Kharoukhandai or the Tree of Midnight Horror

 

Kharoukhandai

The human tongue can detect at least five tastes or flavours: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (or savoury). The heat of peppers and chilli don’t count as the sensation you feel when you eat them is actually pain that is triggered by the same sensors in our bodies that are also activated when we feel a rise in body temperature. We all crave for things that are sweet, fatty, salty and meaty or savoury. The whole food industry is geared towards fulfilling our desires for these flavours.

But here’s the thing with bitter. Most people don’t like it. One theory why we don’t like bitter tasting food from an evolutionary standpoint is that bitter foods indicate toxicity.  Our bodies evolved to learn that sweet fruits and berries are safe to eat, bitter ones are not. Sure enough, research has shown that many bitter foods found in nature contain hundreds of toxic molecules like alkaloids and glucosinolates.

Nevertheless, many people and cultures a
round the world consume bitter foods in varying quantities. For instance, vegetables like radishes and broccoli are slightly bitter while the widely consumed bitter gourd is pretty high on the bitterness scale. Coffee and tea are bitter. So we sweeten them with sugar. Unsweetened chocolate is actually extremely bitter.

Why then do some cultures have bitter flavours in their cuisines? Perhaps some people had to survive on bitter foods in times of scarcity, which thereafter became an acquired taste and an integral part of their diet. I’m not sure. The reasons might be unique to each food and to each culture. Whatever the reasons for their consumption might be, it has been reported that eating bitter foods might be beneficial for our health, specially gut health.

The love for bitter food among the Bodos would be legendary if only our cuisine had been more famous. The king (or queen) of bitterness in Bodo cuisine is ‘Naarzee’ (usually cooked with pork fat). I will write about it in a future post. I’m not sure if there is a scale to measure bitterness (like the Scoville Unit to measure hotness of food),, but ranging from the slightly mild to the vomit-inducing, Bodos have it all.

The flowers of the Kharoukhandai tree is cooked into a bitter dish by the Bodos. Known by various common names such as ‘the tree of midnight horror’, ‘Indian trumphet flower’, its scientific name is Oroxylum indicum. All parts of the plant are used in traditional medicine in various cultures. I have a few trees growing in our homestead in the village. These trees usually flower during summer nights and most of them fall to the ground in the morning. Whenever I’m home in the village, I wake up to gather these flowers to cook as a side dish.

There’s really no special way to cook the flowers. You can crush them into tiny bits and cook them with a little oil and add some salt and turmeric powder to it, or some fermented fish paste if you want to enhance the flavor of the dish.