Migratory birds, no jet lag to feel ever at home?

Whenever I catch sight of a flock of migratory birds in flight, I strike up a conversation starting with: what are your international roaming rates? Doesn’t it cost a lot to use Google Maps while roaming? Mostly they don’t look like they’ve even heard me. I am not hurt. How could they possibly know my Malayalam?  Nor would they expect me to speak their Russian.

Siberian cranes fly eastward searching for warmer places in the Southern part of India. How do they manage flying at such high altitudes crossing the Himalayan mountain range without losing their way?

I must be naïve to ask such a question. They started doing it way before the advent of computers, let alone GPS. Siberian cranes use their own inbuilt GPS and coordinates inherited from their forefathers. Finding one’s way home was very much a life skill for our own hunter gatherer forefathers.  But it became a lost art just like our ability to read clouds or being a sure-shot backyard meteorologist. A trade-off with technology for the sake of convenience.

Well, the trees our wayworn feathered guests perch on must be luckier. I used to feel sorry for trees for they can’t move and travel the planet. They are glued to the earth. Even in the worst drought, they cannot leave while animals around migrate. However. It was a later realization for me that the stationary nature of trees often seems compensated for by the birds which choose to chirp on them. Birds move around and collect news from wherever to share with the host at night. Loosing oneself in the stories of yore and thousands of miles away from different lands across the globe they flew over, the trees must be intoxicated into a trance-like sleep, night after night.

Do trees remember the birds that once nested in their branches? Do birds care about the trees that once hosted them offering bed and breakfast in the form of fruits, nuts and insects? No idea. I love to believe they do. They do enquire after each other’s well-being and share their stories from far-off. The Swallow in Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” did talk to the Prince. During the migratory long-distance flights, she couldn’t catch up with her flock. Exhausted, she settled down on the shoulders of the statue of the Happy Prince, hoping of course to start afresh the next morning.

“High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince. He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large ruby glowed on his sword-hilt”. So began Oscar Wild his beautiful short story. The Prince had never seen sorrow while alive enjoying the pleasures of the palace but was shedding tears now seeing the plight of the people. The Swallow ran errands for the Prince, taking each valuable in turn to the ones in distress, near and far.

In 2018 a biopic of Wilde was released bearing the title of his famous short story. A just tribute to the star of the aesthetic movement in English literature.

Just as ephemeral as a view of birds of passage, this year too is fast running out. Edibleshoots wishes you all a merry Christmas, happy 2020, and an exhilarating semester break. Love you all.  
                                                                                                       [Photo credit: A pair of eyes in love]                                

And I am Ghee Vada. Nice to Meet You, Mr. Donut.

An increasing number of people worldwide are ditching “doughnuts” in favor of “donuts”. Even the multinational American fast food company Dunkin Donuts adopted the simplified spelling years ago. Whichever spelling you prefer, the taste remains the same.

The other day, I was invigilating a test. When the last test taker had left, I flipped through a textbook a student had surrendered after a last-minute review and forgotten to claim on leaving the venue. The page I opened to was one that told the story of the doughnut. (I had noticed the textbook earlier on but resisted the temptation to dip into it to satisfy my curiosity. It turned out to have been an exercise in delayed gratification.)

To my surprise, I learned that donuts came to America with Dutch settlers in the 18^th century. Those donuts didn’t have a hole in the middle as they do today. The story goes like this.

Elizabeth Gregory, the mother of the captain of a merchant ship, would prepare her olykoeks (oil cakes) according to her special recipe. She made the dough with milk, butter, flour, sugar and eggs, and added walnuts or hazelnuts and various spices that she got from the cargo that the ship was transporting. Elizabeth’s son, Captain Hanson Gregory, used the top of a round tin to cut into the oil cakes and remove the undercooked inner parts as he didn’t like the raw taste.

That was obviously a waste of food, the captain explained in an interview with the Boston Post many years later.  He went on to say that in 1847, to remedy the problem of an undercooked middle section, they began to put a hole in the middle, allowing the inner part to be equally exposed to heat and therefore baked through. That was the birth of modern donut. I think people in India had known this technique long before, as popular ‘urad dal vadas’ date back to Dravidian times. But history belongs to those who are first to write it down, and India was beaten to it.

