Meet the ingredient

Karela, aka bitter gourd, is a bumpy, dark green gourd that grows in every Indian kitchen worth its salt. It tastes bitter. And your body responds to it like it’s been waiting for this the whole time.

Inside the body

Eat karela and your cells start using insulin better. Immediately. Your body has insulin receptors that recognize the compounds in karela the way it recognizes a voice it knows. Your pancreas gets to relax because your cells are finally listening. Your grandmother was feeding you something your body actually wanted.

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In Ayurveda, karela is Tikta (bitter), Ushna (warming), Laghu (light). The bitterness stimulates agni, your digestive fire. It balances excess Pitta and supports liver function. This wasn’t arbitrary. The taste was doing the work. When your tongue registers bitter, your whole digestive system wakes up. That’s why it mattered.

Where we lost the plot

Somewhere we decided bitterness meant punishment. We stopped cooking karela. The vegetable never left the Odia kitchen or the Bengali kitchen or the Maharashtrian kitchen, but everywhere else it became a health thing. A juice cleanse. A diabetic vegetable.

We turned it into supplement marketing and forgot that technique was the whole point. Bitterness stops being a problem when you know how to cook.

What to do with it

My mom makes it with jeera (cumin seeds) and besan (bengal gram flour) and it tastes nothing like medicine. Finely slice the karela, salt it so some bitterness bleeds out but the vegetable stays whole, then toss it with roasted jeera powder and a little besan. Medium heat, a little oil, cook until the edges brown. Jeera adds warmth. Besan coats each piece. You’re building layers.

Or take a whole karela, slit it lengthwise, stuff it with roasted spices and sautéed onions, tie it with thread. Let it simmer in a pan with water and salt. The spices move into the vegetable. The bitterness becomes part of something bigger. You’re cooking with the taste, letting it deepen.

Both these things assume you want to eat this. That you’ll enjoy it.

Tell me, how do you cook your karela? Let’s celebrate it. 💛

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The Forgotten Pantry. One Indian ingredient, every day, for 365 days.

Writing 365 of these is an act of faith. Faith that the ingredients are worth it, that the stories matter, that someone somewhere is reading this over morning coffee or chai and thinking, yes, I know this one. Thank you for being that person. 💚

Avarekai is a hyacinth bean. Lablab purpureus, if you want the formal name. My friend Nikita, who also writes on Substack, suggested this one. Thank you.

It probably started in Africa, but it has been growing in Indian soil for at least four thousand years, which is long enough that arguing about its passport feels beside the point. In Karnataka, it shows up every winter and people build a whole season around it.

Inside the body

The part nobody tells you when they hand you a bowl of avarekalu usli: Raw, these beans contain compounds that release cyanide. You have to cook them properly, every time, no shortcuts. That’s not a footnote, that’s the whole reason this is a cooked vegetable and not a salad ingredient.

Once cooked, it’s quietly one of the highest-protein vegetables in an Indian thali. Close to a quarter of the bean is protein.

Where we lost the plot

Avarekai has an identity problem, and it’s not the usual story of an ingredient disappearing. This one stayed exactly where it was. It just never left home.

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Ask for it in Karnataka and you’ll get avarekai. Ask in Gujarat and it’s valor or papdi. Cross into Maharashtra and it becomes vaal. So many regional names that the bean lost its own. Frozen packets sold across Indian stores, even outside Gujarat, are labeled “Surti Papdi Lilva” by default, regardless of which bean is actually inside the bag. A Karnataka winter staple, wearing a Gujarati nametag, because that’s just what stuck.

And then edamame walked in. Boiled soybean, served at the start of a meal you’re about to pay too much for, became shorthand for “healthy protein snack” worldwide. Avarekai does the same job. Better, actually. It has more protein than edamame, gram for gram. It just never got a publicist. One bean got a cocktail-hour rebrand. The other one is still sitting in a Bangalore street stall every December, doing the work, unnoticed.

What to do with it

Avarekalu usli: steam the beans, toss with grated coconut and a mustard-curry leaf tempering. Or go the Gujarati route, vaal nu shaak, slow-cooked with the dried beans until they fall apart in the gravy. Either way, cook it through. No exceptions there.

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Hello reader, if you are enjoying these daily posts, I have jotted down some of my reasons and thoughts on why I started this project of 365 days, 365 Indian ingredients. Feel free to read it here. Take your time, and a share and like would go a long way.

Meet the ingredient

Elaichi is green cardamom, and it’s the spice in your masala box that’s truly Indian, not adopted from somewhere else. It grows wild in the Western Ghats, in the forests of Kerala. The hills there are literally called the Cardamom Hills. It’s been part of Indian cooking and trade for thousands of years, long before it showed up in a Scandinavian bakery or a coffee shop chai latte.

Inside the body

My dad used to chew on a pod after every meal. I always thought it was just an old-man habit, something to do with the hands and the mouth after eating. Turns out he was doing real digestive work. The oils in cardamom go after the bacteria that cause bad breath, and chewing it kicks off the enzyme in your saliva that starts breaking down starch. It’s not a mint. It’s a small after-meal digestive aid that happens to taste good.

It also works as a mild carminative, helping with gas and bloating after a heavy meal, and there’s research showing regular cardamom powder can help lower blood pressure. In Ayurveda, it’s added to milk specifically to make the milk easier to digest. That’s why it goes into your bedtime milk and your kheer, not just for flavour.

Where we lost the plot

My dad’s habit was the real use. Daily, after meals, plain. What my siblings and I actually hated growing up was finding a whole pod in our biryani. You’d be eating, get a mouthful of rice, and suddenly bite into this sharp little pod you didn’t expect. We’d pick around it.

That’s the bigger shift with elaichi. It went from an everyday digestive habit to a “special occasion” spice, reserved for biryani and wedding kheer, used whole and decorative rather than chewed and functional.

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What got me intrigued is scandinavia took it more seriously than we did. Swedish bakers built whole traditions around cardamom, “kardemummabullar buns” where it’s the headline flavour, not a finishing touch. It shows up in their everyday breads and cookies, given its own dish, its own identity. Some even go as far to say if you want a flavour of Sweden, just add cardamom. In India, outside of kheer and biryani, it mostly just sits in chai, one flavor among several, never the main event.

