The practice of serving seasonal vegetables needs to be saved
Nostalgia is the tastiest sauce, yada yada, but I can’t begin this piece without thinking of my fondest memory of winter. It is a vegetable stew, possibly a bastard born of some deemed-English parent, made with beetroot, carrots, onions, peas and potatoes and spiced with whole peppercorns, deep red in colour and almost watery in consistency. Its arrival on the dinner table heralded the season of mists and mellow sunshine, of apples and oranges, of school holidays and strings of lights on Park Street.
Everyone in India has these season-specific food associations, whether it’s the sarson da saag in Punjab’s fierce winters, or undhiyu, the mixed vegetable dish in Gujarat, where two extreme seasons are often crammed into the space of a day. They are one of the ways this country acknowledges the earth’s slow, majestic perambulation around the sun, the dependability of which phenomenon somehow has never managed to rob it of wonder.
Soon, though, in urban India, that sentence will be written with the verb in the past tense. While there’s no doubt the rural core will continue to measure their year by the sun, our cities are well on their way to blurring the seasons where the dining table is concerned. “In an ideal world,” said a chef friend, “we’d be eating cauliflowers only in winter, with the rest of the so-called English vegetables. Fortunately or otherwise, we don’t live in an ideal world.”
It’s not just the cauliflower. In Bangalore, where the year-round temperate weather helps it steal a lead over other Indian cities in obviating the seasons, Namdhari’s Fresh, the premier vegetable retailer, pulls out only two of its main products — the relatively less-sought-after snowpeas and sugarsnaps — for five to six months of the year. Everything else, from the humble bhindi to the exalted leek, is available every single day, at least in theory.
(This story appears in the 26 August, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)