Did you know that “doughnut hole” refers not only to the actual hole in the middle of a donut, but also to a ball-shaped pastry originally made from the dough cut out to make the holes? It gets even more interesting. In the U.S. Medicare system a “doughnut hole” means a gap in coverage. So the word “hole” as it relates to donuts, actual or metaphorical, is used in the sense of nothing, something, and nothing respectively. Sorry for getting rather philosophical on you, but I’m in good company. Japanese author Haruki Murakami said in his Metaphysics of Food that “Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit”. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Breadwinners to win your hearts...

           Two Moroccan beauticians used to live on the other side of my street. We had a casual chat at the Afghan baker’s shop in our neighborhood almost daily.  They would invite me to visit their country, as a kind and courteous gesture, at the end of short exchanges of pleasantries while waiting for our hot flatbread straight from the tomb-shaped, clay oven. I would respond with the same courtesy: "Next vacation, Insha Allah, for sure", hoping to go there one day, but not expecting it to ever happen. 

     However, last summer vacation my wildest dreams came true. I found myself traveling alone through a mountain village in Southern Morocco, where a Berber widow taught me how to bake flatbread on hot pebbles in the courtyard of her house. Her dexterity in wetting a peel and using it to lay the flattened, moist dough on a bed of hot pebbles was awe-inspiring. She baked each bread to a golden sheen. (Gotcha! Don’t be taken in by my outlandish lies. I was just kidding. I have never been outside of Asia. The above was only one of the many flights of fancy of a born daydreamer.)

The moment captured in the photo is from the Samosa Souq in Abha during last Ramadan. (This souq is an informal and makeshift two-hour-long market selling Ifthar delicacies only during the 9th month of the Hijri calendar.) By the way, slapping the leavened, flat, elongated bread onto the preheated, clay-lined walls of the vertical oven is itself an art requiring great skill. It looks deceptively easy, but onlookers attempting a trial are bound to come up short.

Don’t think of bread as only European-style loaves. It is one of the oldest forms of cooked food. I haven’t consulted an anthropologist or ethno-archaeologist about this, but my intuition just points in that direction. Speaking from my understanding, during the times we had to survive only on the things we grew ourselves, we cultivated a few patches of rice or wheat. Once harvested, we dried, threshed, winnowed and sieved the grains, ground them into a flour, added some water and salt, then kneaded the dough for making flatbread. 

This is true about every group of people that ever survived on this planet we continue to share living on. Just change the grain grown according to where you live – rather like we did in a substitution table in our grammar school - and the final output changes accordingly.

      Corn and cornbread made in beehive-shaped mud ovens in the Nile Delta; rice and flat rice Pathiri baked in earthen pans by the grandmas of Malabar; wheat and elongated, ovate pita bread of Southern Saudi Arabia; hectors of wheat fields and rising butter naans of North East India - these are just a few to help you with this exercise.

The Empty Quarter / Rubu’al Khali: Dreamwork of Golden Grains

It first rained on Rann of Kutch, the drought-stricken salt desert, on the day Fathima entered the village. Everyone still remembered that day and the girl who had brought rainclouds along into that Monsoon-forgotten hamlet. I recall the images I conjured up while reading The Love Across the Salt Desert by Keki N Daruwalla. No one dared to do the impossible by crossing the desert except those few who did so for “reasons of their own”. Nawab Hussain, for instance, made the journey for “the daughter of the spice seller; she who smelled of cloves and cinnamon”. Ever since reading that story I have romanticized the desert.

Here I am now in a distant relative of the Rann of Kutch: Rubu’al Khali, commonly known as the Empty Quarter, a territory shared by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and Yemen.

        

The silence, the clarity, the mystery, the remoteness, the vastness, the serenity, the eternity and the capricious nature of a wild, other-worldly desert! Rubu’al Khali, 650,000 square kilometers of contiguous golden sand, 1000 kilometers in length and 500 kilometers in width. I had always dreamed of visiting it one day. That day finally came a few months back while I was accompanying a friend of mine on his way to a remote hospital.