And while it sat in that festive corner here, the world moved on without us in another way too.

What to do with it

If you’re cooking biryani or pulao, crush the pods lightly before adding them so nobody bites into a surprise. And try what my dad did. After a meal, one pod, just chewed plain. See if it does what it did for him.

Tell me, how do you consume cardamom in your family?

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The Forgotten Pantry is my attempt to give the Indian kitchen its flowers while it’s still very much alive. So thank you for reading. 🌺 If you know someone who grew up eating this way and forgot to feel good about it, send it to them.

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Pudina is mint, mostly Mentha arvensis, and it’s been growing wild in the Himalayan belt for a very long time. Ayurvedic texts mention it as far back as the 2nd century. In my kitchen it shows up whenever summer shows up. Pulao, chutney, raita, a glass of chilled buttermilk on a hot afternoon.

Inside the body

This one blew my mind—the cooling you feel when you eat mint isn’t actually cooling. It’s a trick. Menthol, the compound that gives mint its cooling, slightly sharp smell and taste, activates a receptor called TRPM8 in your nose, the same one that fires when your skin meets real cold air. Your temperature hasn’t dropped at all. The receptor just goes off anyway.

There’s a whole body of research on this with people who have blocked noses. Rub on a menthol balm, breathe in, and most people report feeling like air is moving better. Measure it with instruments and nothing has changed. The nose is exactly as blocked as before. Mint didn’t open anything. It convinced you it did.

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Ayurveda gets to the same place through a different door. Pudina is considered Pitta-pacifying, cooling to an overheated system. Different language, same instinct. Something about this leaf reads as cool to the body, whether the thermometer agrees or not.

Where we lost the plot

Nobody actually forgot pudina. That’s what I find interesting. It got hijacked instead. Most mint grown in India today isn’t headed for anyone’s kitchen. It’s grown for menthol, for toothpaste, cough drops, cigarettes. India is the world’s largest mint oil exporter, and that entire industry traces back to six cuttings sent from Japan to a lab in Jammu in 1952. Before that, there was no commercial mint oil production in the country at all!

So the herb in your chutney and the herb in your toothpaste are the same plant family living two very different lives. One stayed a kitchen herb. The other became a global commodity.

What to do with it

I throw a handful of pudina into pulao right near the end, and it changes the whole dish. Chutney is the obvious one, pudina with coriander and green chilli, more of it once summer arrives. And on a hot afternoon, mint stirred into buttermilk or raita does something a fan in the room can’t.

Hello reader, if you are enjoying these daily posts, I have jotted down some of my reasons and thoughts on why I started this project of 365 days, 365 Indian ingredients. Feel free to read it here. Take your time, and a share and like would go a long way.

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Meet the ingredient

Aka kaddu ke beej. The seeds you’ve been throwing away with the kaddu skin every time you made sabzi. Pumpkin itself came to India from the Americas after the 16th century, but it absorbed so completely into the Indian kitchen that the seeds became part of the pantry too. Rural households in MP, Rajasthan, UP roasted them with salt and ate them without making a fuss about it. No label required.

Inside the body

In 2020, I was developing a wellness food product and sold a granola bar (made with oats) for sleep. Pumpkin seeds kept coming up in the research. They’re one of the best plant sources of tryptophan, the amino acid your body converts first into serotonin, then into melatonin. I didn’t know this ingredient at all before that project. What I also didn’t know then: the tryptophan absorbs better when you eat the seeds with a small amount of carbohydrate. A handful with a piece of roti, or stirred into khichdi, works better than seeds eaten alone.

The zinc is worth knowing about separately. Zinc deficiency is genuinely common in India, and pumpkin seeds are one of the better plant sources precisely because they don’t carry the phytates that grains do. Eat them as a snack. And then there’s magnesium, which shows up in its absence as poor sleep, muscle cramps, and anxiety. Most people have never connected those symptoms to what’s missing from their diet.

Where we lost the plot

While researching for this project, I realised pumpkin seeds weren’t a new import. They’d been here, absorbed and in use, for a long time. What happened was two things at once. The seeds started being treated as kitchen waste in urban homes. And then the wellness industry repackaged them as a premium product, often imported, sometimes from Austria or Canada, sold at several times the price of what a local kaddu produces in your own kitchen. Those are pepitas, a hull-less variety bred for snacking. The desi kaddu seed is different: pale, flat, with a white husk.

Here’s the part that gets me: the pale, flat seeds of the desi kaddu are likely higher in cucurbitin1 than the seeds of the orange imported pumpkin sold in supermarkets around Halloween. That conclusion comes from what research tells us about variation across cucurbit species. It hasn’t made it into English-language nutrition media yet. The grandmothers who saved seeds from their kitchen kaddu were probably working with the better product. They just didn’t have a wellness brand telling them so.

What to do with it

Dry roast with salt and black pepper. Eat as a snack, or stir into curd or sprinkle on salads or your morning eggs. If you want the sleep benefit specifically, eat a small handful in the evening with something light, a piece of roti, a few crackers. The carbohydrate matters.

You can also add the seeds, soaked overnight, into your morning smoothie or dal. They don’t change the taste. They just do their job quietly.

Next time you cut a kaddu, save the seeds. Wash them, dry them on a towel, roast them in a dry pan. That’s the whole thing.

Tell me, how do you eat your pumpkin seeds?

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The Forgotten Pantry. One Indian ingredient, every day, for 365 days.

Writing 365 of these is an act of faith. Faith that the ingredients are worth it, that the stories matter, that someone somewhere is reading this over morning coffee or chai and thinking, yes, I know this one. Thank you for being that person. 💚

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Green moong is whole mung bean, skin still on, growing in Indian soil long before most of our other staples arrived. There’s no story of how it travelled here. It just always was. You’ll meet it dressed up as moong dal in most kitchens, but the whole, unsplit version is the one doing the real work.

Inside the body

Here’s the surprising part. The dry seed has almost no vitamin C. Sprout it, and that number jumps to something your body can actually use. Germination switches on a process that wasn’t happening before. So a bowl of sprouted moong is nutritionally a different food than the dry dal sitting in your jar.

