The first time I ever set foot in Kashmir, it was autumn, and far from noticing the stunning scenery, my eyes were riveted on the windows of the houses I passed. There were drying vegetables strung from most windows, especially those in rural Kashmir. Depending on which part of the Valley I was in, there were blood red chillies, or much less colourful turnips all strung attractively on twine like edible necklaces and hanging from windows. Spinach greens would be spread out on cloth in courtyards in front of houses, while rows and rows of precisely slit aubergines would be suspended, somewhat incongruously from clotheslines. Photographing whatever I saw was on my agenda on that particular trip way back in 1987, so I didn’t really wonder very much about how these vegetables were going to be cooked.
Back home in Delhi, I noticed that my Kashmiri neighbours would dry modest amounts of vegetables from the windows of their first floor flat. There would be a turnip ‘necklace’ or two along with tomatoes cut in halves and spread on a complicated patchwork of newspapers which were laid on bedsheets which were in turn, carefully arranged on the tiny square of grass that was their terrace garden. Without the exposed wood window frames and burnt brick walls of Kashmir, our neighbour’s efforts were hardly worthy of a photograph, but it was a decided oddity in Nizamuddin West of the 1980s. The joint family with at least ten ladies of all ages seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on tending to the vegetables. In particular, the tomatoes had to have a full-time chaperone, one who would turn them over individually two or three times a day and who would shoo away crows the rest of the day.
A few years later, I married a Kashmiri, and what used to be a curiosity became an annual ritual in our house too. It was a foregone conclusion, so said my mother in law, that winters in Kashmir were extremely severe. Snow covered the ground for months, the Jammu-Srinagar road – till today the only ground link between Kashmir and the rest of the country – was closed to traffic because of heavy snow and slippery ice. And so naturally, the supply of vegetables slid to zero for indefinite periods. There was only one way to beat the impasse and that was to be self-sufficient. Already our three-storey house in the Old City of Srinagar contained enormous walk-in closets with spices, pulses, rice and groceries to last a month. And the number of copper vessels we possessed was enough to fill a shop, I was convinced. So drying your own vegetables seemed to be all of a piece with my new lifestyle.
Come September, and we’d send my father in law off to the market to buy up every tomato in the market. September and October are the months when the indigenous tomatoes of Kashmir made their appearance in markets – it was an art to decide the precise day when the price was at its lowest and then raid the neighbourhood market a few minutes before the rest of the mohalla did! We would do the same for the thin variety of aubergines, fenugreek and spinach leaves, and turnips. My mother in law would fight for the right to buy bottle gourd and dry them: the rest of us would do our best to shout her down. In our collective opinion, dried vegetables were about gastronomy; not about healthy choices alone.
There is an art to cooking dried vegetables. Some have to be reconstituted in hot water; others don’t. The general rule is that they are either cooked in combination with each other, or with a dal, lamb, chicken or eggs that are first boiled and then fried. Dried vegetables are never, but never, cooked in combination with a fresh vegetable, and in our family we go the extra mile by slicing onions and drying them, the better to enrich our winter vegetable preparations.
Eggs that have been boiled and then fried are cooked with sun-dried tomatoes or dal. Al hach dried bottle gourd) or wangan hach (dried aubergine) are cooked with an onion and may be combined with meat. Handh, a spinach green that grows wild in Kashmir and is available nowhere else, is dried and cooked with chicken famously in the house of a new mother, because it is believed to cause heat in the body and thus benefit both mother and newborn. The moist spice cake called ver that is – or used to be at any rate – pounded in every household in the Valley, is used in generous quantities during the winter months. The combination of shallots, chillies and spices is a delicious one in addition to being heating to the system.
Dried vegetables, known collectively as hokh syun have to be cooked with sensitivity. It is a task that I am happy to leave to my mother in law and her superior cooking skills. Dried vegetables taste delicious in a cooked dish, and their taste is further enhanced by the addition of a hunk of ver. Ask any card-carrying Kashmiri what he or she misses most about the tastes of home and invariably the first thing will be gogji ara (turnip necklace is how dried turnips are referred to). Drying of the vegetables over a week so that most, if not all, their moisture is gone, intensifies the flavour. And slowly, what was a necessity gained the status of comfort food.
So, it is rather heart-breaking to note that the drying of vegetables is becoming somewhat redundant in the Kashmir of today. One reason is that the Jammu-Srinagar highway has become an all-weather road, maintained rigorously. When it does snow, the snow is cleared away in a matter of hours and seldom is the road closed for more than two or three days a year. Hence, vegetables from the plains are carried to the Valley with never failing regularity. And global warming has meant that Kashmir is not as prone to heavy snowfall as it was a few decades ago, which in turn means that vegetables can be grown within the Valley itself. The upshot is that Kashmiris eat meat throughout the year, and when they want vegetables to break the monotony, there are fresh ones available in the market. They may be well have their advantages, but the sheer pleasure of sitting down to a meal with piping hot rice and dried aubergines cooked with dried tomatoes will be lost forever.
