Shevla chi Aamti: My Family’s Monsoon Recipe Originates in a Rare Toxic Flower
Shevla chi aamti is prepared only by a handful of native communities in Maharashtra. This recipe is a well-guarded culinary heirloom that is passed down from grandmothers and aunts to each new generation.
Long stalks in shades of green, yellow, and purple, are dotted with bright orange and yellow specs; they pop up under precise conditions of the south-westerly monsoon’s overcast cloud cover. On its own, these stalks are toxic; consuming them raw can trigger a deadly stinging sensation in the mouth, tongue, and throat. But combined with a sour berry called kakad, the dragon stalk yam can coalesce into a meaty textured curry, revered for its medicinal qualities.
Towards the end of the sweltering summer, my mother’s weekly trips to the local market in Mumbai’s northern tip of Virar, turn into an unusual quest. She searches the nooks and corners of the bazaar, looking for a frail tribal vendor, who usually stocks a basket of an elusive bunch of spongy stalks that, to the untrained eye, could be mistaken for alien stems. More often than not, my mother is successful in securing this most cherished stash of rare wildflowers, called shevla in Marathi. Shevla blooms for a very brief period, starting from mid-May until July, just before and after the monsoon rains.
Shevla is a key ingredient of a delicious curry, called simply shevla chi aamti. It is at the heart of our family’s must-have monsoon menu. This recipe is a culinary heirloom that only a select few of Mumbai’s native Maharashtrian communities are privy to. Every year, my mother eagerly looks forward to preparing the dish and hosting a lavish feast for the family.
Making the aamti is an event in itself. One must prepare enough to last two days, as the curry always tastes best the next day. Like most wildflowers, shevla is toxic and requires meticulous cleaning and prepping. First, the outer leaf of the long conical stalk, enveloping the hollow bud, must be peeled off. The bud is the edible part and comes in varying shades of purple, mauve, and ivory, depending upon its maturity.
I admire the jewelled spade-like stalks, and my mother reminds me to not touch the base of the spadix, encrusted with orange and pink pollen. The pollen is toxic and must be discarded, or will cause severe throat irritation.
My mother trusts only the brass pot, perched on the top shelf of the kitchen (saved for special occasions), to cook the curry. Its heavy coating serves as a good base for the long sautéing process required to soften the shevla. After more than two hours of slow cooking, the curry can still be hazardous to health and cause throat itching if not detoxified with the paste of kakad berries, known by its scientific name Garuga pinnata.
A Fine Line Between Toxic and Delicious
Despite the tiring preparation process, my mother has carried on my grandmother’s tradition of cooking the curry every year. “The taste of shevla is hard to replicate with other curries or dals,” she explains. “And since it is available for a very short period every year, there’s an excitement in finding shevla at the right time.”
My mother’s version of the meal featuring shevla chi aamti, is made and consumed leisurely on a Sunday lunch. It is served alongside steaming hot rice or bhakris (a thicker version of chapati), suka bombil thecha (fried Bombay duck crushed in the stone mortar with chillies, garlic and sea salt) and batata chya kapa (round slices of potato, shallow fried with semolina.) If nature is kind and the lunch coincides with the early days of rain showers in June, the aamti’s taste is nothing short of heaven.
Though the earthy taste of the shevla is too strong for some, others like me have come to appreciate it with the whiff of childhood nostalgia, the memory of eating it every monsoon.
For most of my life, I’ve been infatuated with these fleshy stalks of wildflower. Its unusual appearance reminds me of the long fingers of a witch or the spikes of a dragon, which is perhaps how shevla gets its common name, dragon-stalk yam. I was convinced shevla grew magically, until YouTube videos revealed the truth of their natural habitat. Like this closely guarded recipe, the star ingredient of the curry too is notorious for being elusive, enigmatic, and hard to source.
The Secret Habitat of Shevla
Shevla stalks | Image by Shweta Desai
Shevla stalks | Image by Shweta Desai
Shevla or Amorphophallus commutatus is a genus of the Aroid family, which typically grows in the warmer tropics of Asia, West Africa, and Latin America. Of the nearly 170 species of this family, about 15 are found in India, mostly around Western Ghats in Maharashtra. They breed sheltered under bushes or between laterite rocks, amid scant soil in the verdant forest areas of Mumbai, the extended suburbs Palghar and Thane, Pune, Nashik, Raigad and Konkan.