It’s also the easiest legume on digestion. Less of the sugar compounds that make other dals gas-heavy, so it sits light even on a sensitive gut. Low on the glycemic scale too, it won’t spike you the way some carbs do. Cool it after cooking and the resistant starch rises, which is gentler still. In Ayurveda, it’s one of the rare legumes considered balancing for all three doshas instead of aggravating one. That’s probably why it became the food you’re handed when you’re unwell, or fasting, or your gut just needs a reset.

Where we lost the plot

Moong dal never disappeared. But the whole green version split into two separate identities, and only one kept its seat at the table. Split, yellow, skinned moong became “dal,” the everyday thing in a pressure cooker, eaten with rice or roti, never questioned. Whole moong got handed over to the wellness conversation instead. It became “sprouts,” something you eat on a diet, something you photograph in a bowl with boiled corn for breakfast. Same bean, two different categories of food in people’s heads. One is dinner. The other is something you do for your health.

Once that split happened, whole moong stopped showing up in the dal pot. Families stopped because the split version was faster, and the whole one got reassigned to a salad bowl with lemon and chaat masala instead of a tempered pot with ghee and cumin. We didn’t lose the ingredient. We lost half its uses.

What to do with it

For the everyday dal, pressure cook whole moong with a pinch of turmeric until soft, four whistles or so. Heat ghee, drop in cumin, ginger, and a green chilli, let it sizzle, then pour that over the cooked dal. Lemon at the end. Eat it with rice or roti. It’s the dal you make on a day you don’t have the energy to think about food but still want something that holds you.

For the sprouts, I steam mine about 30 percent, just enough to take the rawness off. Toss with black salt, lemon, and chopped coriander. That’s breakfast, or what I reach for when evening hunger hits and I don’t want anything heavy. You can eat them fully raw too, if your gut handles it well. Just chew slower.

Tell me, how do you like to consume your green moong?

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Chaas has been in the Indian kitchen longer than most things we consider essential. Not as a drink someone designed, but as what was left after the makkhan (traditional butter) was taken out. The liquid remaining after churning curd for butter, thinned with water, sometimes spiced. That was it. The original buttermilk was a byproduct that turned out to be more useful than what it came from.

It goes by different names depending on where you are. Mattha in Rajasthan, mor in Tamil Nadu, majjiga in Andhra, mooru in Karnataka, taka in Maharashtra. Same idea, slightly different spicing, completely different ritual around it

Inside the body

The reason chaas works better than curd as a digestive aid is actually about survival. Live bacteria in curd don’t always make it past the stomach. Buttermilk, being more dilute and slightly acidic, is gentler on them. More of the lactic acid bacteria arrive in the intestine intact. You are not drinking chaas for protein or calcium. You are drinking it to move things along.

The spicing is not incidental. Roasted jeera releases thymol and cuminaldehyde in forms that are more bioavailable in an acidic liquid than in water. Hing reduces fermentation in the gut. Black salt replaces electrolytes. Classical Ayurvedic texts list seven distinct spiced buttermilk formulations, each targeting a different condition: piles, weak digestion, postpartum recovery, oedema. The spice changed the therapeutic target while the liquid being the delivery system.

Where we lost the plot

Probiotic supplements happened. The idea that you need a capsule with 10 billion CFU to fix your gut made a daily glass of chaas after lunch seem quaint. And the wellness industry, which needs things to be packageable and premium, had no use for something that costs almost nothing, takes two minutes, and comes in a steel or terracotta glass.

There is also something that got lost in the shift from churning to blending. The traditional process, making dahi, churning it to extract butter, then diluting what remained, produced a more complex buttermilk. Different bacterial strains, deeper fermentation. Most urban kitchens now blend curd with water. The result tastes similar. The microbial profile is not the same.

The South Indian tradition understood something the rest of us forgot. Mor or majjiga was not a drink. It was how a meal ended. The digestive close of a thali. A function, not a beverage.

What to do with it

Spice it properly. Roast the jeera before you add it. Use black salt, not white. A pinch of hing if your digestion needs it. Drink it after lunch, not before, not instead of.

If you make kadhi, you already know this, but it is worth saying: the reason buttermilk works as a kadhi base and yogurt does not is the acidity. It keeps the besan gravy from clumping and gives a sour note that tamarind cannot replicate in this context.

And if you have been buying probiotic supplements for gut health, try three weeks of post-lunch chaas first. It will not come in a box with a CFU count on the label. That is the point.

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Meet the ingredient

Tadgola, aka ice apple comes from the palmyra palm, one of the oldest trees in the Indian landscape. It goes by nungu in Tamil Nadu, taal in Bengal, taati munjalu in Andhra, and a dozen other names across every coastal and semi-arid state in the country. That many names for one fruit usually means one thing: everyone knew it.

The fruit itself is unassuming. Dark, hard shell on the outside. Crack it open and there are two or three translucent jelly pods sitting inside, each holding a small pocket of water. Just ripe, the texture is soft and yielding, and the water that comes out when you bite in is clean and faintly sweet. There is nothing else quite like it.

Inside the body

Tadgola is 85 to 90 percent water, but that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is the mineral matrix it comes with. The potassium and sodium in the flesh help the body actually hold onto that water, not just pass it through. It works the way an electrolyte solution works, except it grew on a tree and cost twelve rupees from a cart.

In Ayurveda it is classified as sheetal, snigdha, madhura. Cooling, moistening, sweet. A pitta-pacifier. When the body is overheated, digestion slows and acidity spikes. Tadgola is naturally alkaline, which is why it has long been recommended for summer heartburn and nausea.

Where we lost the plot

The palmyra palm grows up to thirty metres tall. Getting to the fruit requires a skilled climber. Once the fruit is cracked open, it spoils within hours. There is no packaging this. No cold chain, no logo, no shelf life.

Coconut water got all three. It got branded, bottled, and sold at four times the price as a wellness product. Tadgola stayed with the street vendor, available for a few weeks a year, unknown outside the regions that grew up with it.

What to do with it

Eat it fresh, from a vendor who knows how to crack it open. That’s it. Chilled or at room temperature, straight from the shell, ideally just ripe when the jelly is still soft and the water runs. Don’t wait for it to firm up.

