A Facebook friend from my hometown of Muncie, Indiana, posted a photo today of her home-grown karela. The bumpy gourd-like squash that some in the U.S. know as bittermelon has become one of my savory salivations. Two summers in a row, I've tried to convince my husband Jim to grow karela. He does his best, and it starts but never really takes off. By mid-August, I'm at the Otrembiak's stall at the Saratoga Farmers Market buying one or two bittermelon a week. I cook it up and Jim falls in love with it.
"Why can't we grow this ourselves?"
I grew up in an immigrant Indian household.
In Indiana.
In the late 1960s.
As a ten-year-old, I was convinced that the two local grocery stores -- Ross's and Marsh -- only sold fresh ginger because my mother would buy it because I never saw it in anyone else's cart or kitchen. My suspicion was reinforced a decade or so later when I bought fresh ginger at a grocery store in southern Illinois and had to explain to the checkout clerk what it was and that it was indeed something edible.
My mother, for the most part, was and continues to be a marvelously inventive woman. She learned how to cook rotis on an open fire, using dried cow dung molded into disks, as a briquette, much as Americans use charcoal in the United States. She also was an extremely picky eater, and, as a result, weighed perhaps 90 pounds at marriage. Coming to the United States and settling first in Iowa and ultimately Indiana, she proved to be a quick adapter, finding the necessary spices for Indian cooking in the local grocery stores, and learning how to use Cream of Wheat to create such delectable breakfast dishes as halwa (which Jim loves to make even though it requires a stick of butter and a cup of sugar) and uppma (a more savory, spicy breakfast offering that I particularly crave but haven't quite got the hang of yet).
Many of the foods that my mother cooked to satisfy self-cravings were not particularly pleasing to my kid-like palate. I did like halwa, but it took me years before I realized that I really did like uppma, perhaps because breakfasts in America were not supposed to include fresh green chilis, onion, and cumin.
Karela was in the latter category. I'm not exactly sure when it first appeared on our kitchen table, but it didn't go over well. It was charred and bitter, and to eat it, one first needed to unwrap a series of complex threads that my mother had wrapped around it. The threads, I learned years later, held in a stuffing made of cumin, chili, onion, ginger, mango powder, and mustard seeds. The spices would roast inside the melon, picking up its bitter savory taste.
"Mmm," I remember my mother exclaiming, as she licked the spices off the threads.
"Yuck," I remember muttering.
"Chhh," I remember my father, a village boy raised on sweet ghee and sugarcane, quietly agreeing.
So my mother made karela periodically for herself. Other Indians who would visit us or come over for dinner would enjoy it with her, but I pooh-pooh'd it for its terrible smell and taste.
And then came the revelation.
I was perhaps nineteen. My grandparents were visiting from India, and my uncle -- Dhanoo Mamaji -- had come to the United States for several months with his wife and young son. I ended up spending some time with them in Washington D.C., where they were staying with my mother's younger sister, someone I had come to know as Papoo Auntie. She was newly married and her first son was just learning how to walk. Somewhere in that time frame, someone made karela. Being in the presence of relatives whom I did not know as intimately as my mother, I kept my pooh-pooh's to myself, and accepted a tiny portion of karela. The spicy, savory sensation of charred seeds and herbs against a thin layer of squash melted in my mouth. "Oh, this is good," I remember thinking. I'm not sure if I shared my revelation with anyone.
Ten years later, I was in New Delhi with my mother visiting India for the first time in eighteen years. The foods and flavors of my family's tradition came out at every meal in the most amazing manner possible. Karela, uppma, arvi: All these dishes that did not exist on the Indian restaurant menus were the certain of our family's attention. Bitter, sweet, savory, sour, spicy, robust, delicate, explosive in their power. Every meal turned me on to what I had been missing growing up in America.
I bought Charmaine Solomon's Complete Guide to Asian Cooking after my return from India. I chose her book because I also had traveled to Japan, Hong Kong, and Bangkok on that trip and felt that while India was the center of the Asian culinary universe, the other countries had things I liked, as well. The book is still with me, twenty-one years later. Many of its pages are splattered with turmeric and oil. The back cover is missing and the spine is torn. But scrawled into the margins of several of the pages are preparations for the vegetables that Americans don't cook. Karela is one of them.
My fondness for karela deepened in my years in Hawai'i when the hottest days of summer seemed to demand respite in the tangy bitterness that karela offered. It was relatively easy to find in both Asian and non-Asian markets and many gardeners at the community garden where I had a plot for awhile grew it themselves. I would see the bumpy green fruits hanging from the vine, and remember the days of my mother licking the spices off the thread. I got the recipe from her, and over the years made it a number of times. The bitterness always seemed to lift my spirits, even as it perplexed the taste buds of my otherwise fairly adventurous friends.
The taste for karela deepened with our move to upstate New York. By this point, I was in my late forties, some fifteen to twenty years older than my mother must have been when she first put karela on our kitchen table. Being in my late forties had alerted me to a series of health issues that I had come to realize were at least partially genetic: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, potential risk for diabetes. Reading up on bittermelon revealed to me that it often helped regulate these ailments and was a favored vegetable among immigrant Indians who suffered diabetes. I began to appreciate the connection. Perhaps karela appeared on our kitchen table in Muncie as my mother was trying to regulate her own health issues. Perhaps my taste for it revived as my issues surfaced.
Last summer, I shared a recipe with the Saratoga Farmers Market after the local farmers repeatedly asked me where I had gotten the goofy looking, bumpy vegetable that always seemed to be in my bag. With the recipe, I made a resolution. I would save the seeds from at least one of the quickly ripening bittermelon fruits that I was buying to grow my own. The Otrembiak's warned me that the plant was not an easy one to grow in our short summer. They urged me to save seeds with "weight" and to plant them in warm soil.
I planted them in a pot indoors in mid-April. For weeks, they did not grow.
About two weeks ago, they sprouted, hesitantly. But then the leaves popped up, and I cheered. They probably will go into the garden within the next week. The Otrembiak's have recommended lots of light and sun, and open space. They may get a small garden of their own.
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