One day recently, I found myself in a jam. I had in my kitchen some 40 large plantains (nenthrppazham in Malayalam), all overripe. That was the fallout of several successive visitors bringing me gifts of bunches of plantains, I didn’t know why.
I have been living alone in my apartment for several years. I had plenty of visitors but rarely gifts of bananas or anything else. Things slowly changed after I turned 90. Stray visitors from my larger family started bringing gifts of fruits.
In the wake of COVID-19, the stream of visitors dried up.
Now, COVID fears somewhat allayed, the stream flows again. Visitors rarely come empty-handed. They seem to think that they must pay this nonagenarian their respects in the form of fruits.
I have no clue whether that is in our tradition. My paternal and maternal grandmothers lived to a ripe old age. They had plenty of visitors, but no one carried any gifts to them. That was perhaps because both had joint families and gifts would be to the family and not individuals.
I wished my visitors were less generous with their gifts. What would one do with kilos of plantains? They don’t keep.
I don’t like to waste food. Could I boil the plantains and reduce them to a jam — the way we do with jackfruit? Jackfruit jam keeps for years and comes in handy to make the sweet dish chakkaprathaman. It was quite common in my rural ancestral home.
Pictures from my early days in that large joint family home of the 1930s began to play in my mind: our cook Rama Warrier, with only a towel around his waist, sweat-soaked, standing two feet away from the blazing fire below a large uruli (bell-metal cooking vessel), stirring the messy mass of jackfruit flesh in it with a large bell-metal spatula fixed to a hardy four-foot wooden handle; and, later, after the chakka-varatti (jackfruit jam) had been emptied into large china jars, the children of the family (including me) happily scraping the bottom of that uruli for pickings.
Childhood memories can be insidious. Soon I found myself peeling the plantains, now blackened, cutting them into small bits and boiling them in a largish steel pan. I kept stirring the mess to avoid it burning and sticking to the bottom. I emptied my plantain jam into a container and let it cool before transferring it to my fridge.
The steel pan was well lined with bits of the sticky jam.
Who can resist the temptation? I was soon vigorously scraping the pan with a spatula and savouring the sticky stuff. My! Yummy! I hoped the plantain jam would keep, just like that jackfruit jam of yore.
pmwarrier9@gmail.com
