Food Talk
Parwal and prejudice

Veggies of the pumpkin-gourd family are among the healthiest items of the summer fare but these evoke images of a diet for a delicate stomach, writes Pushpesh Pant

COME summer and there is a glut of squash vegetables in the market. Most of these belong to the pumpkin-gourd family — snake gourd (chichinda), ridged gourd (pahari torai), bottle gourd (ghiya or lauki), ash gourd (petha), wax gourd (parwal) and the rest.

These are the veritable Cinderellas of the veggie world — the mere mention of ghiya and toria, tinda and parwal evokes the images of essentially plebian fare or the bland diet prescribed when the stomach is upset. We have never been able to fathom the roots or depths of this unreasonable prejudice. These are some of the healthiest items of the summer repertoire — high in water content, low in calories, easy to digest and quick to prepare — allowing you escape from the oppressive heat in the kitchen.

Of this quartet, it is the parwal that fascinates us the most. Lauki comes into its own in the awadhi musallm incarnation or the dum edition in Kashmir. Tinda stuffed with paneer in piquant tomato gravy also finds some takers with its Mughali pretensions and, we must confess that we have been totally floored by torai mimicking magaz masala that we had at Osman Miyan’s house in Lucknow but all these are exceptions. Poor parwal is seldom served as a special dish.

The only time we were made to feel that parwal was a dish fit enough for a king was at a sweet shop. The halwai took pride in the parwal he served — a translucent beauty packed delicately with a subtle filling of mildly sweet hung yoghurt specked with pistachio slivers — vaguely reminiscent of shrikhand — registering a hint of sweetness on the tip of the tongue betraying no trace of its vegetable roots.

The friendly man was generous enough to share the recipe but it involves hours of exertion and this has dissuaded us from attempting it on our own. We have been content to prepare with minimum fuss a delectable dry parwal sabzi adding perhaps a few thinly sliced onions to strips of parwal — both fried crisp.

What looks as great as it tastes is the tarkari — the gravy dish that has the irresistible charm of burnished gold — a gift from Sonar Bangla. Only in Bengal is the potol-parwal considered a delicacy. There is foodlore that tells us of a babu moshai who was so fond of this vegetable that he was nicknamed Potolda.

Babu Moshai, the popular ethnic restaurant in Delhi, serves a tasty potol curry but while splurging on it we kept missing what mom used to cook at home. She had acquired the recipe during her sojourn in Shantiniketan in the 1930s and remained her favourite for summer.

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