The best Christmas dish that nobody makes for Christmas

I’ve been living in Mumbai, India since May, with ample opportunity for homesickness in this massive metropolis: I don’t speak the language, I knew one person when I moved here, and it took 2 months to find a place to live. But oddly enough it wasn’t until the middle of December as I stood watching Chef pour a tempering over a pot of kadhi that I realized I might be a little bit homesick.

I was in the quantity kitchen of IHMCTAN, the oldest cooking school in India, watching the preparation of a seasonal Gujarati delicacy called udhaiyu. The kadhi was a simple accompaniment, a side dish, but as the tempering spread out over the surface of the kadhi, somehow this most Indian of dishes inspired an acute pang: I was starved for the Christmas season in NYC.

Kadhi is a yogurt based dish, broth-like, with the thickness of a light gravy - neither soup nor sauce. It is made from fresh curd beaten smooth and mixed with a small amount of besam flour-the powder of the ground chick pea called chhana dal- which keeps the curd from separating as it is heated. Brought to a gentle simmer, the besam flour slowly loses its raw taste and the dish becomes silky and is ever so slightly sour. When the flour is completely cooked, the dish is ready for tarka, or tempering. Oil is heated in a separate pan and a mixture of spices is added in a very particular order to snap crackle and pop their flavor into the oil. Then the entire contents of the pan are poured onto the kadhi. Other things can be added; pakoras or vegetables or little fried dumplings of fermented urad dal, but in it’s simplest form, this is it. Done.

It doesn’t really sound like Christmas does it?

Maybe I’m far from home and so starved for the season that in my hunger for the familiar I am chasing a chimera. Maybe this doesn’t exist outside my head, maybe I am forcing a square peg into a round hole. But I do not think so. I think this real, and that kadhi is the best Christmas dish that nobody makes for Christmas.

That includes Indian Christians, for whom Kadhi definitely is not the Christmas ham of India. There are about 60 million Christians in communities across India, particularly in the states of Goa, Mangalore and Kerala. Churches in Kerala trace their roots back to Thomas the apostle, who is said to have visited the southern part of India that is now Kerala around 50 A.D. It is unknown if he ate kadhi during his visit. I suspect he did not, or it would have clearly made it onto the Christmas table.

St. Thomas not withstanding, kadhi is made and consumed with relish all over India by many different communities, and while the yogurt and besam almost never change, the spices in the tempering and the additions to the yogurt often do. The Gujarati tempering of this particular kadhi is like Christmas in a pan, the colors and flavors of that state in western India somehow perfectly reflecting the idea of a holiday season 15,000 miles away.

Let’s start with the curd: it is white, the color of snow, the classic backdrop for anything Christmas. The tempering begins the decoration: first into the hot oil, because their size demands more time to release their flavor, are whole cinnamon, cloves and cardamom. In India these spices are three of the pillars of the renowned spice combination garam masala. But as they hit the oil and began to crackle and release their flavor all I could think about was winter heat, and all the mulled wine and spiced cider and eggnog I wasn’t drinking at all the holiday parties that I wasn’t going to in NYC.

Next up for a dip in the hot oil was curry bata and madras chilies. I cannot argue for the familiarity of the flavor here, because curry bata, the leaves of a the Murraya koenigi tree taste so little like anything I eat at home at any time, much less at Christmas. And whole chilis aren’t on many December holiday tables in NYC. Still, they may not taste like Christmas, but they sure do look like it. The curry leaves are bright green little tear drops, and the Madras chilies are bulbous, the size of gobstoppers, and a rich red. Their colors ignite when they hit the hot oil, the curry leaves getting brighter and greener and the chilies getting lighter and redder. I felt like I was looking at a pot filled with a Christmas tree and ornament stew. Then, as the pan was poured onto the kadhi, and the tempering of green leaves and red chilies with their colors turned on by the shimmering oil began to spread across the white canvas, they became nothing less than a jumble of Christmas lights, plugged in but still tangled from 11 months in a box.

Seeing the tempered kadhi was like a winter walk through Prospect Park-I wanted to go sledding on this dish, to reach into the pot and fashion snowballs from its whiteness to throw at busses and as they passed beneath windows decked out in Christmas lights that winked like the curry leaves and chilies bobbing in the curd. To me, at that moment, this dish was Christmas, even though, to the best of my knowledge, it isn’t on a Christmas menu anywhere in the world.

