy 200 gms of mulberries, wash and clean it and pat it dry
• Remove stems
• Add approximately same amount of sugar, blitz in your mixer
• Taste and see if it is super-sweet.
• Add juice of 1 lemon or half a lemon, depending on how you want it
• Strain the juice
• Serve with ice, garnished with mint

This is a fresh juice, which you should ideally consume the same day. Enjoy :)

The Marathas in Delhi

Not many people know that Delhi was under the control of the Marathas in the late 1700s.

But the Diwan-e-Khas of the Red Fort in Delhi is a standing reminder of the Maratha presence in the city. A major portion of the silver enamelling from the roof and walls of the Diwan-e-Khas was knocked down and melted by the Marathas, to finance their foray into North-West India.

Diwan-E-Khas, Hall of Private Audience, Red Fort, Delhi

After the death of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, the Marathas emerged victorious in the 27 year long Mughal-Maratha conflict. Under the two Maratha Peshwas, Baji Rao I and Balaji Baji Rao, the Marathas began an ambitious expansion program, dreaming of a large pan-Indian empire. They began conquering territories in all directions, including northwards, paving the way for them to become the most dominant empire in India.

Other than the green portions, everything else on this map below shows areas under the Maratha Confederacy (either direct rule, or right to taxes, or areas raided) 

Under Peshwa administration and with the support of several key
generals and diplomats, the Maratha Empire reached its zenith,
ruling most of the Indian subcontinent landmass. 

Ahmad Shah Abdali, also called
Ahmad Shah Durrani is the
founder of what we know today
as Afghanistan.

In Delhi, the weakness of the Mughals had allowed Ahmad Shah Durrani (an Afghan who wanted to expand his territory) to take over the city in 1757. He returned to Afghanistan, leaving behind his son Timur at Delhi. At the invitation of the Mughals, the Marathas captured Delhi by 1758, defeating the Durranis. Timur fled to Afghanistan.

The capture of Delhi was only a political gain for the Marathas, because the city was bankrupt - the treasures of the Mughal Empire had been squandered by Aurangzeb in his futile quarter century war against the Marathas. What remained had been looted by Nadir Shah in 1739 and by Ahmad Shah Durrani. 

Hard-pressed for money, the Marathas stripped the Red Fort’s Diwan-i-khas of its silver (amounting to Rs 9 lakhs, two months upkeep for the Maratha army). 

After capturing Delhi, the Marathas moved further north-west, conquering territories as far as Lahore, Attock and Peshawar, chasing the Afghans beyond the Khyber pass. 

However, as soon as the Marathas diverted their northern troops south, the Durranis returned to soundly defeat the Marathas and re-capture Delhi. There was a decisive battle at Panipat in 1761, where the Maratha forces were routed. Over 100,000 Marathas (both combatants and non-combatants) perished; while some managed to return to their homes. The Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao lost his son in the battle and died a broken man the same year.

Mahadajee Scindia of Gwalior

The Panipat battle dealt a severe blow to Maratha supremacy. However, ten years later, in 1767, under Peshwa Madhavrao, the Marathas rose again to came northwards. 

The Maratha general Mahadajee Scindia captured Delhi again, appointed the Mughal Shah Alam II as a puppet king, and reinforced Maratha foothold in Central and North India. 

However, the grand confident ambitions which fueled earlier Maratha thrusts northwards, and their dreams of creating the next big pan-Indian empire, did not resurface. The death of Peshwa Madhavrao in 1772, the breaking up of the Maratha confederacy into strong individual fiefdoms (the Holkars, Scindias, Bhonsles etc), and the loss of group identity and confidence after Panipat led to the gradual weakening of the Martha empire until they finally lost to the British.

Thus ended a major chapter in Indian history; starting with the founding of the Maratha empire in 1684 by Shivaji, and ending with the third Anglo-Maratha war in 1818. If you would like to see an interesting series of photos of Maratha weaponry, head over to our facebook page album.