Hemant Tripathi recalls spotting shevla while trekking in the Aarey and Borivli national park forest areas of Mumbai. Shevla is among the first wild vegetation to emerge after the first monsoon showers.
“Shevla is very ephemeral in nature,” says Tripathi, a botanist and a programme officer at the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre. “They remain underground for the majority of the year and only emerge during reproduction time.”
Their reproduction cycle is in sync with the overcast skies and heavy, humid weather, which heralds the arrival of the monsoon season. Under these precise conditions, the tubers of the Commutatus sprout a single leaf stalk, which appears like a snake hood. Its flowers emit the strong stench of decay, in order to attract insects that help with pollination. The smell also wards off herbivores grazing in the forest, thus providing natural protection for other plants to germinate.
Shevla, a Sentient Flower?
The tribal communities of western Maharashtra, believe that the traits of this wild plant have endowed it with an innate sense of intelligence. Shailesh Awate, co-founder of OOO farms, an agro-enterprise works in tribal areas to revive indigenous foods. “It is a unique plant in the ecology,” he tells me. Like the Adivasi communities he works with, Awate also believes that the mysterious-looking flower is sentient. He considers shevla to be an extreme form of mushrooms, due to their biological similarities and reputation of being magical, mysterious and intelligent.
According to Mumbai-based nutritionist Aditi Prabhu, the Adivasi, Kokana, Warli and Katkari tribes among others who forage shevla and other wild vegetation, befittingly describe them as ‘devkrupa bhaji’ or ‘divine mercy’ vegetation. Prabhu, who documents local ingredients on her blog, finds the uncultivated, wildly growing shevlas to be a rich source of nutrition, offering diversity in the diet of the tribals.
Bhiklya Ladkya Dhinda, an elder of the Warli tribe of Jawahar village in Palghar, 125 km from Mumbai, describes wild vegetation like shevla that grows abundantly during the rainy season, as nature’s gift to the adivasis, and its consumption is sacred to them, “whether you like the taste or not.” Malnutrition due to food insecurity and poverty is rampant among the tribal population of Western Maharashtra. Many are dependent on edible plants, vegetables, yams, berries and flowers that grow in the forest as a supplement to their diet.
“You don’t need to cook other vegetables when there is shevla chi bhaji,” says Vaishali Chandrakant Powar from Vanganpada in Jawahar. A member of the Kokana tribe, she cooks shevla with any available lentils, as meat and fish are expensive and hard to procure. The preparation is simple — with tamarind and bondara leaves (crape myrtle) as a detoxifying agent; but the bhaji is relished by all, she assures me confidently.
Prabhu says that the only reason why shevla, packed to the gills with protein and fiber, hasn’t trended as a millennial superfood, is because it is rare, seasonal, and also somewhat dangerous.
Shevla chi Aamti | Image by Indranil Aditya
Shevla chi Aamti | Image by Indranil Aditya
Shevla chi Aamti | Image by Indranil Aditya
Chef Thomas Zacharias, former executive chef of The Bombay Canteen in Mumbai and founder of The Locavore, knows this well, having discovered the ‘deceptive’ nature of the flower rather painfully. He first spotted them four years ago at Grant Road market, a vegetable market in South Mumbai that is famous for stocking seasonal produce. A creature of habit, who acquaints himself with new ingredients by tasting them raw, Zacharias broke the tip of the flower and chewed on it without realising its toxicity. For two days, he had to endure a stinging sensation in the throat and mouth, which he describes as being pierced by a thousand needles at once. Another visit to the market, and talking to the vendors, helped him discover the sour kakad berries, which are usually sold alongside shevla.
If the beautifully ornate flowers drew his attention and got him excited, cooking shevla the first-time left Zacharias disappointed. The vividly coloured stems disintegrated into a brown mess. However, he still managed to retain its meaty, umami flavour by binding the mash into a crisp patty (shevla tikka) and making a jam out of kakad, as a side dish. Shevla, which until then was exclusively prepared in home kitchens, featured on a restaurant menu for the first time in July 2019.
