Recently, I was watching a cookery show. A famous master chef was telling the viewers about adding a dressing to a salad platter. This left me wondering how many of these cookery shows take up a banana stem or a banana flower as their prime ingredient for a dish?
In this world of potato lovers, I have two strange children who love anything banana. One has banana stem as her all-time favourite vegetable, while the other will pledge anything under the sun for his banana flower curry!
I do not really know when my own love for anything banana started. Yes, I don’t just mean the fruits. I seem to love anything connected to a banana plant? Growing up in a coastal town in Kerala, I developed a penchant for bananas at a very young age. We come across so many varieties of banana in Kerala. The feasts in Kerala are never complete without the various hues of nendran (a variety of banana) chips or fritters made out of the half-ripe bananas, or the pazhapayasam. There is a saying that if you have a banana plant and a coconut tree in your house, you never have to worry about sudden visitors. Yes, indeed these two bountiful trees give so much to fill any empty stomach!
Having spent a few years in the Cauvery delta regions of Tamil Nadu, I introduced my children to eating banana stem and banana flower at an early age. These two vegetables are rich in their fibrous quality as well as nutrients.
Having sung the benefits of my children’s favourite vegetables, I make it very clear that making dishes of these two vegetables is no cakewalk. Cleaning and cutting of a banana bloom would take up a lot of time and patience. You need to prepare yourself for a long and hard ordeal! After applying coconut oil to your hands to protect your fingers from turning black, you have to take out each layer of the bloom separately and remove the stamen from each flower and discard it! This has to be done for the entire flower. Banana stem, though not such a time consumer, also needs careful cutting and removing of the threads of fibre. Vazhaipoo paruppusili, a dish made of ground and steamed tur dal with banana flower, is a famous and favourite dish of many in Tamil Nadu.
My daughter-in-law, soon after her marriage, asked me what is my son’s favourite dish? When I told her that it was vazhaipoo paruppusili and went on to give a long lecture on how to make the dish, she was understandably flabbergasted! “Why on earth would your son love such a difficult dish,” she asked me. Very soon, she went on to master the nuances of her partner’s favourite dish and became an expert in it.
Now living in a Scandinavian country, surrounded by apple trees and no trace of banana, she still tries to get hold of a banana stem or a flower from an Indian store there, whenever possible.
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