- By Aishwarya Pramod, with inputs from Deepa Krishnan

Photo source: All photos from Wikipedia

Signboards in Delhi - and the language debates in India

-by Aishwarya Pramod

If you drive through the streets of central Delhi, you'll come across road signs like this one:

Dr. Zakir Hussain Marg is an arterial road leading south-east from India Gate

The name of the road is written in the four main languages of Delhi - from top to bottom, these are:
- Hindi (in the Devnagri script)
- English (in the Roman alphabet)
- Punjabi (in the Gurmukhi script) and
- Urdu (in a modified form of the Persian nastaliq script).

Under Mughal rule in Old Delhi, the official court language was Persian, the formal and elaborate language of scholars.

A section of an official firman from the Mughal Emperor 
Aurangzeb's rule, late 17th century

Although Persian was used for official purposes, the real lingua franca was Hindustani - a language which pre-dated the Mughals. Hindustani arose in the 11th century AD, through contact between the local Indian population, and various Muslim invaders, traders and religious men who settled in Hindustan from the north-west. It was a hotch-potch language which allowed speakers of Turkic, Arabic and Persian to communicate with native Indian speakers. In Delhi, the popular local language was Khadi Boli. Hindustani retained the grammar and structure of Khadi Boli but also absorbed a large number of Persian, Arabic and Turkic words for better cross-cultural communication. Typically, Hindus wrote Hindustani in the native Devnagri script, while Muslims wrote Hindustani in a modified version of the Persian script. 

When the East India Company came to power after the Mughals, they continued to use Persian for administrative purposes. Only in the 1830's did the Company replace Persian by introducing English as the official language at higher levels of administration. At the lower levels, government business was conducted in Indian vernacular languages. In much of north India, this language was Hindustani. 

When the British declared Hindustani with Persian script to be a co-official language in much of north India, Hindus cried foul. They wanted the native Devnagiri script to be used.

The terms 'Hindi' and 'Urdu' came to be used for two versions of Hindustani. Both started out very similar, but slowly,  'Hindi' became the Devnagri script based, increasingly Sanskritized version, and 'Urdu' became the Persian script based version. Hindi became a Hindu language and Urdu became a Muslim language (see this article for a more detailed explanation). 

Signboard for a Unani medicine shop in Old Delhi. The Devnagri script is on the right

After the British left, the issue of official language came up again. Adopting a Constitution written in English, the colonizers' language, was offensive to many members of the Constituent Assembly. An Indian language had to be chosen.

But India had more than 400 living languages. Even apart from the growing communal divide between Hindi and Urdu, the south Indian states spoke Dravidian languages, which were entirely different. So, in which language should the affairs of government be run? And of course, which language (and which script?!) should be designated India's rashtra-bhasha, the national language?

The Constituent Assembly of India with Jawaharlal Nehru at the rostrum.
The Assembly saw many heated arguments regarding the language issue.

Nehru and Gandhi both felt that Hindustani could be used as an all-India language of communication, using both the Urdu and Devnagri scripts. Gandhi especially tried to promote Hindustani as the perfect language to bridge the gap between Hindus and Muslims.

The Partition of India effectively killed all talk of Hindustani. It significantly reduced the number of Urdu speakers in India, as many Muslims went to Pakistan (although Old Delhi still has many Urdu speakers). Partition also brought in a large number of Hindu and Sikh Punjabi-speaking refugees to Delhi.

A Sikh family on the move. Post Partition, nearly 500,000 refugees poured
 into Delhi from western Punjab, Sindh and the Northwest Frontier. 

The refugees spread out through the city, squatting wherever they could. Eventually they were allocated land to the south and west of Lutyens' Delhi, where today we can see the large number of colonies dominated by Punjabis. Displaying thrift and business skills, the Punjabis eventually came to play an important role in Delhi's trade and commerce. Thus Delhi has made multiple transformations, from a Mughal, to a British, to a Punjabi city.

The refugees moved into camps, gurudwaras, temples, 
schools, military barracks, pavements as well as parks in Delhi.

After Partition, Hindi became further Sanskritized. But Hindi was even less acceptable to the Dravidian states than Hindustani (as this photo from a South Indian newspaper shows!).

