Taste of Life: Poonah grape that was deemed “only fit for tarts”

The variety was believed to have originated in Persia and travelled through Surat and Aurangabad before reaching Poona, where it flourished

One of the pleasures of studying the history and culture of food is discovering where a single line in an old book, newspaper, or a recipe can lead. A passing reference to a dish, an ingredient or even a particular fruit can open up a much larger story, taking you across kitchens, gardens, markets, and continents.

A tart is a pastry dish with a firm, usually sweet crust and an open top, filled with fruit, custard, jam or another mixture. Unlike a pie, which is often enclosed with pastry, a tart leaves its filling exposed. The tart was part of the European culinary repertoire that came to India. (WIKIMEDIA)

“Only fit for tarts.” That was how Robert Riddell described the green grapes appearing in Poona’s markets in September in his “A Manual of Gardening for Western India” (1842). They were the second crop of the vine; the first appeared between January and March. Unlike the sweet grapes of the principal season, these were sour. They were abundant, but of little value as table fruit.

Riddell’s description hints at an interesting use for them. If they were not particularly pleasant to eat fresh, perhaps they were better suited to the pastry kitchen.

Poona was well known for its viticulture throughout the nineteenth century. When Sir Evan Nepean became Governor of Bombay in 1812, his passion for horticulture led him to collect and introduce fruit trees, flowering shrubs, and plants in the Presidency. Among these was the “Poonah grape,” a vine that Major Lock had brought to Poona from Shiroor in 1805. It was believed to have originated in Persia and travelled through Surat and Aurangabad before reaching Poona, where it flourished. Lock named it the “Poonah grape,” presumably impressed by the quality of its fruit.

Nepean sent vines to England, including specimens for Sir Joseph Banks, an English naturalist, botanist, and patron of the natural sciences, and the Fulham nursery. After several failed attempts, a vine finally survived in England in 1817 under the care of Isaac Oldaker, Banks’ gardener, at Spring Grove House at Isleworth in London. The grape had large, tapering bunches and oval, dark-red, fleshy fruit with few seeds. It was sweet but not very juicy, and ripened late, requiring considerable warmth.

Although some English and American gardeners regarded it as an excellent late-season grape, its identity remained controversial. Nineteenth-century horticulturists variously equated it with Raisin des Carmes, West St Peter’s and, later, the Lombardy grape, while others maintained that these were distinct varieties.

By the late nineteenth century, European grape varieties were also being imported into India and grafted onto local vines.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Poona and the surrounding Deccan belt, bolstered by agricultural experiments at the Ganeshkhind Botanical Gardens under botanists like G Marshall Woodrow, were renowned across western India for prized table grapes. The Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency listed seven varieties of grapes growing near Poona in 1885: “kali” or black, a long, fleshy grape; “abhi,” a large round white watery grape; “phakdi,” a long, somewhat fleshy, white grape; “sahebi,” a long white sweet grape; “bedana,” the seedless small, round, sweet, and white grape; “sultani,” a large, round, bitter white grape, and “sakhri,” a very sweet, small, round, white grape.

According to the Gazetteer, the vine yielded sweet grapes in January, February and March, and sour grapes in August. The sour grapes were abundant, but were not encouraged because they were of little value.

The Gazetteer recorded sour grapes in August, while Riddell described the second crop as appearing in Poona’s markets in September. These were not prized as table grapes. Their sourness made them less appealing as fresh fruit, but potentially useful in the kitchen. A tart could turn a sour fruit into a more agreeable dessert.

A tart is a pastry dish with a firm, usually sweet crust and an open top, filled with fruit, custard, jam or another mixture. Unlike a pie, which is often enclosed with pastry, a tart leaves its filling exposed. The tart was part of the European culinary repertoire that came to India.

Tarts were well suited to fruits with a sharp or acidic flavour, as sugar and pastry could balance their sourness. They also offered a different way of eating fruit. Instead of being served fresh, they could be cooked and combined with sugar in a pastry. Apples, cherries, plums, gooseberries, currants, mangoes, pineapples, and berries all found their way into pastry. For European households in nineteenth-century Poona, the tart offered a way of using fruits that were underripe or sour.

Cooks in Anglo-Indian households gradually adapted tarts to the fruits that were available locally. This reflected the broader practice of adapting European recipes to Indian ingredients and seasons. Fruit could be turned into jams, jellies, puddings and tarts, allowing cooks to use produce that was plentiful at particular times of the year.

From 1861, “The Bombay Gazette” displayed advertisements placed by Pestonjee Jeewanjee and Co of Bombay for mango and pineapple specifically “for tarts,” and preserved green grapes were also being sold. By the 1880s, Poona’s Treacher & Co was importing and selling “tart fruits” from Europe, along with Indian green mangoes for tarts.

An early recipe for grape tart could be found in “The Practice of Modern Cookery” (1781) by George Dalrymple. Titled “Tourte de Verjus” (Verjuice-grape Tart), it reads: Stone and blanch the grapes a little in boiling water, then drain them very well, and stew them a little while in good syrup; when this is cold, put it in puff-paste, without covering it, and glaze the border with sugar.

Dalrymple’s recipe shows that sour or underripe grapes could be used in pastry. Verjuice grapes, valued for their acidity, had long been used in European cookery. Dalrymple’s recipe combined that sharpness with sugar, syrup and pastry.

The sharpness of an underripe grape could be softened with sugar, making it well suited to a tart. Cooked with sugar and enclosed in pastry, the same fruit could become a dessert.

The Anglo-Indian cookbooks from the Bombay Presidency that I have examined do not mention grape tarts. In “Anglo-Indian Cuisine” (1904), Constance E Gordon, who frequently visited Poona, did not write a recipe for grape tart. Instead, she included recipes for a variety of fruit tarts, including apple tart with cream, currounda tart, currant tart, damson tart, gooseberry tart, and greengage tart.

Grapes belonged to the wider repertoire of fruits that could be transformed into tarts, yet they do not seem to have acquired the same place in Anglo-Indian cookbooks as apples, currants, gooseberries, mangoes, or other fruits. Perhaps the September grapes of Poona remained a minor and largely unrecorded use of the city’s second grape harvest.

Poona’s grapes were eventually eclipsed, and its vineyards gradually disappeared during the twentieth century. The “Poonah grape,” however, survives in horticultural history, immortalised in William Hooker’s watercolour illustrations of cultivated fruits.

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