A Focus on Preserving Disappearing Wild Foods
Zacharias’s The Locavore — a multidisciplinary venture to champion local food— has now partnered with OOO farms’ Awate to introduce India’s young, urban crowd to the wealth of regional food. The two have teamed up on the Wild Food Project that aims to document and celebrate the variety of local produce that pops up during the monsoon in Maharashtra. “The idea is to make people aware of the incredible diversity in our own backyard. Something is terribly wrong [when] locals in Mumbai are aware of broccoli but not of shevla. We want to change that,” he says
At a time when wild food species are shrinking and even shevla’s availability in the markets in Mumbai is limited, the project aspires to add value to the local communities and inculcate a sense of mindful cultivation and harvesting among them.
“We are teaching the tribals to practise harvesting without uprooting the tubers, cutting them close to the roots or breaking the stems mid-way so as to preserve the natural vegetation habitat,” Awate says about an in situ conservation initiative in a Thane village, where the commutatus grows in abundance.
The project has also successfully established a link between the Adivasis and restaurant owners to help the tribal communities with an additional income stream through foraging and in turn, encourage them to preserve the natural habitat. “This way they will not veer towards deforestation or slash-and-burn farming for rice cultivation, which can completely destroy wild plant species,” he says.
Farmers Sunil and Shakuntala Bhoye, also from Jawahar, who annually supply shevla to restaurants in Mumbai say the linkage has helped them with extra income. “We only sell the shevla, after our family and the villagers have had enough to consume. It is a traditional part of our diet as it is believed to control sugar (diabetes) and everyone in the village likes to eat it,” he says.
Botanist Tripathi feels such efforts to preserve indigenous food are crucial, as conventional crops are at risk of adverse weather due to climate change, fungal diseases, and insect attacks. He says wild edible plants are reservoirs of fundamental genes that can be used to broaden the genetic base of conventional crop plants.
“In the future, as certain mainstream crops may disappear, we can fall back on wild plants to offer a genetic template to replenish them,” he says.
Additionally, tubers such as shevla, which are essentially yams, are an important source of nutritional diversity and food security for many communities in Africa.
“In India, we haven’t started the discussion on food security and genetic preservation of crops,” says Tripathi, pointing out the urgency of such an initiative. “We have a rich and wild diversity and it is high time we think of preserving it.”
As conservation efforts towards wild plants take root, there is also a small endeavour among local communities to make ingredients like shevla familiar to non-Mahrashtrians. Homemaker Subodhni Mhatre and her friends utilised their free time during lockdown to collate 50 plus native recipes including shevla chi curry in a PDF and circulated it on social media.
“We [have been] eating and making shevla since childhood, but today’s generation is neither aware of the ingredient nor of the tedious preparation technique,” says Mhatre. “There is no mention of the recipe in books either. We hope this PDF can be a guide for the future generation.”
My mother’s recipe of shevla chi aamti, was a guarded family secret - until now. We are sharing the recipe here, so the pleasure of eating this rare ingredient is not limited to our family alone.
RECIPE FOR SHEVLA CHI AAMTI
Ingredients
6 bunch of Shevla (Shevla are usually sold in a bunch each containing 4-5 stalks)
6 tsp oil
1 chopped onion
5 garlic buds
150 g prawns/minced meat or soaked masoor dal
½ grated coconut
2 green chillies
½ tsp cumin
5 g pulped tamarind
4 tsp besan
Salt, to taste
Tempering
3 tsp ghee
2 crushed garlic buds
Preparation
Discard the bottom part of the spadix with orange and pink pollen and roughly chop the shevla. Saute the shevla in oil till its soft and mushy for at least 30 minutes on low heat. Grind it in a mixer to make a coarse paste
Grind coconut, cumin and chillies in a mixer with water for a smooth paste like consistency
Mix besan with water for a thick paste
Method
Heat oil in a brass metal or a thickly coated pot. Add crushed garlic and chopped onion and cook until it is translucent. Stir fry salt and turmeric marinated prawns/ minced meat or masoor dal. Add red chilli powder, homemade masala powder
Add the shevla paste and let it cook for 5 minutes. Put a lid with water on top for slow steam. Add salt, pulped turmeric and some water and stir it for 2 minutes. Now add coconut mixture with some water. Let this steam. Finally add the besan paste. Add enough water for a curry consistency. Cook the curry for 10 minutes.
Temper with crushed garlic in ghee. Aamti is ready to serve
Shweta Desai is a journalist and researcher. You can follow her here: shwetadesai.contently.com
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