In Bengal, the ripe pulp at a later stage gets battered and fried into taal-er bora, a monsoon fritter. In Tamil Nadu, the fresh sap from the tree, called neera or pathaneer, is drunk as a morning tonic before it has a chance to ferment. The same tree, three completely different foods depending on when you harvest it.

But honestly, for most of us, the best thing to do with a tadgola is find one. The season is short. The vendor who sells it won’t be there in July.

Do you have a tadgola memory to share?

Hello reader, if you are enjoying these daily posts, I have jotted down some of my reasons and thoughts on why I started this project of 365 days, 365 Indian ingredients. Feel free to read it here. Take your time, and a share and like would go a long way.

If you’re based in India and this is adding something to your kitchen and your thinking, you can support this work here:

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Chhole, aka kabuli chana, aka chickpeas. Everyone has a gas joke ready. That’s the first thing people say about chickpeas. Soak them properly, cook them with hing, add some jeera, don’t rush it—and still, someone at the table will make the joke.

Meanwhile, we’re all eating hummus like we grew up with it.

Chhole is kabuli chana, the large, pale, smooth chickpea that anchors North Indian cooking. It came to the subcontinent relatively recently, around the 18th century, likely through Afghanistan, which is why it was named kabuli. “From Kabul.” Before that, we had desi chana, the small dark one. Kabuli arrived late and took over completely.

India is now the largest producer of chickpeas in the world. We grow most of what the world eats.

Inside the body

About 35% of the starch in chickpeas is resistant starch. Your small intestine cannot digest it. It passes through intact, reaches the colon, and gut bacteria ferment it into short-chain fatty acids, particularly butyrate. Butyrate is what the cells lining your colon run on. It reduces inflammation and supports the gut barrier.

There’s also a satiety piece. Research found chickpeas trigger a significantly higher and more sustained release of fullness hormones compared to regular starch. The effect depends on intact cell structure. Whole chickpeas, properly cooked. Not powder, not a cracker.

One more thing. The resistant starch content increases when chickpeas are cooked and then cooled. Yesterday’s leftover chhole has more of it than freshly cooked. Also bonus points—it also tastes better!

Where we lost the plot

The gas problem is real but it isn’t inevitable. It’s what happens when the prep is skipped. Here are few ways you could avoid it:

1. Overnight soaking breaks down the oligosaccharides, the carbohydrates that cause fermentation in the wrong part of the gut.

2. Discarding the soaking water removes more of those carbohydrates.

3. Cooking with hing, jeera, and ginger isn’t decoration. Each one has a specific role in making the chickpea digestible. The whole method was built around this ingredient’s particular demands.

Open a can of chickpeas and you’ve skipped all of that. Blend it with tahini and olive oil, sell it in supermarkets across the world, and suddenly there’s no stigma attached. No warnings. Just a gut-health claim on the label.

The version that takes overnight soaking and a handful of whole spices carries the gas joke. The version that comes out of a can gets the wellness aisle.

India grows the chickpeas. Exports them. Imports them back from Australia when domestic supply dips. Then reads articles about how hummus is a superfood.

What to do with it

Soak overnight. Discard the water. If you want the chhole dark without food colour, add a black tea bag to the cooking water. Tannins from the tea deepen the colour naturally. Remove before eating.

Cook with whole spices in the water: black cardamom, a bay leaf, two cloves. Not optional.

Eat the leftovers cold the next day. That’s the version doing the most work.

Tell me, how often do you eat chhole?

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Jowar is sorghum. It came to India from Africa about 4,000 years ago and settled so thoroughly into the kitchens of Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh that most people assumed it had always been here. In North Karnataka they call it jola. In Tamil Nadu, cholam. The bhakri made from it was the daily bread of peninsular India for centuries.

Then the Green Revolution arrived, wheat got subsidies, and jowar got reclassified as poor people’s food.

Inside the body

Nobody in the millet revival is talking about this: cool the bhakri down first.

Jowar contains resistant starch. When the bhakri cools, that starch changes form. Instead of being absorbed as glucose, it travels to your gut and gets fermented by your gut bacteria. The glycaemic load drops. Your microbiome gets fed. It’s the same grain, the same meal, but what your body does with it is different depending on whether it’s hot off the tawa or packed cold for lunch.

Where we lost the plot

You cannot make jowar roti with a rolling pin. The flour has no gluten, so it won’t stretch or hold. You have to pat it by hand on a wet cloth, using a technique called thapna, and cook it on a dry tawa. It asks something of the cook.

That skill became a class signal. Wheat roti was easier, softer, more uniform. It didn’t require learning. When ration systems started distributing wheat and rice, jowar got pushed to the edges. Rural kitchens, older women, communities that simply never stopped.

Now it’s back on shelves in millet revival packaging at two hundred rupees for half a kilo, positioned as a health food discovery. The irony is that the people selling it are not the ones who kept it alive.

What to do with it

Start with bhakri. Use hot water to make the dough, pat it by hand, cook on a dry tawa. Eat it with dal and raw onion. Or thecha if you can find green chillies worth pounding. Let some of it cool before you eat it.

If you want something simpler: pop whole jowar like popcorn. Dry pan, high heat, lid on. It’s a traditional snack in Maharashtra and MP that predates the entire makhana moment by several centuries.

Tell me, what is your jowar story?

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Meet the ingredient

Falsa. Grewia asiatica. A small, dark purple berry that grows across northern and western India and has been here since the Vedic period. In Ayurveda it goes by Parushaka, which translates, roughly, as “that which fills up.” In Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, my hometown, it would be a common fruit in summer in a bag carried by my grandfather, and would get eaten with salt until someone’s stomach hurts.

Inside the body

The cooling effect of falsa is not poetic. It’s electrochemical. The fruit is unusually high in sodium and potassium, which means it’s doing the same job as a sports drink, except it’s a berry you eat off your palm. It helps balance the ions that regulate nerve signals, muscle function, and enzyme activity.

Charaka knew this without the vocabulary. He listed falsa in the Shramahara group, herbs that relieve fatigue, and separately as fever-reducing. Both make complete sense once you understand what the fruit actually does to the body. A summer street fruit that shows up in Charaka’s detox chapter is not something you throw away.

It’s also a low glycemic index fruit, which means the sugar hits slowly. And it’s high in iron, so the dizziness that comes with a bad summer gets addressed from two angles at once.