Front page of Periyar E. V. Ramasamy's Tamil 
periodical Kudi-arasu (3 September 1939). 
The headline reads "Veezhga Indhi"
 (Down with Hindi)

Finally, in spite of protests, the Assembly decided that Hindi in Devnagiri script would be the government's official language. To give the non-Hindi speaking states time to learn Hindi, the Assembly decided that English would continue for the next 15 years for Centre-State communication. Also, each State and Union Territory could have their own official language for official communication within the state.

After the expiry of the 15-year period, in 1963, attempts were made to end the use of English. But large scale protests from non-Hindi speaking states ensured the continued use of English as the official language of the government.

Delhi, as a Union Territory, originally adopted Hindi as its official language. It also continues to issue orders and circulars in English. In 2003, Urdu (in the Urdu script) and Punjabi (in the Gurmukhi script) were added as official languages. Since then, all government signs, roads, etc. bear names in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and English.

Raj Path (King's Way), with the President's House at the far end

I'm going to miss my Gaajar ka Halwa !

All through Dec-March, I have been enjoying the taste of fresh, bright red winter carrots:

Go on, admit it. They look fantastic, don't they?

During the rest of the year we get these orange ones; they are small and stubby and not very interesting.

"Regular" carrots for sale at Chittaranjan Park
These orange ones always remind me of Brer Rabbit, for some reason :)

Then along comes winter, and the long red ones start appearing in the markets. They're so juicy and sweet that I often end up buying more than I need!

This year I've eaten an unusually high number of winter carrots. I've julienned and grated them into several salads. I've diced them small into biryanis and pulaos. I've sauted them with other winter vegetables as a stuffing for rolls. But what I've enjoyed the most - my favourite winter carrot treat - has been Gaajar ka Halwa.

I suspect this is North India's favourite winter dessert, because I know very few people who don't like it. What's not to like about a mixture of carrots, milk and sugar? :) :)

Hot Gaajar Halwa from my kitchen, just before the garnishing
Now that spring is here, I am going to have to say goodbye to this :(

The markets are still carrying several winter vegetables; although in a few weeks it will be all gone.

I am not a big fan of radishes, but lots of people love them and winter is when the best ones make their appearance. Chef Sanjeev Kapoor has a whole bunch of radish (mooli) recipes here. My favourite among them is mooli paratha.

Fresh winter radishes in Delhi's bazaars

Another winter specialty is broadbeans or sem phalli.
 This year the crop in Rajasthan has fared really badly due to frost.

But the best part of winter is all the green leafy vegetables that appear in the market. Spinach, amaranth, mustard greens, fenugreek, there's lots to choose from! In general we don't eat leafy vegetables in the monsoons, so when winter comes, it's great to be able to add these to the diet.

What a pleasing sight!

The last couple of weekends, we have been indulging ourselves with paalak ke pakode (spinach fritters). It's really super-tasty, and Sanjeev Kapoor's video is very good. So here's the video recipe; watch it, it will make you salivate!

If you cannot follow Hindi, then the English language recipe is here. Spinach will be in the markets all through spring, so you can try this recipe next weekend. The entire family will clamour for more. Let me know how it goes!!

Truck art in India - I love it :)

One of the pleasures of a driving holiday in India is the gaily painted trucks I get to see on the road.

Truck art interests me because it makes for great photography, but also because each truck "talks to me" about the owner and some of his thoughts. 

This truck above is a great example of typical Indian truck art

There are so many interesting things that this truck is telling me. For example, I know that the owner of the truck is called Choudhary. This tells me something about his ancestors. The word Choudhary originally referred to landholders who collected tax on behalf of the king, and were entitled to withhold 25% (Choudhary means "holder of a fourth"). So this particular Choudhary obviously has diversified from agriculture into the trucking business :)

Agriculture is still very much the major theme of the truck. Under the sacks of onions which the truck is carrying, you can see a scene of bucolic plenty. Buxom prosperous women with lots of jewellery, green fertile lands, plenty of water, lactating cows, fruits, vegetables, well-built village houses - each of these is a symbol for prosperity and plenty. This is Indian representational art at its folksy best.

