Wild hibiscus comes to us in Auroville with passing breezes, or perhaps just with seeds sown by the plants themselves, earlier in the season. We love them for their uninvited wildness, the ease with which they grow in soil that is untended, and apparently inhospitable, their abundance, their sour green leaves that spread like the outstretched fingers of our hands, their creamy white, red-throated flowers that pucker pink with the setting sun and leave us with tart edible calyces (called roselles, about which I’ll write more in my next article in this series) which little garden foragers will unfailingly love. Thanks mostly to a Jamaican colloquial reference to them as red sorrels — what we call puliccha keerai in Tamil and is famously known as gongura in Telugu — these are sometimes called the sorrel, though that is a misnomer as sorrels are a different plant family altogether. This wild hibiscus variety is the Hibiscus Sabdariffa, and will grow anywhere with minimal care, so if you learn to recognise its leaves, you might let it remain a visitor to your garden when it arrives — and harvest leaves, calyces and seeds as they mature to keep its cycle going perennially.
Our favourite daily use of puliccha keerai is in simple dals , where just a handful of greens pack enough of a sour punch to substitute for tamarind or kokum or lime juice, so these are a good souring agent substitute. Then you need nothing more than chillies to balance sourness, onions and garlic fried for added flavour, and the sambarpodi of your choice to tie it all together into a Vitamin C-packed masiyal (yes, that’s the likely source of all that sourness). The gongura chutney experts up North will add roasted coriander and urad dal to chillies and garlic, fried with the leaves sometimes in the company of peanuts — and grind it all as roughly as a stone would, for a rustic chutney. Sourness is, after all, one of our six recognised arusuvai or six essential tastes. Nothing better than the common puliccha keerai to celebrate that, in whatever form.
This column helps you figure out how those pesky weeds in your garden serve a purpose. Reddy is a cultural anthropologist who lives and works between Puducherry and Auroville. She blogs at paticheri.com