Where we lost the plot

Falsa didn’t disappear because people stopped wanting it. The street vendor’s call in northern India, kaale kaale phalse, sharbat waale phalse, was a whole summer sound. People remember it with the same sharpness as a smell.

It disappeared because it lasts one day. Maybe two, if you’re lucky and it’s refrigerated. It can’t survive a truck ride. It bruises before it arrives. Blueberries from Chile can sit in cold storage for weeks and land in a Mumbai supermarket looking perfect. Falsa cannot. The supply chain is not built for things that are alive in the inconvenient way.

So what fills the gap? Packaged sharbat concentrates with added colour and sugar. Flavoured electrolyte drinks. The thing we actually needed in May was right there, costing nothing, growing in someone’s backyard, and the market had no use for it.

What to do with it

If you find a vendor, eat them the way my I did. Raw, with salt, seeds and all. The seed is not a problem. The skin is not a problem. The mess is the point.

If you get a larger quantity, soak them in water for an hour, rub the pulp out with your hands, strain, add a little sugar and lemon, and serve over ice. That’s the sharbat. No recipe needed. No rosewater required, though North Indian tradition often adds it. The whole thing takes ten minutes and it will fix whatever the afternoon did to you.

Tell me, have you heard of this ingredient before?

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The Forgotten Pantry is my attempt to give the Indian kitchen its flowers while it’s still very much alive. So thank you for reading. 🌺 If you know someone who grew up eating this way and forgot to feel good about it, send it to them.

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Curry leaf, aka kari patta, has been in the Indian kitchen longer than almost anything else in this series. Native to India, grown in backyards, dropped into hot oil every morning across the South. You know the smell. That sharp, slightly bitter hit the moment the leaves touch fat. It is one of the most recognisable smells in Indian cooking, and somehow, we still don’t really know this leaf.

Inside the body

Here is the thing I did not know: curry leaf may slow the rate at which your meal raises your blood sugar. It contains a group of compounds called carbazole alkaloids that appear to interfere with the enzyme that breaks starch into glucose.1 This happens in the pan and in the food. Not in a supplement capsule.

The liver benefits too. Specific alkaloids in curry leaf have shown hepatoprotective effects in research, including in studies looking at fatty liver, which is now one of the most common conditions in urban India. The same leaf that appeared in every South Indian meal for generations is now being removed from the daily diet of the exact population that needs it.

I’ve used curry leaf soaked water on my hair for a while now. The hair fall reduction was real enough that I noticed it. There’s a reason for that: the leaves contain compounds linked to melanin production. The traditional hair oil use isn’t folk belief dressed up as science.

Where we lost the plot

This one isn’t forgotten. It’s misunderstood. And I want to celebrate it. Because I love this ingredient.

Most households that use curry leaf daily are still discarding it. The leaves go into the tempering, the volatile aromatics move into the oil, and then the leaves themselves get pushed aside. What stays in the leaf: the fibre, the alkaloids, the iron. The part doing the body work. Gone.

Outside South India, curry leaf has faded from everyday North Indian urban cooking. Packaged masalas replaced the technique that needed fresh leaves. And now you can buy dried curry leaf powder marketed as a blood sugar supplement for several hundred rupees for a hundred grams. The fresh version is growing in someone’s garden nearby, probably for free.

What to do with it

Eat the leaves. That is the whole instruction.

In Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, curry leaf chutney powder is one way this happens. The leaves are dried, ground with urad dal and spices, mixed with sesame oil. You eat it with rice or idli and the whole leaf goes in. That is worth making.

My mom would also make curry leaf chutney using amla as the base. It’s the vitamin C the leaf loves. Indian cooking so beautiful!

The other thing: if you use curry leaves in tempering, try adding more than you think you need, and then actually eat them. They are slightly bitter and a little fibrous, which is exactly why they work. Don’t avoid it.

34 ingredients down, 331 more to go.

If this made you open your kitchen cupboard, my job here is done.

The Forgotten Pantry. One Indian ingredient, every day, for 365 days

Meet the ingredient

Peanut aka mungfali aka shengdana arrived in India with the Portuguese in the 16th century. It settled so completely into Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Rajasthan that each region claimed it as its own. India is now one of the largest producers in the world. It came from somewhere else and never left.

Inside the body

The boiled peanut from a street cart turns out to be the most intelligent preparation. Boiling increases resveratrol availability more than roasting does, and roasting beats anything processed. The fat profile is mostly monounsaturated, which means sustained energy without a blood sugar spike.

The niacin content supports serotonin conversion, which connects to mood and sleep. Ayurveda classified it as heavy and warming, said eat it cooked, said winter is the right season. The vendor at the signal had been following those instructions without knowing it.

Where we lost the plot

Peanut butter arrived and everything shifted. The same ingredient that sold for five rupees in a newspaper cone got repackaged in plastic tubs with protein percentages on the label, as if the mungfali needed improving to be worth eating.

People who grew up finishing a cone before their fathers took a first sip were now buying it as a supplement. Then the allergy conversation did the rest. Valid for people who have the allergy. Significantly overextended to everyone else. A food that Indian grandmothers ate daily, without drama or a second thought, became something to approach carefully.

What to do with it

My earliest peanut memory is a small bowl of salted ones at the only restaurant in our neighbourhood, the kind of place where my dad would order a whiskey with the other men in the family. I had finished the bowl before he took his first sip. The other memory is the car. Whenever I said I was hungry on a long drive, he would find a peanut vendor at a signal, roasted peanuts in a newspaper cone. I never understood how he always found one. He just did. And now we would raise both eyebrows at the protein tub.

Dry roast a handful. Rub the skins off. Eat warm. Or make shengdana chutney: roasted peanuts blended with green chilli, garlic, lemon. Keeps in the fridge for three days and goes with almost everything.

The newspaper cone remains the gold standard but it requires a signal and some luck.

Tell me, what is your peanut memory?

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Meet the ingredient

Aka charoli, or almondette. Most people have had it without knowing what it is. A handful of tiny beige seeds floating on kheer, present at every festive table, noticed by no one. You eat around them, or eat them without thinking. I did, for years.