Scenes of almost unreal rural prosperity are a common theme on Indian trucks

The Choudhary surname is widespread across North India, so just going by the name, I cannot tell where this particular guy comes from. This village scene gives me no specific clues, except that the costumes of the women are the North Indian ghagra-choli. Besides, the vehicle says it has a National Permit (NP), so it could literally be from anywhere. But the truck art gives me more clues: 

Under the title Choudhary the truck says "Veer Tejaji" in Devnagri script

Veer Teja is a folk hero from Rajasthan, so now I have my next little piece of info :) This is probably a Rajasthani Choudhary. Now I see the semi-hidden license plate, and find out it is a Goa license (GA = Goa). So maybe this Rajasthani Choudhary currently lives in Goa. Or, more likely, maybe he bought and registered the truck there for some tax break. There are two names, Vishal and Anurag, also written. Probably his sons. 

Apart from these "identifying marks", there are interesting homilies and sayings painted on the truck. 

• "Maa ka aashirvaad" (Mother's Blessings) is a very common feature of all Indian trucks, and refers to the almost divine status accorded to mothers in popular culture (many Bollywood movies have this theme too). 
• "Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram" (Truth, God, Beauty); this is a traditional philosophical statement that has entered the mainstream because it is also the title of a famous 70's Hindi movie. 
• "Soch kar socho saath kya jayega" translates to "Think! What can you take with you when you go (die)?". It's another philosophical statement which suggests that too much attachment to material possessions is meaningless.
• "Jai Hind" (Victory to India) - another popular theme, expressing national pride and patriotism

As you can see from the above, truck art is not just about painting a truck. It is a fairly complex expression of the cultural background, community, personality and belief systems of the person owning the truck.

Another common feature of Indian truck art is what I can only call "driving instructions". Horn, Please or Horn OK Please is the most ubiquitous one, asking those following the truck to honk while overtaking so that the truck driver is alert to their presence. Drivers use their hand - they stick it out of the window and wave - to signal to people behind them that they may now overtake the truck. At night this system doesn't work, hence the somewhat baffling "Use Dipper at Night". You are supposed to flash your dipper (high beam), and then "Wait for Side" (which the truck driver will signal using the blinking red light signal). Then you can overtake. For much of India's trucking years, we have had narrow highways and side-roads, often permitting only one vehicle in each direction. So this kind of signalling is essential.

Here is another gorgeously painted truck, that I photographed near Jaipur:

A charming find on the Jaipur Highway :) :)

You can tell by now, that there are lots of similar elements between the two trucks, right? This one has the same buxom woman, signs of prosperity and plenty and identification markings showing the trucker's community (Meena) and his favourite god (Hanuman). On the top of the truck it says "Dekh Saheli tera aashik aaya", which brought a smile to my face. "Look, says the heroine's friend to her, your lover has arrived". And it has the ever-popular warning "Buri nazar wale, tera muh kaala" (Oh you person with the evil-eye, may your face be blackened).

If you are travelling in India and come across beautifully painted trucks, do send me some photographs! I am creating a facebook album for them, and would love to add to my collection. You can email them to deepa at delhimagic dot com and I'll send you an invite to the rest of the album. Thanks in advance :) :)

Know your spices (1) - Jeera

Every Indian woman knows this spice: cumin, jeera, jeerakam, jeergey, jeeralu. It is in my kitchen masala box too. But in spite of being so familiar with it, I realised that I had no idea where it grew! Or when! Or how it reached my kitchen! So when I spotted a big heap of jeera at Khari Baoli, I decided to ask the shopkeeper where it came from. 

Cumin (Jeera) stacked at the Spice Market at Khari Baoli (Old Delhi)

The shopkeeper looked at me somewhat irritatedly. "It comes mostly from Gujarat", he said, "and Rajasthan." Ah. So at least now I could place the spice geographically into Western India! Since the shopkeeper wasn't very forthcoming, I went to the Spice Board website, and looked up some data. It turns out that India is the largest producer of cumin in the world (80% of world output). Most of this jeera is for domestic use. Only about 20% of what we produce is exported (mainly to the US, Brazil and the UK). 

Jeera is a rabi crop, which grows in dry winters. It is sown in Oct-Nov-Dec, and harvested in Jan-Feb-March. So the best time to see jeera in the wholesale markets is in March, when major deliveries come trundling in. But you will also see jeera all through Jan-Feb (the peak tourist season!). 

