Season’s Gre-eat-ings
Of Starfruit at Christmas and Watermelons in the New Year
Christmas has been celebrated on 25 December 2023 in some parts of the world but will be celebrated on 07 January 2024 in other parts of the world .
For me personally home responsibilities often conflict with Christmassy activities that bring me good cheer. Being married to a farmer and living a substantial part of my life in a village close to Mumbai, I have easy access to organically grown fruit and vegetables. My daily responsibility is to cook simple but wholesome vegetarian dishes within 12 hours of the vegetables being picked from the field. Nutrition wise and taste wise there is no substitute for this. Ah… but then making Christmas marzipan is far more interesting! Another time bound activity is processing a fruit depending on it’s desired stage of unripe, semi-ripe or ripe into a pickle or preserve. The natural window of time before a fruit naturally progresses from unripe to semi-ripe and ripe is a few days and from ripe to over ripe is less than a day. Ah…. but then learning new Christmas carols for choir singing is also as urgent and enjoyable! So in the days before Christmas while I am ‘topping ,tailing and trimming’ fruit for a pickle or preserve, family members are subjected to “tuneless” Christmas carols being played in the background as I’m listening to recordings of only alto voice parts that I have to get note perfect before I get to Mumbai city for rehearsals for Christmas midnight Mass.
Naturally then when the few starfruit (carambola) trees that we do have began to fruit in profusion in mid December I dropped plans of Christmas marzipan moulding and decided to “ad-vent-ure” into chutney making instead. Starfruits do not look like stars when suspended from their tree branches. But pick a firm green one from the tree ,cut across it’s ridged sections and you have pretty star shapes that will instantly suggest Christmas and enliven any salad with its sharp tangy flavour. No peeling needed and deseeding is easy. Making it also perfect to process -with the addition of sugar, salt, chilli powder, ginger, garlic and vinegar- into a Christmas chutney. This chutney would also be a perfect accompaniment to the return of simple everyday vegetarian meals, after Christmas feasting.
Meanwhile in the watermelon fields near our farmhouse, from the last week of October 2023, the villagers who work in collaboration with my husband have of their own accord set up rudimentary temporary outdoor shelters on the watermelon plantation itself. They grow their own vegetables in a patch adjacent to the plantation, cook their meals on an open- air firewood stove and when the day’s work is done sleep in mosquito net “tents” anchored to their temporary shelters. A healthy lifestyle indeed , but a hardy one as well. So in December, the lyrics of well known Christmas carols are expressive of the reality in the fields outside, especially after sunset. Nights in the village in December are cold, still and silent. They also feel dark and deep, because of the absence of large-scale electric lighting. The sky above is a black canopy studded with a zillion twinkling stars. Sometimes there are nomad shepherds watching their flocks by night. It’s also common practice for the watermelon farmers to watch over the plantation at night, to keep human and animal predators at bay!
Watermelon seeds have been discovered in ancient settlements in parts of Africa and in areas around the Dead Sea. Those ancient watermelons may not have been the sweet ones we are familiar with today. Sweeter varieties of watermelons were cultivated and spread to the Mediterranean world during Roman times. Watermelons were being cultivated in India in the 7th century. In a hot climate watermelon is an excellent thirst quencher . Come December and Mumbaikars eagerly welcome days and nights with a cooler temperature… But this year it’s hot enough in December to crave for a large juicy slice of watermelon!
Climate change and its consequences does not bring “good tidings of great joy” to farmers in general. But hopefully the summer like conditions conditions, in what’s supposed to be winter will mean more demand for watermelons. And that rings a bell of good cheer for those organic farmers like us who ended 2023 and brought in 2024, with the labor intensive process of harvesting watermelons.
