Did you know that ‘shukto’ - a Bengali banana flower dish - was one of Swami Vivekananda's favourites?

A banana flower is an extraordinary looking thing. Burgundy red, the colour of a bad bruise, it hangs from the plant in a weirdly suggestive way. Peel back the red bracts, the protective layers, and you are confronted with neat rows of delicate blooms, pinkish white bodies curving up to bright yellow tips.

These will become the bananas, but are also good to eat now, if prepared properly. Eaten raw, the blooms are too bitter, and their outer petal, the calyx, too tough to swallow. From each tiny bloom, the calyx must be removed as also the bitterest part: A long slender pod called the stigma.

After this, the blooms are dunked in water and lime juice to prevent them from discolouring and perhaps remove more bitterness, but not all. A little should remain, giving the flowers an agreeable edge, a bit like the herby bitterness of artichokes. The cleaned flowers are chopped fine, usually along with the innermost bracts, which are not red and stiff, but pale, tender and lightly bitter.

These are extensively used in one of the oldest Indian texts devoted to food, the Soopa-shastra, which was written in Kannada in the early 16th century. The standard translated version lists 16 ways of cooking banana flowers, in soups and porridges and stuffed in a dosa, with brinjals and jackfruits, in curd and milk, sweet and savoury, and the oddly named “milky bloom on the sling”.

Bengal is particularly fond of mochar, as banana flower is called there. It is mentioned in the life of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the 15th century Bengali mystic, including one time when he visited Pandharpur on the other side of India and met a fellow mystic who recalled visiting Chaitanya’s home and eating delicious mashed mochar made by his mother. Swami Vivekananda liked eating mochar with the bitter dish called shukto, which shows how Bengali food plays with levels of bitterness. There are banana flower dishes from across India, yet they are all prepared less and less, and the reason is simple: The preparation process is really tedious, especially the stripping of each tiny banana bloom.

Some varieties are easier to clean, but most require substantial labour. The end result is something that tastes much like red cabbage, after it’s simply sliced and cooked well. Banana flowers do have a special flavour, but those who miss it are generally not the ones doing the preparation. Who can blame a busy cook for wanting to skip such generally unappreciated labour? Perhaps the answer to preserving such traditional foods is to value them properly, and their vanishing from routine menus can help with that.



Recently during Chennai’s annual festival season of Carnatic music, during which the snacks eaten in the breaks are as anticipated as the performances, there was a craze for vazhaipoo vadas, deep-fried banana flower fritters. Because few people made them at home now, the caterers could present them as a special delicacy, a traditional banana flower dish that was finally getting its due.