100 days in the green zone
A food designer’s journey to discover ‘missing’ vegetables and cook with them
Akash Muralidharan loves the movie ‘Julie And Julia’. The Chennai-based food designer wanted to replicate the story of a savant of cooking the culinary savant Julia Child, and her culinary disciple, blogger Julie Powell.
He got to create his Indian adaptation in March this year. His chosen doyenne of cooking was the pioneering Tamilian cookbook author, S. Meenakshi Ammal and her seminal Samaithu Par (Cook and See). He swapped a year for 100 days and instead of a blog, he upgraded to sharing vlogs on Instagram. Muralidharan, 25, gave his project deeper focus, exploring the little-known vegetables in the Tamilian kitchen.
The cookbook club
It was another cookbook that kicked off Muralidharan’s research into vegetables. In early January, and he was working joined at the Center for Genomic Gastronomy, an artistic think tank in the US. A colleague forwarded him an NYT article about Usha’s Pickle Digest, a celebrated Indian cookbook by Usha Prabakaran. One quote of hers stuck stayed with him: “The reason for writing the book was to ensure that the vast culinary heritage of this land stays on the map”.
It got him thinking about the role of cookbooks today. “I had never used a cookbook before and learned how to cook from my mother. I wondered whether people used cookbooks anymore,” he says.
It was around the time that he found three fragile volumes of Ammal’s cookbooks in his house. They belonged to his paternal grandmother and were handed over to his mother as a wedding gift. He also found correspondence between his mother and her mother that contained handwritten recipes, and some attachments from magazines.
Muralidharan started reading.
Ammal’s Samaithu Par was first published in 1951. It was one of the first Tamil cookbooks, published at a time when such books were unheard of. The all-vegetarian cookbook became a culinary Bible: brides carried copies to their married homes, students carried them abroad and it became a cure for homesickness. She released three volumes. “Her style was unique. The recipes are like a story that she narrates. She gives advice, mentions what will happen to the dish, suggests replacements and customisation, and talks about how the dish should taste,” he says.
Beyond the writing style, the vegetables intrigued him. One of the first recipes he read mentioned country cucumber, a vegetable he was unfamiliar with. Further reading brought up other vegetables. He questioned his mother about these vegetables and she spoke fondly about cooking and eating them when younger, but not anymore.
In search of answers, he decided to seek help from outside his home. His apartment block has 150 homes and they became his study subjects. He sent out a survey to all the women, via a Whatsapp group. The survey had 37 vegetables (taken from the books) and asked people to choose the ones they used more than twice in a week, and mention why they did not use the others. The results surprised him: the popular vegetables were the onions, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes and many hadn’t heard of the others, couldn’t source them or didn’t know how to cook with them.
It was time for his Julie moment. He decided to investigate on his own and created a 100-day Cook and See challenge to cook with these unused vegetables and understand why they were no longer part of the Tamilian kitchen.
Kitchen experiments
The 100-day challenge began on March 2, with 25 vegetables. The first vegetable was a simple one, flat beans or val papdi, and cooked as Thalichu Kottiya Sambhar (with tamarind and dal). Flat beans belonged to a category of lesser-cooked vegetables. Other similar ones followed — cluster beans, elephant yam, chayote, and banana flower.
Among the unusual ones were air potatoes — belonging to the yam family; guava leaves that were cooked into a chutney; neem flower cooked into a soupy Veppampoo Charu; decalepis root or magali kizhangu — used in Ayurvedic medicines and to make pickles; winged beans — a tropical legume cooked into a stir fry; and the nutritious sun berry or manathakkali. The most unique vegetable was the first one he read about, the thummattikai or country cucumber. He found it easier to source the sun-dried versions (called vathal), usually sold in country medicine stores. These berries are typically eaten as a side or fried and Muralidharan cooked Vathal Kuzhambu recipe (a stew with tamarind). The bitter turkey berries or sundakkai were the most difficult to prepare. They had to be washed thoroughly, crushed slightly, soaked in buttermilk to reduce bitterness and sun-dried in the sun. Another difficult ingredient was the veldt grape, an astringent medicinal plant. The mature vine causes itching and thus, had to be treated with care.
Every day, he wrote about one vegetable — the history, flavour, and how it is cooked. He bought most of the vegetables from the market — “it’s easy to find except no one is looking for them”. Many were sourced from the gardens and backyards of friends and family. As the project gathered attention, people wrote in with suggestions and recipes. During his research, he found that approximately 30 vegetables weren’t native to India.
Cook and See turned out to be a bonding exercise for mother and son. They shopped on Sundays and in the evening, planned their lunches for the week. Muralidharan’s mother cooked and he filmed her. “My mother used to earlier note down recipes from TV cooking shows, but over time, she stopped experimenting. This rekindled her passion for trying out new recipes,” he says. “Every day, we cooked two new recipes. My dad and brothers had the most fun with the project because they were eating all the food.”
Insta connect
The lockdown in March forced Muralidharan to take pause because he could no longer source the vegetables. He changed the medium, using art to pay tribute to recipe books and inland letters in which people shared recipes: Darshini Narayanan drew the vegetables, Srishti P sketched the cookbook, and Magesh Kumar provided animation. In the final ten days, he asked followers to share their stories of foraged food from their gardens and surroundings: some spoke about roselle leaves or gongura, one spoke about discovering how to cook with betel leaves and make Vetrilai Saaru, and another cooked an aloe vera thuvaiyal.
Besides the “good lunches”, there were other rewards to Muralidharan’s 100-day project. It got people talking about shopping habits, why these vegetables aren’t mentioned in school textbooks or aren’t found on restaurant menus. It got his media attention where he spoke about wanting to spread awareness of little-known vegetables.
“There are many varieties of vegetables available to us. We have a wide choice, but we end up sticking to a few.”
Muralidharan wants to continue his project and curate his observations, research and recipes into a book. “It will be specific to the region [Chennai] and focus on the changing eating habits, biodiversity and talk about the need for changing what we eat to be more sustainable,” he says.
At the moment, he is content that his Instagram account became a space for people to discuss and share their memories of different vegetables, and talk about their recipe collections and cookbooks.
And unlike the movie and real life where Child is dismissive of Powell’s project, Muralidharan received much encouragement and support from Ammal’s great grand-daughter-in-law. “She told me Ammal would’ve been very proud.”