So if you find yourself with a free night and a bit of Besam flour during this season, give it a shot. Get some curd, buy it or make it, ten parts by volume. Whip up a slurry of besam and water, one to one by volume and whisk it into the curd over a medium low flame, and don’t stop whisking until the curd begins to simmer. Let it simmer for a while, stirring occasionally until a small layer of scum forms. Don’t skim it; just let it cook away. And when it does, the kadhi is ready for tempering. Lay out your spices and fire up your oil. Toss in a mustard seed to test the heat. When it beings to sizzle, toss in the cinnamon cloves and cardamom. Watch them. They should be sizzling, and when the cardamom begins browning, maybe 10-20 seconds later, toss in the curry leaves and the chilis. When they are vigorously popping, add a pinch of Hing, otherwise known as aoesofatida. Pull the pan off the flame, and stir it briefly but well. Then pour it into the kadhi, and maybe, even without moving to Mumbai, you’ll see Christmas bobbing around in this particularly Indian dish.

Seed of Sita

The monsoon is winding down now in Bombay, though you’d never know it from the torrents of water that rush through the streets faster than the drains can carry them away. On the fruit stands of Warden Road, Alphonso mangoes are a distant memory, jackfruit have long since disappeared and jamun too have faded away, replaced by mounds of papaya and guava. Apples are trickling into the city from the cooler climes of northern states, joining the standard array of tiny bananas the size of two hooked fingers and sweet limes the size of baseballs. These are delicious treats for the fruit inclined, but there is another fruit stacked high in the stands - the belle of the ball, loaded by the dozen into the bags of customers: during the later half of the monsoon in Bombay, it is the season of the Sitiphal, a deeply weird, delicious and racy fruit.

One of any number of migrant edibles that thrive in India, Sitiphal most likely came from the West Indies some time in the mid- to late-17th century. The name Sitiphal translates as the seed of Sitta, consort of Shiva the Destroyer. Shiva needs no introduction other than to say it’s his world: we are only living in it. And apparently, we are also eating his consort’s seed. Also called Sharifa (noble fruit) by some in India and called Annona Squamosa by nobody in Latin, I think Sitiphal is an excellent name, far better than that fig leaf of an English handle, the Custard Apple. Calling Sitiphal any kind of apple is like calling cunnalingus “holding hands”. Apple is PG, custard apples maybe pg-13, but Sitiphal is definitely rated X.

The true blue nature of Sitiphal is not immediately evident upon viewing. To the uninitiated eye the fruit might look a little gross: its thick greenish grey skin - the color palette of nausea - covered in small, sometimes moldy knobs like blunt diamonds that mimic the symmetry of leaves. Its size and shape is a dead ringer for the body of an artichoke, but upon closer inspection, the skin is whole and gnarled, lending the fruit the look of a prehistoric, even alien pod that will devour you. As such, it is not immediately clear how you would eat Sitiphal, except you know you don’t want that skin in your mouth. This is enough to turn many newcomers off completely, but it held my attention with a kind of gruesome fascination born of astonishment: people eat that? And live?

Awesome.

I stopped a fellow shopper one day to ask how she ate them. This was in part because my mind had turned Sitiphal into the fugu of fruit and in part because I had previously bought some guava from a flatbed cart in the Fort district, and the guavawalla wanted to slice it up and dust it in salt, so I figured maybe there was something I needed to know about the Sitiphal. But there wasn’t. You cut it open and eat what’s inside, other than the seeds.

So when the Sitiphal grows soft and malleable, rippling in your hand, and the skin looks like it is beginning to rot, with flecks of what seem to be mold in the creases of the knobs, well, then it is time to dine. I ate my first one with my friend Carol Alter, who instructed me to use my hand to open the fruit. When ripe, the skin is soft and yielding, and opened easily as the fruit tore in my hand. There is an oval slit running down the middle of each half of the exposed fruit, framed by rows of curved candy corn shaped nubs of very moist flesh attached at the base of the skin, nestled together like couples spooning. The sticky flesh is whitish with a slick sap near the skin, and you can see a hint of the hard, shiny seeds like teardrops buffed black by polish that are hidden within each one. The inside of each half of a Sitiphal looks alive, pulsing from the vibrations of your hand, wet and succulent, with a sweet and heavy floral perfume. It hits you primally, viscerally and you cannot help but think of sex. To some it is gross, to some it can be tolerated or enjoyed in moderation, but there are some who can never get enough

From here you can take it wherever you might take a great fruit. In Bombay, folks scoop out the insides and sort out the seeds and then cover the flesh in sweet cream, or make Sitiphal kulfi or Sitiphal milk shakes. You could also just grab half a torn Sitiphal and spoon the flesh into your mouth, spitting out the seeds as if eating a watermelon. Or don’t even use a spoon at all and just dive in and enjoy the slippery flesh directly, without anything coming between you and the seed of Sitta.