Punjab - five rivers, five spices
- rosemary
- Mar 18
- 5 min read
No I haven't jumped from the Caribbean to India on my world tour of food. This is a lucky dip recipe which has led me here and there, confusing me a bit but also learning a bit.
The recipe is Indian - Sikh - says the author, who is, somewhat surprisingly, Beverley Sutherland Smith. She calls it simply Vegetables with whole spices. There is no Indian name for me to follow up on, just that Sikh reference. The recipe is not online, so herewith a brief outline. The spices - brown mustard seeds, turmeric, ginger, glarlic, cumin seeds, black peppercorns, chilli. The vegetables - your choice really. Method - Fry the spices, add onions, and capsicum, salt and pepper. Add your longer cooking vegetables - potatoes, etc., fry until coated, add stock and cook until almost tender. Add your softer vegetables - which include tomatoes and a touch of sugar. Keep cooking until done. I'm guessing how much liquid you end up with is up to you. Certainly the pictures of the related dishes that I found varied from almost soup to a dry stir-fry look.
The book? David gave it to me for Christmas in 1995. Either I told him about it, or he deduced that I was in a Beverley Sutherland Smith phase and so bought it to surprise me. I'm guessing I suggested it, for not only was I on a Beverley Sutherland Smith kick but I was also - as it turned out, only theoretically - on a vegetarian kick. I certainly went through a phase of wanting to be much more vegetarian, but as it turned out that took many, many years, and we still eat a fair amount of meat - but less than before.
But I digress. The recipes in the book come from here, there and everywhere, and I think she was probably going through the same kind of process as I because I think it was around this time that she seriously got into growing vegetables in her garden. She's an underrated guru I think. I have several of her books, and have cooked many recipes from them, with rarely a failure. This one I have not tried.
So I began with the Sikhs, which led me to the Punjab, which apparently means 'land of five rivers' - Punj (Five) + Aab (Water) - the five rivers that flowed through that northwestern part of India, making it a fertile grain basket. Wheat being the main crop for thousands of years. When I turned to Madhur Jaffrey and her section on the Punjab in one of her books she said:
"The only food that makes a Punjabi feel that he has eaten a proper meal is bread." Madhur Jaffrey
Well this is where naan and parathas come from. The other big crop seems to be mustard, plus a lot of dairy - from buffaloes as well as cows. The Punjab, of course, was split up in the days of partition, so that two of the five rivers are now in Pakistan. Besides she did not have a recipe there for a similar dish. After Gujarat, this is the part of India with the highest number of vegetarians - some 50% was one figure that Madhur Jaffrey quoted.
So then I thought I had seen a reference to five Punjabi spices and got waylaid into Panch Phora - an Indian five spice mix. The ingredients were not the same however - nigella seeds, fennel seeds, brown mustard seeds, cumin seeds and fenugreek. At which point I discovered that this is a Bengali thing, and so not relevant. I mean that's the other side of the country. I remember making this spice mix once - It's pretty easy - just gather them together and mix. I don't think you even toast them, although I may be wrong.
However I was sure that I had seen a reference to a Punjabi spice mix and so I explored a bit more.
Which is where I found that there is a Punjabi garam masala. There are, of course, lots of different recipes - this one is from a website called This, That, More, but all of them have similar ingredients, and the commonality of toasting the whole spices before grinding them. The recipe above that I chose to illustrate, had cumin, coriander, peppercorns, bay leaves, cardamom, cinnamon and cloves, which doesn't really match up with Beverley's list, and it is a powdered spice mix as well. Beverley used whole spices.
So at this point I decided that this was a generalised recipe, amongst a whole lot of generalised recipes for a vegetable curry that used a vaguely similar group of spices - no chilli and things like cinnamon.
So I began to look for Punjabi vegetable curries and came across something called a Kardai Sabzi or also a Shorvedar Sabzi.
I first found the Kardai Sabzi on a list of the top 9 Punjabi dishes on the Taste Atlas website, and even though the vegetables were different I thought that the finished dish did look sort of similar. Sabzi, by the way means vegetables, and Kadai is the kind of dish - a kind of wok - in which they are cooked. Sabzi is also a word that comes from the Persian, and so, of course, in this part of India especially the Persian influence is high.
Taste Atlas, did not have a recipe but I found one that also looked similar to Beverley's on a website called Archana's Kitchen. I think the dish it is in is the kardai. And I guess you can find this kind of dish in Indian restaurants as well. There are lots of recipes for this - all a little bit different of course. I also discovered that there are heaps and heaps of Indian foodie websites, but unlike other cuisines there doesn't seem to be that dominates the rest. Most of them look pretty authentic however.
And what about Madhur Jaffrey? Does she have a recipe for Kadai Sabiz? Well as far as I can see - no. However I did find this for her Shorvedar Sabzi on a website called Keep Trying. However, the weird thing about this is that 'shorvedar' means mushroom and there is not a mushroom in sight anywhere.
It was all a little bit frustrating really and I did not really learn an awful lot, and nor was I hugely captivated. I don't think I shall be making it anytime soon, although I might give the garam masala a go. After all you can use it for meat as well. And that's one thing I learnt - Sikhs - whose homeland is the Punjab - can eat meat if they want to. They just can't cut their hair. Well I think that's right. Yes it is although these days, lots of them do.
YEARS GONE BY
March 18
2023 - Nothing
2022 - Nothing
2020 - Deleted
2018 - Sea coconut
2017 - Nothing
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