Chironji (Buchanania lanzan) grows wild in the dry deciduous forests of central India and Western Himalayas including states of Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand. Not imported, not adopted, entirely native.

Inside the body

Here’s what surprised me: the kernel is about 52% oil and 25-30% protein. For context, cashew runs around 18% protein. We’ve been using a protein-dense, fat-rich food as a garnish!

The fats in chironji include linoleic acid, an essential fatty acid the body cannot synthesise. It matters for skin integrity, hormonal signalling, and keeping systemic inflammation in check.

The fatty acid profile also supports steady blood sugar. Ayurveda classifies it as balya, strength-giving, and rasayana, which means tissue-restorative. The Mughal-era use was more interesting: a handful of charoli with rose water and saffron, eaten before dinner to open the appetite.

Where we lost the plot

We kept chironji in the kitchen just enough to never think about it seriously. It became the almond’s cheaper cousin, something you scatter on sweets when almonds feel like too much. Its English name is literally “cuddapah almond.” The comparison was always a downgrade.

Meanwhile, the tree is on the IUCN Red List1. Overharvesting, deforestation, premature seed collection before full ripeness. The tribal communities of central India whose livelihoods depend on it are under pressure from all sides. We treat it as a garnish. The tree is disappearing. These two facts exist at the same time, and most of us holding a bag of chironji don’t know either of them.

What to do with it

The kheer use is real and worth keeping. Soak the seeds first, the texture shifts from chalky to something almost creamy. But the more interesting application is as a thickener. Ground chironji paste works the way cashew paste does in a gravy, it adds body and a faint nuttiness without taking over. Mughlai and Rajasthani kitchens used it this way.

In MP, the Gond and Bharia tribes make a chironji halwa with ghee, milk, and jaggery that has nothing to do with garnishing anything. It is the thing itself.

Buy it, soak it, use more of it than you think you should.

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Meet the ingredient

Hing, aka asafoetida is not Indian1. It just became indispensable here, the way only a few ingredients manage to.

The plant, Ferula, grows in the cold desert mountains of Iran and Afghanistan. It arrived here around 600 BC, possibly carried by Alexander’s army who mistook it for a prized Roman spice and brought it east by accident. India kept it. The Romans forgot it. We now consume 40% of the world’s supply and grow none of it ourselves2.

Inside the body

Most people think hing prevents gas. That’s not quite right. What it actually does is relax the smooth muscle lining of the intestine, which is why it works on spasm and bloating, not just wind. It also triggers bile release, activates digestive enzymes in the pancreas, and measurably increases salivary amylase before food even reaches the stomach.

Ayurvedic texts have two specific classifications for it: deepaniya, meaning it kindles digestive fire, and sanjna-sthapaka, restorer of consciousness. It was given to new mothers, used for fainting, for respiratory collapse. A pinch in dal is a very mild version of something that was once considered serious medicine.

Where we lost the plot

What most kitchens use as hing is not hing. The yellow powder in the small plastic box is somewhere between 3 and 35% actual resin, cut with wheat flour, rice starch, and gum arabic. My mother grew up in a Jain family where hing was not optional. It was the flavour base for everything, standing in for onion and garlic. We still order ours specially from Madhya Pradesh.

The real thing is darker, almost amber, intensely aromatic. A pinch is genuinely enough. When you see a video of someone adding two teaspoons of hing to a dish, you are watching someone cook with filler.

In 2022-23, India imported 1,441 tonnes of raw hing worth $187 million. Not a single kilo was grown here.3 That number should tell you something about what pure resin actually costs, and why the Rs 20 box cannot possibly contain it.

What to do with it

Always bloom it in fat first. Hot ghee or oil, half a second, then build everything else on top of that. It is never an afterthought and it is never added directly to food.

In dal, I add it at the very start of the tempering, before cumin, before anything. When it hits, there is a moment where the whole kitchen smells like something is about to become very good. That moment is the point.

Tell me, do you add Hing in your dishes?

If you’re based in India and this is adding something to your kitchen and your thinking, you can support this work here:

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The Forgotten Pantry. One Indian ingredient, every day, for 365 days

This is the first monthly haul. A look back at what we covered, what surprised me, and what the comment section taught me about why this project exists.

The month in ingredients

1–30, in order.

Sattu · Sabja · Kokum · Ghee · Amla · Bathua · Kasuri methi · Ajwain · Alsi · Ragi · Makhana · Cashew · Poha · Jaggery · Coconut · Ash gourd · Halim seeds · Jackfruit · Mishri · Lobia · Litchi · Magaz · Black pepper · Anardana · Moringa · Lotus stem · Raw mango · Bael · Suran · Mustard seeds

[Full archive → The Forgotten Pantry on Substack]

The ingredient that surprised me 🫡

Litchi.

Everyone filed it under “too sweet to eat freely.” But litchi’s own polyphenols stabilise the blood sugar response its sugars create. The fruit regulates itself. Six weeks a year, eat it without the maths.

Wellness noise, dismantled 📵

The guideline that sent ghee out of Indian kitchens for thirty years was wrong. The oils that replaced it oxidise at high heat. Ghee doesn’t. We traded down, and we did it because someone else’s science told us to.

Two recipe ideas to try 🫰🏼

The snack

Dry poha, makhana, and cashews, roasted together in ghee with black salt, turmeric and black pepper. Four out of the six ingredients were in this month’s posts. Poha brings iron and easy carbs. Makhana brings magnesium and keeps blood sugar steady. Cashews bring copper, which helps the body actually move iron around. The ghee ties it together and makes the nutrients more bioavailable. It also takes ten minutes and tastes better than anything in a packet.

The meal

Drumstick soup, with lotus stem added in the last ten minutes of cooking. Drumstick releases its nutrients slowly as it steeps, and lotus stem holds its crunch even after simmering. Eat suran on the side, par-boiled and pan-fried with salt and lemon. Three ingredients from this month, one quiet, filling meal. Your gut will know what to do with all of it.

Seasonal note 🌞

Raw mango season is ending. If you still see kairi at a fruit stall, buy it. Eat it raw with salt and red chilli powder. Or make aam panna the real way: boil or roast the whole fruit, scoop the pulp, blend with water, roasted cumin, black salt, mint. Drink it cold. The bottled version is a flavour. This one is a function. The window is closing.

