Anita said that her colleagues, sharing recipes in the college staff room, weren’t talking about khasta kachoris and light-as-air soufflé or even melt-in-the-mouth kabab . No, it was all about Jugni. So when I asked what on earth that was, she was silent with annoyance and her usual opinion that I have no touch with reality, with the price of eggs and noon-tel and what the hip, happening vegetables in the marketplace are. Jugni is a long cylindrical vegetable, mostly green, sometimes mottled, sometimes a bright sunshine yellow. Eventually the penny dropped. Zucchini! That which my cook calls Cuzzini! Yes, she said patiently, the very same, and wasn’t it amazing how we had adapted yet another generation of imported vegetables to Indian cooking.
Peas, cauliflower, carrots — ‘English’ vegetables — are now so much a part of our daily diet that no one could even remember the time when they weren’t. And potatoes, chillies and tomatoes had become the base of most of our food after Vasco da Gama set foot here. But zucchini, bell peppers, corn, mushrooms, broccoli had all shown up in our vegetable shops and on our chopping boards in recent times, very much in living memory. Yes, mushrooms were local and home-grown in the East, in Odisha, in Himachal. But their introduction to cities was so recent that we could both remember the time when we had to find them in special shops, or even earlier, when we used to don our Red Riding Hood personae and trot off to the colony park to try to fill our baskets with post-monsoon fruit of the land. Now the local sabziwala always has a stock.
So the result is that mushroom pakoras are getting as common as gobhi, alu and pyaz bhaji . Not fritters, in a batter of flour, eggs and milk leavened with baking powder; but regular pakoras of besan , chickpea flour.
So we talked about the others. Apart from salad leaves, which had not been adapted and absorbed (probably because we’re neither huge leafy salad eaters nor do romaine, iceberg and arugula take well to being cooked), all the rest have been subjected — or elevated, depending on one’s perspective — to zeera, haldi , onions and garam masala . Bell peppers, red and yellow, are tossed in place of green capsicum with paneer or potatoes.
Red, yellow and orange bell peppers have a sweeter flavour than green capsicum and, if cooked lightly, have a gentle crunch. Apart from all the nutritional benefits — the antioxidants, the high Vitamin C content, the magnesium and Vitamin B6 — the colour is worth the effort of cooking. My favourite is Anita’s own recipe, an Indian style combination of rai , mustard seeds, half-cooked onions, paneer and red bell peppers. So, what appears on the table is a golden mixture with plump cubes of paneer, yellowed with turmeric, and jewels of bright red pieces of red pepper gleaming prettily throughout.
But, going back to zucchini, I had a question about how it was used. She said, like tori , and that its price had become competitive enough to warrant a housewife buying it, just for a change. Jugni/ zucchini is tempered with cumin and asafoetida or onions and tomatoes; or grated, shaped into balls and fried into koftas before simmering them in gravy. Broccoli — that which my father’s factotum Bhagwan Singh grows in abundant excess and calls broccoline (as in glycerine and Boroline) — is made into, as he says, gobi alu . That makes perfect sense because they are after all from the same family; the florets have the same shape and almost the same flavour.
Corn is another food we grew up with, but either on-the-cob, roasted, or dried and ground into makki ka atta , throughout winter, preferably as an accompaniment to sarson ka saag . But now, it’s ‘American’ sweet corn kernels in curried spinach or whole baby-corn cobs in pakoras , or floated in spicy brown gravy. Whatever diversity nature provides, the Indian kitchen wraps in pakora batter or naps in spicy curry.
RED BELL PEPPER PANEER
Serves 4-6
3 tbsp vegetable oil
2 tbsp rai, small reddish-brown mustard seeds
2 cups red bell pepper, cut into 1-inch squares
3 small onions, quartered
1/2 tsp turmeric
1 tsp coriander powder
1/2 tsp cumin powder
1/4 tsp fenugreek powder
1-2 tsp red chilli powder
1 tsp amchur (dried raw mango) powder
500g paneer, cut into 2-inch cubes
Salt
Heat oil well and fry rai till it splutters. Sauté bell peppers for five minutes and add onions, letting layers separate. Add powdered spices and cook on medium heat for a couple of minutes. Raise heat, add paneer and cook till coated well with spices. Stir in salt and take off heat.
