Taste of Life: How Chinese prisoners made Europeans in Poona love mustard leaves
Some Europeans in Poona took a liking for mustard greens, thanks to the Chinese prisoners in the city
Pune: Nineteenth-century Britain is often visualized as brown, black, white, and grey with air filled with smoke and dust. The popular understanding of the era is largely monochrome, ignoring the chromatic revolution in Europe. The Victorians loved colours. The craze for life in vivid colour was rife due to the arrival of industrially manufactured dyes by Carl Wilhelm Scheele and William Henry Perkin. It changed the way clothes were designed and worn, and walls were painted. It also changed the way Europeans ate, especially their greens.
What was truly remarkable was the accessibility and affordability of these colours for the working class. Women wore brightly coloured clothes as a mark of assertion. This cultural shift, however, was loathed by many who detested “garish”, “loud”, and “outrageously crude” clothes and food. The rainbow transformation inevitably created tension and backlash against the mass adoption of industrially manufactured colours. The fight between natural and artificial was the most bitter with the colour green. In the mid-nineteenth century, the toxic arsenic green was associated with aestheticism endorsed provocatively by the likes of poet-playwright Oscar Wilde. It was a symbol of decadence and chicness.
Victorian Britain witnessed rapid urbanisation which resulted in a shortage of food in the growing cities. As a result, food merchants resorted to adulteration to save costs. They also made efforts to make the food more attractive by using newly invented synthetic dyes. Fresh fruits and vegetables were seasonal and often hard to obtain. Colouring them masked their staleness.
The mid-Victorians’ love for colourful food was aided by the lackadaisical attitude towards the safety of what they ate. Green vegetables were routinely dyed with verdigris, an attractive blue-green colour that occurred naturally as a patina on copper or brass. Several cookbook authors like the formidable Mrs Isabella Beeton instructed readers on how to make their own food dyes with ingredients like verdigris, vinegar, and alum.
The opponents of the chromatic revolution endorsed natural dyes and pigments and frequently appealed for the use of fresh vegetables, especially leafy ones. By the 1850s, green vegetables were sufficiently established for the Vegetarian Society to flourish. Watercress and spinach were often mentioned in speeches organised by the Society. Mustard leaves were endorsed too.
Mustard seeds and mustard were used in British kitchens. Lead chromate was added to the mustard to make it look vibrant. The proponents of “natural food” hence promoted the use of fresh mustard leaves. But the leafy vegetable was not easy to get used to. It tasted piquant and pungent. Moreover, it was popular in Africa, South East Asia, and India – regions that were considered backward.
The call for the use of fresh leafy vegetables soon reached Poona where mustard of two kinds, red and black, was either grown at any time of the year in gardens or during the cold season round fields of wheat or gram, or among wheat and linseed. This was an insurance against eventual drought, which would be fatal for wheat but was less harmful to gram and mustard, which were harvested after several months of growth and before the wheat was ripe. Mustard protected the young shoots against the birds and enriched the soil.
The leaves and green pods of mustard were eaten as vegetables, mostly by farmers and the working class. The seed was used in curries and relishes, oil was extracted from it, and it was powdered and applied as a blister. Mustard leaves did not find much love from the so-called “upper caste” and “upper class” Hindus in Poona possibly because of the strong taste and because it was consumed by the so-called “lower castes”.
The agricultural department endorsed mustard. In 1881-82, in connection with sugarcane experiments, Mr G Marshall Woodrow, the superintendent of the botanical garden at Ganeshkhind, noticed that the soil of Poona had “very little of the silica in a combination of potash of soda and lime in the form known as soluble silicates”. It was not difficult to reproduce these soluble silicates without which sugarcane could not grow, but it would be expensive in India and could not be done in a short time. To grow sugarcane without wearing out the land it was necessary to manure with two tonnes an acre of quicklime and ten loads an acre of wood ash, and to show and plough in a green crop such as hemp or black mustard.
The annual report of the Ganeshkhind Garden in 1885 mentioned that it had requested and encouraged farmers in and around Poona to plant mustard in their fields. The harvest of mustard around wheat had suffered a setback then. Wheat, after it had come into the ear, was affected by mildew called “tambera” and “garva” or “khaira”. These diseases were said to be commoner in fields where mustard was grown than elsewhere. They covered the crop with small swellings containing a dark brown powder. The grain became small and shrivelled. As a result, farmers stopped cultivating mustard.
However, Europeans in Poona used mustard greens in their kitchen. Although it was a winter crop, mustard was sown on a small scale, mostly in wooden boxes, for household requirements at any time of the year in their gardens. Delicate mustard leaves provided a favourite vegetable throughout the season. The vegetable had an assertive taste and was the star ingredient in several dishes. It added a zip to omelettes. It could be blanched and flavoured with garlic, or stir-fried with bacon or ham.
The “Bombay Chronicle”, on May 12, 1932, noted that mustard greens resembled cabbage and that the pickle was popular in southern China, and hence, those who had an affinity for the Orient should make it during the winters. The entire head of greens was brined and then allowed to ferment. The greens, salty and crunchy, with a faint mustard taste but without the bitterness of the fresh leaves, could be made into soups or eaten as it was.
Fermented mustard leaf was a popular indigenous fermented dish in many Asian regions like China, Taiwan, and Thailand. On the Penghu islands, harvested leaf mustards were dry salted in wells to prepare pickles. Some Europeans in Poona took a liking for mustard greens, thanks to the Chinese prisoners in the city.
The Chinese inmates were accommodated in a makeshift prison in the Poona Cantonment in the early 1830s. They stayed there for more than six months when a small commotion broke out over the issue of contaminated rice. The convicts tried to stage a coup in the prison, and some of them were shifted to Mahabaleshwar.
After 1850, all Chinese and Malaya prisoners were kept in Poona. They were allowed rice daily and mutton or fish twice a week. They were also allowed to harvest some vegetables, including mustard.
The “Report on the diet of prisoners and of the industrial and labouring classes in the Bombay Presidency” (1865) describes how the mustard leaf pickle was made by the Chinese prisoners in Poona. The mature leaf mustard was washed, cut, and wilted in the sun for a day or two. Then they were put in a fermentation vat with a layer of salt. Each layer of leaves was spread with dry salt and pressed tightly. At the top of the vat, a heavy stone was put. After three days, water was drawn out of the leaves. Adding fresh layers of mustard leaves and salt was repeated two or three times and the vat was covered and sealed with a heavy stone on top for fermentation. It was opened after a couple of months. The jail authorities mentioned that the pickle had already a small consumer base in Poona and recommended its sale in the open market.
Mustard leaves found a market in Poona and elsewhere after Mahatma Gandhi added it to his list of raw vegetables to be consumed. In a letter written to Ms Prema Kantak on February 3, 1935, he mentioned that he ate different uncooked “bhajis” (vegetables) including the leaves and twigs of mustard. Ten days later, he wrote to Bhagwanji Pandya to discuss dietetics. He commended him for “reducing the quantity of milk” in his diet and advised him to continue “taking raw vegetables and fruit”. His list of raw vegetables included spinach, cabbage, radish, carrots, turnips, fenugreek leaves, and mustard leaves.
But the vegetable never enjoyed popularity like spinach or fenugreek. In recent years, however, “sarson ka saag” (thick curry of mustard leaves) and “make ki roti” (roti made of maize flour) have become popular in restaurants in Pune.
Chinmay Damle is a research scientist and food enthusiast. He writes here on Pune’s food culture. He can be contacted at chinmay.damle@gmail.com
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