Fruits of India........!!!!!

toldcha it was jackfruit... and yea - it does smell a-plenty


:brishti

a-plenty delicious

well that's what it was because it's exactly as Nick-H describes.Anyway I'm more interested in any kind of indian food, don't think I'll be buying Durian in a hurry.

Yes Diane, your's sounds like durian, while hal's sounds like jackfruit. There was some confusion it seems because of the overlapping questions.

Regarding nick's comment about durian not being native to India- actually quite a number of the commonly grown fruit in india are exotic- with about half of those on the original list being from south america or other parts of SE asia. During the british occupation, they were keen to experiment with what all they could grow in India, and as a result India has a truly great wealth of interesting fruits.

Vegetable crops don't seem to have fared as well, with many traditional crops having fallen by the wayside in lieu of standard european crops. This tends to happen with annual vegetables anywhere a region has been oppressively colonized.

Whilst not a fruit, isn't the greatest example of this... tea?!

Also one of the early examples of industrial espionage: stolen by the Brits from China, they thouhgt they could grow it in parts of India, and the rest, as they say, is history.

How about Chilly? I've heard that it was Brits who introduced that to India too?

Speaking of vegetables... there were some veggies that I didn't notice other than these: squash, cauliflower, daikon, pumpkin, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cabbage, potatoes, okra, & some greens. What about broccoli, English peas, green beans, lima beans, & corn? And lettuce? Are salads a Western thing?

Corn is very common. Street vendors sell it roasted over coals.
I saw green beans growing in Rajasthan, and had peas in a few dishes. Peas and cauliflower is a common dish.

I think salads in India are more along the lines of cold cooked veggies and fruit, rather than lettuce and tomatoes.

By English peas do you mean garden peas (which have to be podded, and which you generally buy frozen) as opposed to the mange tout/sugar snap type?

If so, then you defintely get them in India - the essential ingredient in good old mattar paneer!

My favourite Indian cookbook, Mridula Baljekar's "The Complete Indian Cookbook" has a few recipes that use green beans.

There are also a variety of salady dishes, but my recollection is that they tend to involve various combinations of carrot, onion, cabbage and cucumber, sometimes with yogurt, rather than lettuce.

I was served a salad in the guesthouse I stayed in Jaipur, which included onions and tomatoes - can't remember if there was lettuce.

Of course every traditional British curry house serves irritating lettuce garnishes with starters and tandoori dishes, but I'm not sure if that's a British curry house rather than Indian tradition.

I've never seen broccoli or lettuce(any variety) in the Pune mandai(market) or with roadside sellers but I've bought and eaten the others - seasons do affect availability perhaps.

The taste of peas and of harbara (fresh undried chick peas/small garbanzo in the pod) has definitely gone downhill though. The vendors themselves told me its because the proliferation of hybrid varieties and that to replicate the taste I knew as a child I had to ask for and look for gavti( village) varieties. I never was able to locate this variety the last time I was there. This year, with luck and more persistence and by going deeper in the countryside, I expect to hit my target.

-skk

Green beans is ordinary, available in our street, I eat them every week. Broccoli is more likely to be found in a posher supermarket; I have had it, not for a long time.

can anybody tell me what veg they do have in india and the similarity with western -please don't just put the name in indian as I have no knowledge of what it is. thanks.

I think we ought to have a separate veg thread!

For the stuff which is not generally known outside India, it is a bit hard, perhaps, not to use Indian names! But I think you would recognise the vast majority of the stuff in a veg market.

The things you might not are---

drumsticks (a long, tough seadpod that grows on a tree. It is cut into pieces an inch or so long, and eaten by sucking the soft stuff out of the middle of the tough outer.

Various gourds. Quite a variety. Knobbly Bitter Gourds, great, long Snake Gourds, not to mention the things that look more like our pumpkin.

Noted by their lack, here in Chennai --- a lot of root veg like parsnips, swede, turnip. Carrots and potatoes are common, but there is little variety in the potatoes.

Separate sticky veg thread - yes, definitely.

Till then - RAW, unripe, green tomatoes - specifically to make bhaji with -- oops, I've eaten fried green tomatoes in the South (US) so I suppose that's not so novel.

On the root vegetables front - navalcol ( kohlrabi) is reasonably common in Maharashtra.

The actual varieties are different - carrots a deep maroon not orange. The chillies are different, the (US/Hispanic) serrano is the closest but only close, I can tell the difference.

More as I think about it.

-skk

Amazing how many of them come from Latin America!

Peeled cucumber seems pretty common too, often seen sold by street vendors (usually at night for some odd reason).