I don’t really remember where and when I first heard the name Rubu’al Khali. But I do know I heard about the Empty Quarter long ago. I guess I first came across it in ‘Laurence of Arabia’.

Desert ecology has always been somewhat of a puzzle for scientists and desert inhabitants (called Bedouins) alike. Large swaths of sand stretch beyond one’s ken to the horizon. The sands are golden with a fine grain. I collected some in a bottle I found lying around to bring home just for a kind of fetishist attachment I felt after spending a mere couple of hours there. I hadn’t done anything remotely similar even during my visits to the holiest places earlier. But this time something in me tempted me to. I just yielded to rid myself of the compulsive urge to act whimsically.

The shifting sand dunes, and the curvaceous peaks forming a serpentine line following a mysterious symmetry, are all really alluring. It can win the heart of the worst Philistine. I will show you beauty in a handful of sand grains, hastening back to Earth through my fingers as smoothly as in an hourglass.

Stopping by a lonely car bay, we engaged in some stargazing. Never had I seen such a mesmerizing, starlit sky, ebullient illumination at its best. That brought me to the realization that there was much more to see in the sky than back home, on Mother Earth, than I had previously thought. The car made its way homeward in total silence, through that mesmerizing no man’s land.

Raised Guards:Your Crops Were Under Our Eyes

"Now, I may look like an eyesore to many youngsters. But not so long ago, I stood tall, keeping an eye on the crop that sustained your grandparents. My presence marked the existence of a seemingly sleepy hamlet in every valley in the vast stretch of apparently barren land. I was all alone all the time, keeping guard. Kasaba, that was the name they called the cylindrical tower made of mud, wood and rock flakes that was me.

"Kasabas were built in the same fashion as any adobe building where the people went once their guard was down.  A tubular structure that withstood the perils of the seasons, even though it was simply made of wooden logs, twigs, mud, and rock flakes. I have puzzled over how I survived the sandstorms, rainstorms and even hailstorms that were common before you all were born over here.

"People used to mount the kasaba to stay watchful of the crops they were raising. By every growing field, every tribe used to have one or two, depending on the topography. The same must have been used to scare away animals and birds that might spoil the crops."

Recently, as I was browsing through the stacks of books at Jarir bookstore,  one book really caught my eye: Back to Earth: Adobe Building in Saudi Arabia. I spent a while thumbing through it, marveling at the curious pictures in color. I looked in amazement at those pages. Quite instinctively, I even ran my fingers over the photos to feel if what was being depicted was dirt and rock pieces structurally engineered with logs of wood. The book tells how a kasaba was built back then, and the materials used. It includes a few pictures from Abha where I am currently living. Hopefully, these structures will never be razed to the ground, but live to tell their fascinating tale to future generations.

I didn't know that, did you?

Coming across something abroad we didn’t care for much back home offers us the opportunity to see it with fresh eyes. This is exactly what happened to me in the case of the frangipani. I’ve known this shrub ever since I can remember; it used to make up the living fence around the yard of my mom’s house. As children we climbed the small trees, not minding their sticky milky-white sap.

I took this picture in Jazan, a port city in the southwest of Saudi Arabia along the Red Sea. Frangipani thrives there for some reason or another, which I couldn’t quite figure out. Though indigenous to Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and Brazil, this deciduous plant has been transplanted successfully to many different parts of the world, and could rightly be said to now be a cosmopolitan beauty. 

It looks majestic with its succulent green leaves and dense clusters of flowers. The waxy white flowers consist of five petals each with a yellow center; they are especially fragrant at night to attract moths for pollination. The flowers don’t yield any nectar, though, and they simply trick their pollinators. The fragrance, which primarily serves a biological function, is simply enchanting to human onlookers and passersby.

          An interesting fact I recall is that the frangipani won’t suffer sunburn even in the hottest summer. I read somewhere that it can withstand up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Centigrade) of external temperature.