Reader moment 🙋🏽‍♀️

This was my favourite part of the whole month—reading through your comments and conversing with the loyalists. But these two comments from two lovely people just hit it right out of the park in validating why this project exists.

Winston Lee, a food scientist based in the US, left a comment on the alsi post: he was at 2 out of 9 on ingredient recognition and said he might have to revoke his title. He has been here since Day 1. By Day 28 he was looking up dried bael slices on Amazon for his sister who has IBS, after reading the post on a fruit he had never heard of. That is TFP working exactly as intended. Across an ocean, for someone who came in knowing almost nothing.

Sheeba, on suran, who grows it in her yard in Kerala: her mother makes it like a spicy fish curry, without the fish. A vaidyar once recommended suran, raw banana, and kulith to her specifically during a period of infertility treatment. Three foods with low face value and high body value. That sentence is the whole point of this series.

Month ahead 🔜

Days 31–60 are coming. And I am so excited. Hing. Chironji. Curry leaf. Falsa. Jowar. And a milestone on Day 50 that will get its own moment.

One Question ❓

Which of these 30 ingredients did you bring back into your kitchen? Tell me in the comments.

Hello reader, if you are enjoying these daily posts, I have jotted down some of my reasons and thoughts on why I started this project of 365 days, 365 Indian ingredients. Feel free to read it here. Take your time, and a share and like would go a long way.

This is still a small community. Every comment, every person who came back the next day, every reader who sent this to someone else—it means more than I expected when I started. Thank you for being here. 💚

If you’re based in India and this is adding something to your kitchen and your thinking, you can support this work here:

Contribute what you’d like💚

Thirty ingredients in, and The Forgotten Pantry is only just getting started. TFP is a 365-day project: one Indian pantry ingredient a day, every day, for a year. It made sense to stop at something foundational. Mustard seeds have been here since before the kitchen as we know it existed.

Meet the ingredient

Mustard seeds have been in Indian kitchens for at least 5,000 years. Seeds were found in storage vessels at Harappan sites. This is not an ingredient that arrived and got adopted. It grew here, was pressed here, built cuisines here. There are three types in common use: black, brown, and yellow, and the one in your Indian kitchen is almost certainly brown or black.

Inside the body

Here is the part that stopped me when I read it. Whole mustard seeds, sitting undisturbed in a jar, are chemically inert. The bioactive compounds inside them are stored separately and only activate when the seed is broken, crushed, or cracked. When that happens, two compounds meet and produce ‘allyl isothiocyanate’, which is responsible for the heat, the pungency, and most of the medicinal action. The seed has to be disrupted to do anything.

Every traditional use of mustard, tempering in hot oil until it pops, grinding into paste, pressing into oil, involves breaking the seed open. The kitchen technique was doing the chemistry before anyone named the chemistry.

What this compound does: it stimulates bile production and speeds up digestion.

Where we lost the plot

I’ll be honest. I have only ever used mustard seeds in tempering. Three seconds in hot oil, they pop, done. I didn’t think much about them beyond that. (Btw, this part about tempering—the dancing mustard seeds is what made me fall in love with cooking). Hot tip: Measure your mustard seeds, then add a little more. Some will escape the pan before you can stop them.

But mustard has a whole other life I hadn’t paid attention to. In Bengal, it gets ground into a fresh paste and becomes the base of entire dishes. Shorshe ilish or Mustard-coated fish. Kasundi, which is a fermented mustard sauce with the kind of regional identity that Dijon has in France, except older and sharper and considerably less exported.

In Punjab and Bihar, mustard oil was the cooking fat until the 1990s, when a government ban following an adulteration scare pushed refined oils into urban kitchens. The ban was never cleanly resolved scientifically. The oils stayed. Mustard oil’s reputation in cities never fully recovered.

We reduced a seed that was medicine, cooking fat, condiment, and ritual fumigant to a supporting actor in the first ten seconds of a recipe.

I do eat mustard sauce occasionally at cafes. But that’s French-style, and it’s a different thing entirely.

What to do with it

If you only know mustard seeds as the thing that goes in first and gets forgotten, try making a simple mustard paste at home. Soak brown mustard seeds overnight, grind them with a little water, salt, and green chilli. Use it as a marinade for any protein before cooking. The flavour is sharp and alive in a way the bottled stuff isn’t.

The other thing worth doing: cook something Bengali. Even a simple aloo shorshe, potatoes in mustard paste, will show you what this seed can do when it’s the whole point of the dish instead of the opening act. Brb, going to try that next.

Hello reader, if you are enjoying these daily posts, I have jotted down some of my reasons and thoughts on why I started this project of 365 days, 365 Indian ingredients. Feel free to read it here. Take your time, and a share and like would go a long way.

30 ingredients down, 335 more to go.

If this made you open your kitchen cupboard, my job here is done.

The Forgotten Pantry. One Indian ingredient, every day, for 365 days

Writing 365 of these is an act of faith. Faith that the ingredients are worth it, that the stories matter, that someone somewhere is reading this over morning coffee or chai and thinking, yes, I know this one. Thank you for being that person. 💚

Meet the ingredient

Suran is an elephant foot yam. It grows across India, appears in Sanskrit texts going back two thousand years, and still shows up in kitchens from Maharashtra to Odisha to Tamil Nadu under different names. Senai kizhangu in the south. Ole in Bengal. In most Hindi-speaking homes, just suran. It is one of those ingredients that has never needed introduction in the places that kept using it.

Inside the body

Suran contains a soluble fibre that, when it reaches the gut, absorbs water and forms a thick gel. That gel slows glucose absorption. It also feeds specific gut bacteria that produce short-chain fatty acids, which reduce inflammation in the colon. The yam is doing two jobs at once and asking for no credit.

One practical note: raw suran contains calcium oxalate crystals that cause throat itching. This is why it is always cooked, and why traditional preparations use tamarind or another souring agent. The acid finishes what heat starts. The reputation for causing itching comes entirely from undercooked or badly prepared suran. Properly made, there is nothing to fear.

Where we lost the plot

Suran looks like effort. It is large and rough-skinned, comes caked in mud, and the raw sap can irritate your hands while cutting. In a kitchen culture that has increasingly optimised for convenience, none of that is a selling point.

