Khushwant Singh lit fest 2018: For the love of booze and salads...

Founder of Agave India, Desmond Nazareth has spearheaded a movement to bring indigenous liquors, fermented by the tribal populations, into the limelight.

Late author Khushwant Singh’s love for food and liquor is legendary. Mindful of this, the eponymous lit fest, introduced a session on Indian salads and booze.

Founder of Agave India, Desmond Nazareth has spearheaded a movement to bring indigenous liquors, fermented by the tribal populations, into the limelight. He was the first to realise that the agave plant, which is the source of the coveted Mexican tequila is native to the Deccan.

Currently, Nazareth is in the process of acquiring an appellation of origin for the Mahua, a country spirit, the only distilled spirit in the world that is made from sweet flowers that grow on the Mahua trees found in the central India.

“I have taken a country spirit and made it into an international quality liquor, so much so that the mahua is being called the potential national spirit of India,” says Nazareth.

On why the spirit is just recently being discovered, Nazareth said, “The spirit was surreptitiously suppressed by the British companies and Indians followed the suit.”

Goa-based fashion designer Wendell Rodericks, who was anchoring the session, talked about Goa’s struggle in acquiring a patent for the cashew feni.

Actress and author of cookbook ‘An Indian Sense of Salad’ Tara Deshpande says, “Upon returning from the United States, one of the things she missed eating was salad. In the Indian cuisine, we do not have a tradition of eating food raw. We cook and over cook everything.”

Extensive search of the Indian Ayurvedic tradition have revealed that Indians only consumed raw-food either when they were convalescing or when they were too poor. This led Deshpande to create healthy recipes that used spices and herbs easily available in India.

“I started deconstructing classical Indian recipes and started using them in a salad. If the spices create a particular flavour in the cooked form why will it not create the same flavour in the raw form,” she said.