Horchata in the time of neem and lime

It’s April. Neem trees are flowering abundantly in anticipation of a new Tamil year, about to begin. The heat is turning white this time of year; the flowers carpet the red earth and turn dry yellow. Limes are here still, as are the melons, not just precursors to mangoes. But the season is starting to call for cooling, and something about the faint sweet-bitter of neem air has made me long this year for horchata.

Having long-played with natural garden colors and made quite a list of fruit-and-flower-based beverages…

• Lavender-cardamom fizzies, with butterfly pea flowers;
• Hibiscus margaritas and hibiscus gin slings, with red hibiscus;
• Coral Jasmine Honey cocktails, with coral jasmine;
• Lychee-Jasmine cooler, with jasmine;
• Jamun jal-jeera, with black jamun fruit, and, most recently
• Rhubarb & Roselle sours, with roselle calyces…

… it felt time to turn to just plain white, and a different category: seed and grain-based drinks. Horchata is an ancient drink, in the sense that barley-based versions go back several centuries and connect countries and continents–Egypt, West Africa, Spain, and then the “New” world. Horchata can be made from tigernuts, sesame, melon and calabash seeds–invariably producing a milky white drink that is only lightly spiced and sugared, and served chilled, an antidote to summer heat.

In this post, I work with rice.

My own story of rice-discovery is a long one and is better saved for another time. Suffice it for now to say that Vijhay of Maiyam Past Foods on the Auroville main road near Kuilapalayam sent me this Wayanad farmer’s rice variety called Mullan Kayama, a protected variety with a fragrance that took my breath away.

We all know something of rice diversity, or the difference between, say, a short-grained risotto rice and long-grained basmati, and the more glutinous types that go into Thai coconut milk-and-mango desserts or sushi. In India we live with more: specific rices for idlis and dosas, the best rices for soft rice dishes like pongals and khichdis, or to mash with rasams and thuvaiyal-like chutneys, or the varieties to use when transitioning infants from breastmilk to solid food. But a lot of that knowledge is about texture, taste, and ease of digestion. I’m still learning of other, far more remarkable properties: separate rices for male and female hormonal health, for nervous conditions, for bone health, the best varieties to make desserts and save for feasts, and more. The farmers, the Siddha and Ayurveda practitioners know of these virtues, but not all the information circulated is clear or verified. There needs to be a pharmacopoeia just for rices, really.

I’d been waiting to make a red-rice horchata, or something else that gave the now-mostly-Mexican/Latin American drink a local Indian twist. So when the Mullan Kayama arrived in a bag one day and filled my lungs with longing, I knew my wait was finally over.

My basic horchata recipe is an adaptation of the one in Fany Gerson’s Paletas–a book I should be using to make more iced things and agua frescas than I do. I loved the idea of dunking melons in horchata, which have their own wonderful flavors (and wished very much I was a bit closer to Delhi, which will get this season’s musk melons in a month). No prickly pear here, so we make do with pomegranate seeds for red splashes and crunch.

I also loved playing with variations–this time, just with cantaloupe seeds.
கிர்ணி பழம் [kizhni pazham] as we know cantaloupes in Tamil country, are in season here. We ate the fruit and made agua frescas plenty so that we could collect and dry the seeds. We added these to rice which was then pulverized dry and left to soak, as in the regular horchata recipe.

A bit of green lime zest always finishes off a good horchata for me: that touch of zip-zing on an otherwise very subtle, flavorful and wonderfully cooling drink.

Horchata de arroz with melon seeds

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Ingredients

  

• 2/3 cups Mullan Kayama or other fragrant rice
• 1/2 cup dry cantaloupe seeds optional
• 3 cups hot water
• 2 inch piece of cinnamon
• 1 cup sugar
• 2-3 cups fresh coconut milk extracted from about 2 cups grated coconut
• lime zest and neem flowers as garnish

Instructions

 

• Combine the rice and melon seeds (if using) in the jar of a blender, and whizz a couple of times until the mixture is coarsely ground.
• Transfer to a large bowl, add the hot water and the cinnamon stick (broken roughly into pieces), and allow this to sit covered for about 5-6 hours or overnight.
• Note that if you live in a very hot region, you might want to have the soaking happen in a refrigerator! Colder clime-dwellers can leave the bowl on a counter-top, covered.
• After the soaking, transfer once again to a blender and whizz again until the mixture is smooth (but grainy).
• Strain through a couple of layers of cheesecloth, pushing with the back of a wooden spoon to extract as much of the liquid as possible. Discard the solids.
• You can prepare your own coconut milk by using the same rice blender, adding water just enough to cover about 2 cups grated coconut, and whizzing for a minute or so. Strain–and repeat the process. The first collection gives you thick coconut milk; the second gives you thin. You should have about 2-3 cups from this process, but don’t worry if you have less. Adjust with cool water.
• Add this coconut milk to the rice-melon-seed milk.
• Add the sugar, starting with 3/4 cup and then adding the last 1/4 cup to taste.
• Chill this mixture in a jar thoroughly, about 5 hours.
• To serve, pour into glasses over ice or chunks of cantaloupe melon, dust with cinnamon, and sprinkle some fresh lime zest and/or neem flowers atop! Serve with a spoon or long fork for the melon pieces, if using, and to stir the horchata–as the rice solids tend to settle. 
• Consume within 2 days. 

Notes

Adapted from Fany Gerson’s book, Paletas