And unlike, purple yam, because of its colour, suran has attracted no wellness rebranding. No influencer has called it a superfood. It does not photograph in a way that performs well. Purple yam got a moment because it is purple. Suran just sat there being exactly what it always was, in the markets that still stock it, waiting.

What to do with it

My mother’s version requires no recipe card.

She would need someone to help with the cutting. A full suran comes in dirty, caked in mud, so you clean it well first. Then you cut off the skin, not peel it. Then cut the flesh into thick cuboids. Par-boiled in an open vessel until just giving. Then pan-fried in enough oil to make the top and bottom genuinely crispy. Salt. Lemon. That was it.

It tastes like potato but denser, more flavourful, with something underneath that a potato doesn’t have. Once you’ve eaten it this way you understand immediately why it’s a fasting food. It holds.

If you want to go further: cube it, boil it, toss in a tempering of mustard seeds, curry leaves, dried red chilli, finish with fresh coconut and a squeeze of tamarind. Maharashtra does this well. But honestly, my mother’s version with salt and lemon is hard to improve on.

Tell me, have you tried suran before?

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Bael, aka Wood Apple is a fruit that grows wild across India, hard-shelled enough to need a hammer to crack open, with a thick woody exterior that gives nothing away about the sticky amber pulp inside.

It has been here longer than most of what we consider Indian food culture, mentioned in the Yajurveda, referenced by Charaka, planted around temples for so long that in many regions a Shiva temple and a bael tree are the same landscape. The trifoliate leaf is what gets offered in puja. The fruit was always meant for the kitchen.

Inside the body

Bael contains a compound called marmelosin, found almost nowhere else in the plant kingdom. It regulates the pace at which food moves through the gut. Fresh bael pulp moves things along. Dried bael slows them down. Same fruit, opposite effects, depending on form. This is why it was the go-to for summer diarrhoea and heat exhaustion across the subcontinent.

Ayurveda classifies bael as deepana, meaning it kindles digestive fire, and grahi, meaning absorptive and binding. The dried fruit specifically was prescribed as pakwa phala, fully ripened, because that’s when the medicine is actually in it.

Where we lost the plot

Bael didn’t get replaced by anything. It just stopped appearing in the places where most of us now shop. It is truly a forgotten part of the pantry.

At my nani’s house in MP, it was a summer morning thing. Someone would scoop out the pulp, mix it with water, strain it, sweeten it with mishri. Done in minutes. We’d drink it before the day started. I don’t remember the taste as clearly as I remember the act of it, the speed, the casualness, the fact that no one made a fuss about it.

That’s the part that’s gone. Not the recipe. The casualness.

What’s left is the health food store version, “wood apple powder,” repackaged, overpriced, with a wellness claim on the label. Or the association with the temple, the sacred tree, the puja. The fruit got caught in the halo of the leaf. Something offered near a deity starts to feel like it’s not quite ordinary food anymore. And once that happens, it leaves the breakfast table.

What to do with it

If you find a ripe bael at a summer fruit cart, and in many cities you still can, the sharbat is worth making at least once. Scoop out the pulp, work it into water with your hands, strain out the fibre and seeds, add mishri and a pinch of black salt. That’s it. Drink it cold, in the morning.

If fresh bael isn’t accessible, dried bael slices are easier to find. Steep one slice in hot water for ten minutes. Plain, no sweetener. This is the version used specifically for gut complaints, IBS flares, loose stools after a difficult few days. It works without drama, the way most things from this kitchen do.

Tell me, is this the first time you’re hearing about Bael?

28 ingredients down, 337 more to go.

If this made you open your kitchen cupboard, my job here is done.

The Forgotten Pantry. One Indian ingredient, every day, for 365 days

Kacchi kairi. Raw mango. The fruit before it becomes the fruit everyone talks about.

Mango is native to India from the forests of the northeast, wild and ancient. Every variety you know started here. Raw mango is not an unfinished version. It is its own ingredient, harvested deliberately, used with full intention. The Indian kitchen always knew what to do with it before it ripened.

The memory that came up while writing this was old. Summer holidays at nani’s or amma’s house. Someone would sit down with a pile of kairis and start cutting them into small pieces, and we would try to sneak them before they made it into whatever they were being made into. Raw, just like that, maybe with a little salt. My mouth waters thinking about it even now.

That is what raw mango does. It is sour enough to make you wince and you keep going back for more. There is something about that particular sourness that the ripe fruit never has.

Inside the body

Raw mango has more vitamin C than the ripe fruit. Sometimes two to three times more. But that is not the interesting part.

The interesting part is malic acid. Raw mango is full of it, and malic acid helps the body manage heat stress at the cellular level. It supports the process by which your cells generate energy, which is exactly the process that comes under strain in a north Indian summer. Aam panna was not invented because it tastes good in the heat, though it does. It was made because it genuinely helps the body keep running when everything outside is trying to slow it down. Add black salt and roasted cumin and you have potassium, magnesium, and electrolytes doing real work. This was the original ORS. Nobody called it that.

Where we lost the plot

Aam panna now comes in bottles. Sugar is usually the first ingredient.

The real aam panna starts with roasting the whole mango on a flame until the skin chars and the flesh collapses. My mom makes hers in the pressure cooker, boils the raw aam whole, then scoops out the pulp. Fast, practical, and it works. The result is tart and slightly smoky and heavy on cumin and black salt. It is a different drink from what you buy at the store. The bottled version is a flavour. The homemade version is a function.

What to do with it

I am writing this having just eaten kacchi kairi ka achaar (raw mango pickle) with dal chawal for lunch. The sourness cut through the dal in exactly the right way. That is enough reason on its own.

But if you want to start somewhere, make aam panna the way it was meant to be made. Boil or roast1 the whole raw mango. Scoop out the pulp. Blend with water, roasted cumin, black salt, salt, and mint. Drink it cold. Optional to add jaggery for some sweetness.

And if you find raw mango at the market right now, buy more than you think you need. Cut them into small pieces. Put them in a bowl with salt and red chilli powder. You already know what happens next. Your mouth probably knew before you finished reading that sentence.

27 ingredients down. 338 to go.

The Forgotten Pantry. One Indian ingredient, every day, for 365 days.