We Spiced Up Our Lives

We took a long drive across the Indian state of Goa to visit an organic spice farm and see how various spices are grown.  I remember Goa as a separate nation under the protection of Portugal, since they were the first European explorers and traders who settled the area.  In 1961 Goa gained its independence from Portugal, only to be invaded by and taken over by India shortly after independence.  It is still more Portuguese than Indian.  It has a higher standard of living too.  We saw rice fields, small stores and some nice homes and temples and some not so nice homes.  Trash was everywhere.  It was too disheartening to take a picture.

Rice paddies

The farm we visited was has several hundred acres of spice production, but the demonstration area we saw was more like a jungle than a farm.  We wandered on paths among the vegetation until the guide stopped and pointed out a plant from which a spice is harvested.  Of the four most expensive spices, this farm grows three.  They do not have the climate to produce saffron, but they harvest vanilla, cinnamon and cardamom.

Vanilla beans

Vanilla grows as long seed pods from which they extract the liquid vanilla. Cinnamon is the bark of a tree.  The tree grows for about 12 years, then is cut down.  The bark is stripped, and you get stick cinnamon or you grind it to make cinnamon powder.

Cardamom is the seed pod of a flower, but it has to be picked by hand at just the right time, and the immature seed pods are removed from each flower by hand.

Betel trees

The area is covered by tall palm looking trees which produce betel nuts.  To harvest the nuts, pickers climb one tree and pick the nuts.  Then, since the trees are very flexible, they lean over , bend the tree and swing onto the next tree, going from tree to tree like monkeys.  Both the leaves and the nut of the trees are mildly addictive and intoxicating, but there seems to be a large market for them.. Our guide demonstrated how to take a leaf, add chopped nut, pepper and other spices before rolling it into a packet and fastening it shut with a clove.  You chew this until you are tired of it, then spit it out.  As you chew, the pulp turns red and stains your teeth.  When an early English explorer came to Goa, he thought the natives must be a vicious bunch because he saw all the globs of red and thought they were blood.

Speaking of cloves, that is the only spice which must be harvested before it blooms.  When you buy whole cloves, you get a bit of the flower stem and the bump on the end is the immature flower bud.

Pepper

Pepper is a vine which grows up the betel trees.  You can pick the seeds when they are green and you have green pepper.  These are used in making pickles.  If you want red pepper, you wait until the seed are ripe and red before you pick them.  If you want white pepper, the mildest kind, you soak the peppercorns until all the red color leeches out.  If you want black pepper, you let the peppercorns dry before grinding.  On the ship we have black pepper in grinders at each table, but they must be trying to save money because not much pepper comes out no matter how you try.

Turmeric grows as an underground root, much like ginger.  It is not growing season for the turmeric plants, but out guide dug up a little piece of a root. The inside of the root is a reddish orange.  As we learned about how each spice grow, we also learned other uses for each one besides cooking.  In Cochin we saw a tree that looked like it had orange moss growing on it.  Not so.  Actually it was turmeric which young couples had rubbed on it to increase their fertility and make childbirth easier.  That was not one of the things we learned at the spice farm.. Mainly we were given recipes for teas using the spice and other ingredients to use to cure or prevent certain conditions.  There were ones for increasing memory, but I do not remember which ones they were.

Jack fruit

Although they are not spices, we also saw jack fruit and pineapple growing.  The jack fruit grows on a tree, not only at the end of branches, but often just sprouts from the trunk.  We saw ones about a foot long, but mature jack fruit can weigh 20 pounds or more.  You can feed not only a family but a whole village with one fruit.

One species of tree provides two different spices.  The outside of the fruit is mace, and the inside is nutmeg.  Another tree produces a nut which, when ground, is called allspice, because its taste is a combination of 5 different spices.  I always thought that Chinese 5 spice powder was a combination of 5 different spices, but now I am not sure if it is that or just ground allspice.

Simple still for distilling to make feny

They also have cashew trees, so we got a demonstration of that process for producing them.  (I told you about that before, so I will not repeat it here.) However, here they do not discard the fruit.  The press out the juice, ferment it and double distill it to make a very potent drink called Feny, about 40-45% alcohol.

Banana leaves, cut in circles, make good plates

After hearing about all the spices and walking around for an hour, we had worked up an appetite, so they fed us a buffet of Indian food including 3 kinds of rice, about 6 kinds of curry, chutney, fried fish in some sort of breading, something else which they just called a sweet and a chunk of watermelon.  All this was served on a plate made from a banana leaf,   I tried all the curries and found most of them quite good.  I may have to try some the next time I see them on a menu.  Then we had time to buy the various spices which they grow.