C is for "Culture is Coriander Chutney."

What is culture, if not the passing of recipes from one generation to the next? 

Culture, according to my trusted Oxford Dictionary, is: "the customs, ideas, and social behaviour of a particular people or group." 

Hmmm... let's see...

The hurried pace of life these days leaves little space for following customs and traditions. Indian weddings, for example, are all about precisely planned and staged performances, instead of the organic singing sessions that sprung up every evening for at least a week before the big day, when I was growing up. Armed with dholak and chammach (drum and spoon), aunties and uncles and elders and youngsters would gather and sing and dance and drink masala chai. The youth would crack unsuitable jokes and then get told off by grannies. The grannies would nudge each other when the room was empty of the young, except the very young, recall the naughty jokes and laugh, shaking in mirth, sometimes covering their denture laden mouths with chiffon duppattas. The very young will remember this and write about them in their blogs.

Ideas change all the time and they should.

This post will become a rant if I get started on social behaviour. So I won't. Suffice to say, I'm not a fan of the screen addiction afflicting the young and the old today. Communicating via 'like' buttons, shared photos and emojis makes today's social behaviour scarily similar to George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty Four'. I shudder.

The only constant, I believe, is food. No, the dictionary doesn't mention food. Recipes, passed down from great-grandmothers to grandmothers and so on, keep culture alive in the bellies, on the taste buds and therefore, in the hearts of children and future generations.

Okay, I agree that culture belongs to the people and by its very nature should be evolving and changing. Stagnation equals lost empires, not progress. But, some aspects of our heritage, wherever we come from, are worth holding on to. Food is the easiest and tastiest aspect of culture we can preserve for our children, not just cooking it but growing it and procuring it ethically, sensibly, like our ancestors did.

I don't know about you, but a lot of my favourite childhood memories link back to my mother's or my grandmother's kitchen. Food is the main ingredient of my nostalgia. What about you?

Today, I'm sharing my mother's coriander chutney recipe that I make often. My son loves it. He's never met her but he loves her food. 

Ingredients: 

A healthy looking bunch of fresh coriander (washed and roughly chopped)

An inch or two of fresh ginger

One/two or three whole green chillies

One medium red onion (cut in quarters)

2 heaped tablespoons of anardana- dried pomegranate seeds. The ones you find in Indian stores have seeds in them so I prefer the Iranian ones which are seedless.

Six or Eight walnut halves.

2 tablespoons of water.

Salt to taste

One lemon (optional)

Instructions: 

I chuck all the ingredients listed above into my Vitamix, except salt and lemon, blend and voila! the chutney is ready. You could do the same in a food processor or a mixer-grinder.

Ready to blitz... I use short, sharp bursts on variable speed because I like chunky chutney, so I don't grind it too fine. Choose the texture you like.

Undo the lid and just smell the hot, sharp and fresh aroma of this simple chutney. Scrape it out into a container/pot/jar.

Add salt to taste.

An observation: If you use Indian anardana, you may need lemon juice to make the chutney tangy. I usually don't need any lemon juice when I use the Iranian variety. 

Play around with the proportions to find what you like; a little less chilly, a little more ginger or for a tangier version, add more anardana.

At home, we eat this chutney with rice and daal or spread on toast or mixed with bhel puri or as a dip with sweet potato wedges or oven baked beets or like I'm doing right now--with garam garam pakore (hot fritters).

Serve it as you like.

Enjoy and let me know if you do try this recipe.

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One of my favourite poems to read to my children (when they were little) and to read aloud in class when I was a primary school teacher and to read to myself when the mood strikes is Michael Rosen's: 

You'll enjoy the rest of this delicious poem too...I'm sure