VEPPAMPOO PACHADI
Separating the tiny flowers from a bunch of leaves of the Neem tree is an arduous task. You have to take care to remove only the flowers, without pulling out the slender stalks too. If these stalks find their way along with the flowers into the 'pachadi' or 'rasam' that the flowers are used in preparing, their bitter taste can seep into the dish and make it less palatable.
A half of the harvest you see in the picture was used to prepare a 'pachadi' consisting of these flowers, known as 'veppampoo', jaggery and tamarind as the main ingredients. A thin solution of jaggery and tamarind pulp is boiled till it just starts to thicken and then it is tempered with dried red chillies and mustard seeds sputtered in heated oil with the neem flowers being dropped into it finally, just after the tempering oil is removed from the flame and begins to cool, singeing but not burning them.
(The remaining half of the neem flowers are kept in cold storage and will be used to season a rasam that takes its name from them - 'veppampoo rasam'.)
It took me the better part of an hour to harvest a tiny fistful of flowers. So it's not surprising that we do it only once a year.
This year I had sort of insisted in my mind that I would engage in this flower picking activity only if the New Year's Day fell on a Sunday and, as if bowing to my wishes, the Panchangam duly obliged.
- © Shiva Kumar, 14 April 2019
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