Peter Wohlleben, in his book The Secret Network of Nature, writes as follows about deciduous trees in general: “As long as they are alive, they are absolutely immune to fire. This is something you can easily test for yourself - but please, with just a single green twig. No matter how long you hold a flame underneath it, the twig will not burn" (p.189). If in doubt, see for yourself. There is no harm in trying.

Mandi: From Pen to Plate in 11 Frames

Mandi (مندي) is a special steak and rice dish, a staple at special occasions such as Eid, parties, and wedding feasts among Arabs. Originating in Hadhramouth, Yemen, it soon made inroads into the entire Arabian peninsula, Sub-Saharan Africa, and recently the Southeast Asian countries too, mostly on account of its oil-free and exotic style of cooking. In short, the fat from suspended meat drips onto the rice being cooked underneath. The meat gets exquisitely tender, which is probably why the name "mandi" (from nada ندى meaning 'dew' or 'snowflakes') was chosen. Mutton (preferably lamb), chicken, and camel are the usual meats prepared this way. 

Let us start with a three-month-old lamb raised nibbling on tender blades of subtropical desert grass and shrubs, often roaming free on vast stretches of the mountainous landscape. At the peak of summer, these lambs even dig up the land and eat the roots of plants underneath.

A pit is dug about four feet deep, and the wall is lined with baked earthen bricks. A layer of charcoal is placed in the bottom and is heated with a pipe-like burner until the bricks get red-hot and smoldering.

The pit oven is ready. It can hold its heat for long, so the burner is removed, leaving only some charcoal at the bottom. No more charcoal is added during the entire day. The reason people in the desert invented this oven could be that it is sheltered from the wind, so the fire can't be put out by an unexpected gust of air, or a sandstorm, and the loss of heat generated by burning scarce firewood is negligible.

Lamb steaks are prepared, cut into reasonably-sized portions, and washed well. Nothing else for marination, but table salt is added before threading the meat onto skewers to be suspended from the top of the stove. (Photo credit: Sharfudheen Pazheri)

Lowering the rice pot containing a proportionate amount of water to which salt and very little spice have been added. Note that strictly no oil is added. Basmati rice is a wonderful choice, but what is mostly being used instead is a kind of big, round-grain rice. The flavorings include raisins, cinnamon, pine nuts, pepper, and the like. However, spices are not indispensable, but salt is.

It is time to cover the rice pot with of metallic net for the steak in a case falling into the boiling rice, and at the same time letting the melting fat seep into the rice adding flavor and great texture. (Photo credit: Sharafudheen Pazheri)

Here come steaks flavored with nothing but salt, on iron skewers suspended above the rice pot. It is time to let them reveal their true, unadulterated flavor without a long list of hot and spicy flavorings.As the meat gets cooked, the juices drop down into the rice pot adding aromatic flavor to the rice.

A long twisted piece of cotton clothing is placed between the huge iron lid and the pit mouth, acting as an airtight washer. A few weights are put on top to keep the lid securely closed. This locks the aromatic vapor in.

Be careful. You need a pair of experienced hands to remove the lid. The scorching steam can cause severe blistering leaving you with no appetite for anything for days. Having been kept airtight for 45 minutes, remove the lid. The cooking time depends on the tenderness of the raw meat that was used. For Jazeeri lamb steaks, it is less than an hour.

    Wow ... cooked and ready to be served. The aroma emanating from the pit oven is irresistible. To the untrained eye, the mandi may appear unappealing, but for those who have tasted it before, and for whom it had invariably been love-at-first-bite, it is a veritable feast. (Photo credit: Sharafudheen Pazheri)

This platter serves three, but it depends on the size of your group up to 6. Enjoy it hot. If you like to complement the taste with chili sauce or slices of onion, it is better not to serve these alongside the mandi as adding directly to the dish will spoil the authentic mandi taste. Arabs traditionally eat sitting down on the floor sharing a big platter, often offering each other steaks broken into bite-size pieces with their hands as a gesture of hospitality and love. And it is customary to invite everyone around to join in ... so please sit down and help yourself.