The biggest "mandi" for jeera in India is in Gujarat, in a little town called Unjha (couple of hours drive north of Ahmedabad).

Ganj Bazaar, Unjha.
Photo source: http://nitatheworldthroughmylens.blogspot.in/2012/02/india-where-i-come-from-unjha-part-1.html

Among the larger cities, Delhi is a very big terminal market for jeera. Other big markets are at Jaipur, Jodhpur and Rajkot. The National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange has its cumin warehouse in Unjha and in Jodhpur (Salawas).  A couple of years ago, I went to Jodhpur, and I saw lots of cumin and cumin-related products (such as jeera-goli) at the Jodhpur Clock Tower market.

This is me at the wholesale grain market in Jodhpur.

Behind me you can see jute sacks filled with wheat. Like wheat, jeera is also usually packed in jute bags, with the edges sewn by hand to prevent spillage. Usually jeera is quick to absorb moisture, which spoils it and reduces its value. So it is stored away from damp areas. The jeera-goli (candied jeera) you see in the bottom-right of the photo is a digestive made with jeera, amchur (dry mango powder) and sugar. It is one of my favourite tidbits, and in fact, I don't know anyone who doesn't like it.  

Jeera is a friendly spice that gets along well with other spices :) :) My friend Hina is Gujarati, and this is her  kitchen masala box. 

Spice box from a Gujarati kitchen

Of course, there is jeera in one of the containers; but if you look again, you will see that jeera is also a key ingredient in two others :) Near the yellow turmeric, there is a dhania-jeera powder, made by dry roasting coriander and cumin and then grinding them. And just below the red chilli powder is Hina's own blend of garam masala, which contains jeera and a host of other spices.

Because jeera is such an everyday spice, it is hard to pick just one jeera-flavoured dish that is special. But if I had to choose one, I would pick the simplest of them all, jeera-aloo (potatoes flavoured with cumin). 

There are many variants of jeera-aloo. My dish above has baby potatoes tempered with jeera, finely chopped green chillies and ginger, and garnished with coriander. Some recipes use red chilli powder, garam masala and dry mango (amchur) powder. The really great thing about jeera aloo is that you can attempt any variant of it, and you'll still always end up with something good. Great for rookie cooks!! Try it!

While we're on the subject of jeera, I must talk about shahi jeera (also called kala jeera or black jeera). This is a darker, thinner spice, which looks and tastes different from the standard jeera. It grows, not in the hot dry areas of Gujarat or Rajasthan, but in the cold terrain of Kashmir and Ladakh. While jeera is used almost everywhere in India, shahi jeera is mostly seen only in Kashmiri and Mughlai cooking.

Shahi Jeera
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Cumin.jpg

There's a lot of confusion about shahi jeera/kala jeera. In some languages, like Assamese and Bengali for instance, kala jeera / kalo jeera is used to mean the nigella seed (kalonji), which is an entirely different thing.

Kalonji (nigella)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nigella_Sativa_Seed.jpg

In Bengali cooking, kalonji and jeera come together, along with other spices, to form the very unique panch-phoron (five-spice).

Panch-phoron, photographed at the Kotla Sabzi Mandi, Delhi
Fenugreek (methi), Nigella (kalonji), Mustard seed (rai/shorshe), Fennel seed (saunf / mouri), Cumin seed (jeera)

But more about all these other spices later!! 

Happy Lohri!

It is so cold this winter that everyone is looking forward to the bonfire of the Lohri festival!

Nothing like a bonfire to bring 
happiness on a winter night!

The Lohri festivities start with a prayer...

...followed by the distribution of prashad (offering)

Lohri is the winter harvest festival, and the typical rabi crops make their appearance in the Lohri prashad.

Peanuts, seasame, corn, jaggery, and puffed rice make up the prashad 

Of course, there is always the one hungry kid 
who can't wait until the prayers are said :) :)
(sneaking a few early mouthfuls of prashad)

We go around the fire in a parikrama and make offerings to the flame

And what's a celebration without a lot of drums and dancing!!

HAPPY LOHRI EVERYONE!
MAY YOU HAVE A WONDERFUL 2013!

Love it or hate it? The karela and its avatars!

