Despite its bitter taste, fenugreek or methi has always found favour in India. Good Food uncovers its ancient Mediterranean origins and links to Indian cuisine
Imagine a relic of ancient Rome and Egypt that is almost forgotten in its original homelands but alive and well in India. Methi might seem the most desi of spices, yet its English name, fenugreek, suggests its Mediterranean origin. The Romans called it fenum graecum, or Greek hay for its grassy smell. Its scientific name is Trigonella foenum-graecum, where the first term refers to its small triangular seeds.
Food historian KT Acharya finds the first Indian reference to methi in the Sanskrit literature of 800-350 BC, but it was an essential ingredient in Egyptian embalming practices from far earlier. As with many bitter ingredients, it had a strong reputation as a medicine. Yet these uses are mostly forgotten in the West, where methi is only used for flavouring. But it is India where its memory has remained strongest. Methi seeds are steeped overnight to be eaten as a tonic or sprouted to add a fresh bitter taste to a micro salad.
One Methi, Many Ways
When allowed to grow larger and form leaves, the methi plants are used in multiple ways: from dipping the leaves in batter and frying them as pakoras to kneading them into dough for paranthas and theplas. Methi is also good when dried into kasuri methi, whose aromatic bitterness balances out dishes that might otherwise taste too rich. As it happens, kasuri methi also provides the best sensory link back to the origins of fenugreek — the next time you open a packet, close your eyes, take a deep sniff and you can almost imagine yourself in a meadow on the Mediterranean coast with the sweet, spicy scent of drying grasses rising all around you.
There are a few pockets of fenugreek consumption outside India, like Yemen, where hilbeh, a paste made from fenugreek seeds is a favourite condiment, and Iran, where the leaves are used in many recipes. What’s interesting is that both these regions have contributed recipes to India, which seems to be the magnet for all things methi. Claudia Roden, the archivist of Jewish cuisine, notes how a hilbeh-like paste is made by Calcutta's Jewish community, which has links to Yemen through Aden. There may also be traces in Hyderabadi food, which has links to Yemen through the many migrants from there to the Nizam’s court. From Iran, the Parsis brought their own uses of methi, a vital ingredient in dishes like dhansak.
Why did the West lose its taste for methi while we retained it? There’s no clear answer, but it could lie in changing attitudes towards bitter tastes. Human beings are sensitive to bitterness, probably because many natural chemical compounds, like poisons, are bitter. Yet many of them have medical benefits, and some can even be relished for their taste. In the West, it increasingly comes from beverages like coffee, cocoa, green tea and aperitifs like Angostura bitters, or salad greens like chicory. Both types of bitterness tend to be consumed as adjuncts to main meals, rather than part of them. However, we in India have no problem taking our dose of bitterness in our main meal, where we happily consume karela and methi.
Bitter-Sweet Memoirs
The rediscovery of methi by the West has largely come via India. In the Road to Vindaloo, David Burnett and Helen Saberi’s survey of curry cookbooks, they note that in Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book, published in 1849 by Dr RF Riddell, an adviser to the Nizam, one of the best recipes is for ‘Mathee ka Bhaji and Fennel Curry with Meat’. Writing some decades later, Colonel Kenney Herbert, the most magisterial of the Raj food writers, doesn’t give recipes for methi in his Culinary Jottings for Madras, but includes it in his discussion on curry powder. Methi seeds, in fact, form the bulk of most curry powders.
For cooks trying out the recipes in the West, the problem was where to get the fresh plants. When Edward Palmer (the half-Indian entrepreneur who launched the Veeraswamy restaurant and range of Indian spices) wrote a cookbook, he noted, “in lieu of methee leaves, use finely shredded spring greens or turnip tops and add to the curry powder ½ teaspoonful of ground fenugreek”. This isn’t a particularly convincing alternative. This may be the reason why, when Savitri Chowdary wrote her Indian Cooking in 1954, the first cookbook to be compiled by an Indian woman in Britain, she pointed out that “methi, like dhania, can be grown quite successfully in this country”.
Methi is still very much identified as an Indian ingredient though, and its wider spread is bedevilled with problems such as recent outbreaks of E. coli attacks in Europe, which were finally traced to salads with fenugreek sprouts from Egypt that had been grown in contaminated water. Perhaps it was an indication that after years of ignoring it, methi is best left to Indians who know and value it best.
No comments:
Post a Comment