Sooty Salad Sets Sail

One of the highlights of our trip was the moment a bat the size of an adolescent cat, with a four to five foot wingspan, suddenly appeared at dusk one day, gliding just out of arm’s reach toward our hotel’s mango fruit tree (we were told these mangoes were only used for pickling and they weren’t ripe yet). These cat-sized bats with a nearly goose-sized wingspan filled the (fortunately stout) mango tree every evening. While crawling inverted all over it, they squabbled without pause, and as loudly as Sunset Park’s feral felines.

I was very fortunate to travel to India this February, together with my partner, Shilpa, our two kids, and Shilpa’s mom, Gita. Gita grew up in Chennai, but her family has roots in Kerala, a state on the southwestern tip of India. We spent much of our trip enjoying the lush beauty in Kerala, both near the ocean and in the mountains. The number and diversity of flying creatures in Kerala was beyond any previous experience I’ve had, with the highlight being the flying cat-bat, known as the Indian flying fox.

Without knowledge of the local plants and a busy sightseeing itinerary, it seemed in the first few days of our trip that we wouldn’t have time to learn to eat anything growing out of the ground. But our pace slowed a bit and my hopes rose when we got to the mountains and caught glimpses of nasturtium’s edible leaves and flowers in the dusty roadside ditch as we drove past.

The room at our hotel there was built on stilts into the side of a steep hill made of the same crumbly dry clay that dusted the roads. We were poking around the grounds underneath our room one afternoon and found a few patches of wood sorrel, a plant we recognized from right here in Sunset Park and felt confident we could nibble. Wood sorrel is delicious plucked raw from the ground and has a surprising and pleasant lemony flavor.

I think the easiest way to recognize it is to think of a cartoon image of another plant: a four leaf clover. The more common (also edible but not as tasty) white clover we can see growing all over Sunset Park’s lawns has mostly rounded leaflets. Wood sorrel’s leaflets are more definitively heart-shaped along their outer edges and look more like what you think clover should look like if, like me, your knowledge is based on four leaf clover cartoons.

Wood sorrel has a bunching growth habit. Its stems look somewhat like the stems in a bouquet of flowers, while white clover spreads in an even, usually low, mat. Wood sorrel’s flowers are also bright yellow and not the ball-shaped, white puffs of white clover.

Our three-leafed sorrel must have changed our luck. With help from some friendly locals, we went on a foraging streak after that. The pinnacle came two days later: after a hot, three hour hike into the hills of a tea plantation, our guide spotted passion fruit vines growing wild in a tangle of bushes. If you really want to love a piece of fruit, do a hot, three hour hike before tasting it. We all thought it was the best thing that had ever passed our lips.

A relative of passion fruit, maypop, grows native in the lower forty eight. We have vines of maypop right here in Greenwood Cemetery. The flavor is not the same as passion fruit and, depending on the plant and level of ripeness, can be divisively, let’s say, musky. But it’s worth a taste to find out what you’ve found.

The next day, we had an afternoon without plans and our hotel offered a free “nature walk.” We were skeptical about whether any nature was going to be found given the quasi-suburban feel of the busy tourist hive we were staying in. But the leader of the walk showed us to an undeveloped dirt road behind the hotel, a steep path ending on the banks of the dammed river below.

There was nothing as dramatic as the passion fruit from the day before, but we sampled small, dark, metallic black-colored berries from the lantana plant. The berries had very little juice but a lovely minty, herbal aftertaste. Please take care not to eat unripe berries from this plant if you encounter it.

Then our guide plucked fresh cardamom seeds for us to try (spicy), as well as fresh and dried peppercorns (spicy and spicier). The tasting menu was rounded out with berries and stems from a plant our guide called false tamarind. These were mainly sour, but the berries were small enough to keep us tasting more, trying to figure out exactly what they tasted like.

The remaining days of our trip were spent in the city centers of Chennai and Varanasi, not exactly foraging hotbeds, but we found a great deal else to sample and learn about.

As always, feel free to reach out with any thoughts to slightlysooty@gmail.com.