I was walking through the sabzi mandi at Kotla Mubarakpur, when I spotted this man reaching deep into a damp sack. From under a layer of packing he brought out these small perfect-sized karelas.  

He was stacking them up in an attractive circular display in his basket. What a great photo op!! They were fresh and tender, the ideal sort of karela to buy.

The karela or the bittergourd is not everyone's idea of fun. If you visit someone for dinner, this is the one vegetable that your host will hesitate to put on the table, unless they know you really well.

But me, I'm a big fan. I love the bitterness of the vegetable and how it combines with spices to create a complicated, sophisticated taste. Many karela dishes also have sugar or jaggery, adding a sweet kick as well.

And it looks like there are a lot of karela fans out there, just like me. When I googled for karela recipes, an amazing variety of photos came up, from different parts of India. Some recipes were simple dry versions of karela sauteed with spices, to be eaten with dal-rice or rasam-rice. Others were recipes for moist vegetable curries that you could eat with roti. There were also recipes for stuffed karela of many types, karela pickles, karela chips and karela chutneys.

In fact, the more I saw how cleverly people were cooking karela all over India, the more I realised that this ridiculously bitter vegetable actually highlights the very finest aspects of Indian vegetarian cuisine!

If you've not cooked karela so far, then the first thing to master is a set of techniques to reduce the bitterness of the vegetable.

The most popular technique is to slice the vegetable, smear it with salt and set it aside to marinate for an hour, so that it can "give out" its bitterness. Later, you squeeze the vegetable and throw away the salt water (and along with that, most of the bitterness). In some recipes, you also smear a little bit of lemon juice along with the salt. The trouble with this approach is that along with the salt water, you are also probably tossing away all the anti-diabetic properties of the karela.

A second technique is to scrape off the ridged outer skin, which is bitter. These scrapings are usually not thrown away - they are sauteed into a spice mixture which is then used to flavour the dish.

A third method to reduce bitterness is to keep the skin but throw away the seeds inside. Bigger karelas have hard bitter dry seeds which stick in your throat and are often inedible. If you buy small, tender ones, like the one the man has got in his basket above, then you can keep the seeds if you wish.

Recently, I was introduced to karele-ka-achaar from Uttar Pradesh. It was the most amazing thing I had ever tasted. The karela was cut into small wedges, and there was lots of masala. It was exactly the same masala that you use in the typical stuffed red chilli achar. But in the karela achaar, the slight bitterness took this achaar to a completely different dimension. I ate it with a hot fluffy aromatic basmatic rice pulao, and it was incredible.

In many south Indian recipes, the karela is cooked in tamarind to kill the bitterness. A lot of jaggery is also added. My mum's recipe for parikya-pulikachal (a sweet-spicy-pickle with karela) involves sauteing green chillies, ginger and karela in a tempering of mustard, curry leaves and chana dal. Tamarind extract is added to this and cooked. A little later, jaggery is added to the mixture and cooked further. It tastes heavenly with curd-rice.

My maid, who used to work for a Gujarati home, adds raisins and ghee-fried cashewnuts to her karela-fry dish. It is a startlingly exciting taste, full of contrasts - the plump sweetness of the raisins, the bitterness of the karela, the fieriness of red chili powder and the nutty richness of the cashew. When she makes this dish, I eat it with a simple dal-rice, so that it doesn't interfere with the flavours. Anything else would be an affront to the dish :)

About 4-5 years ago, I had an absolutely delicious Punjabi karela-sabzi at my friend Pooja Sharma's house in Mayur Vihar. Her mother made it in a jiffy and I remember wolfing it down with hot rotis. When I asked her "What is your magic ingredient, aunty?", she said to me, "Nothing complicated, beta, this dish just has salt, red chilli powder and turmeric". I couldn't believe it, and kept trying to replicate it, but I think it takes Mrs. Sharma's special touch to get it perfect. I should just angle for another invitation! :) :)

If you have not tasted karela before, the easiest thing to start with is karela chips. They are popular in many parts of the country, but I have seen them more often in Western and Southern India. They are sliced really thin, coated with a thick batter of gramflour and spices, and deep fried until crisp. The spicy slightly bitter taste is a perfect match for an ice-cold beer. Try it sometime and tell me what you think!