A Tale of Two Jams: Vilampazham Jam

I’ve a theory that what’s a jam or a jelly in the West is a halva in the East. My prior post on ube halaya or what Sri Lankan Tamils would know as rasavalli kizhangu kali elaborated some on that. I was suggesting that (1) there’s good reason to think of the Filippino halaya as much more of a halva-like pudding than a “jam,” as it’s often now described–and (2) that it’s not entirely impossible that the idea of such a preparation as halaya travelled East during the many centuries of Chola-Tamil-Buddhist-Sanskrit influence all across South East Asia, before Spanish and Christian colonization over-wrote and all but extinguished those pasts, partly because very similar preparations exist here and partly because India was an important “site” for the development and diversification of halvas in general.

This post continues that line of thought via another “jam,” this one made from vilampazham, Limonia acidissima.

The very idea of a vilampazham jam got me wondering, as halaya did, about what our native categories for such preparations really might have been. The word “jam” may be Tamilified into “jaam” [ஜாம்] and we may now have acquired tastes for breakfast preserves, but such things remain largely (upper class) foreign, imports. Preserving for us involves more pickling than making jams per se, and that’s on the spicier side of things. On the sweeter, sun-dried mango pulp [aam paapad in Hindi] and palmyra fruit pulp [thaati thandra in Telugu] are far more likely to stock larders than any row of fruit preserve jars.

So wither this idea of a “jam” for a traditional, seasonal fruit like the vilampazham? Mind, I’m not making the claim for vilampazham jam as an ancient food, but it is something many will report their grandmothers making, and jam-making, canning etc. were not precisely paati-pursuits. Canning centers and even the idea of housewives having the resources available to make jams and fruit confections like Guava toffee were an artifact of Nehruvian Soviet-style socialism or Gandhian cottage-industry-style production, but either way post Independence, not really before. So my question is: did the grandmothers have jam in mind exactly–or were their methods much more in tune with local pickling and halva making?

In both the Indian and Filipino cases, I suspect the latter. “Jam” is just our Anglicization of what is properly a halva or maybe a cooked pickle; “jalea” just the Hispanicization of what is properly a nilupak. It’s not a straight translation, but an interpretation of something local in some other tongue. Jams are similar enough to halvas and to some pickles, Jaleas are similar enough to nilupak. There are process differences: for example nilupak involves cooking and then mashing, while halayas may me made by mashing while cooking. But such differences can be ignored in practice, and the essences of things identified otherwise.

I’m calling this recipe a “jam” because folks who make this seem to want to call it a jam, and because (like many jams out there) it’s more sour-sweet than the typical halva. It also uses sesame oil and a seasoning–which actually make it more akin to pickles. When I told my mother-in-law I’d used a little ghee, too, she asked, quite intuitively: “why?” and offered that “for pickles, sesame oil is best.” So we call it a jam, but in practice treat it as a pickle. It might properly be a bit of both.

Nonetheless, a jam this Vilampazham jam shall forever be. Here’s the process, in pictures.

Two varieties of vilampazham are available in the markets, the smaller and the larger, the darker and the lighter (shell and pulp), or what I’d like to call the naattu variety “country cousin” of the far more sought after, urbane sophisticate town fruit. I wound up with both this season, and got to compare. Country cousin is distinctly more tart and wiry than the custardy, golden town cousin. Catherine Reddy offers this on the taste of the vilampazham: “Wood apple’s texture and taste are quite similar to tamarind. Its flavor is sweet, pungent, lemony and acidic with a pleasantly fermented aftertaste. Some do not care for the taste, as the fermented notes may be interpreted as distasteful putridity and muskiness.” She’s absolutely right, but perhaps more right about the country cousin than the town fruit, which is also a complex sourness but with far fewer fermented tones.

Here is a visual comparison, of the fruits’ shells, the cracking, pulp extraction and finally jamming.

Here are the two varieties of vilampazham posing for a picture, focus on the country cousin variety for whom I have admittedly a soft spot just because he’s the less glamorous one.

The vilampazham has a tough shell that is valued as much as the interior pulp for medicinal reasons, so much so that we boil it with rasams to tap into its worth. It’s not useful in jamming, however, for obvious reasons. The fruits are easily cracked by being knocked on a hard surface or with a hard object.

Town cousin variety here. Note how much lighter, larger and greener he is compared to the country variety. Note also that these fruits, when I chose to tackle them, were on the slightly unripe side. Ripe fruit might have been browner on the outsides.

And here are the interiors of both, like small worlds. Country variety a deep dark chocolately brown, town cousin much fairer. A fully ripe fruit might have grown more toffee-like in color, as you see from the vilampazhams I used to make rasam in this post.

There are textural differences, too. The country cousin has less pulp, more fibre. The town cousin looks like a ready-made scoop of ice cream. There are many who will simply add jaggery to this ready-made fruit cup and serve as-is. Cardamom and some coconut fancies it up into a no-cook halva: the pulp texture seems halva-like already, perhaps.

I mixed the pulp of both vilampazham varieties, and the country naattu variety was clearly the more dominant, so my pulp quickly turned a deep brown. The seeds are edible, soft and with a light crunch, they can be quite pleasant to chew on. For a jam, however, I didn’t want quite so many, so I pressed the pulp through a sieve to remove at least some. It was hard work!

To make this easier, you could add a little water to loosen the pulp and push it through–but that means more time and fuel used to prepare the jam, so the less water used the better.

What seedy pulp I had left, I combined with the leftover shells, and “washed” them all in a great big basin of water to extract what tastes remained–there’s enough sourness there to produce several sharbats, which are the other favorite thing to make with vilampazhams. Just some jaggery for sweetness and a touch of chilli powder.

I’ve covered some of the fruit’s famed medicinal properties in this earlier post, but here just a word about the shell. There’s a saying in Tamil, “விட்டதடி ஆசை விளாம்பழத்தின் ஓட்டோடு”– which means something like ‘the desire to let go comes with the vilampazham shell.’ The saying is an insight from Siddha medicine, which prescribes taking the ground paste of these shells for three weeks to lose sexual desire. In a culture with as many ascetic callings and solutions as ours, this is not just a fun fact, but a vital insight!

After the pulp extraction, the jamming is actually rather simple.

Unlike most other jams, there isn’t a lot of cooking–unless the pulp itself is very liquidy, in which case it will need to be boiled down.

Then make a jaggery syrup as below, to a 1-string consistency (I used panavellam, which is dark by nature and probably made my jam even darker), and mix that in, cooking only until all moisture appears gone.

Then add sesame oil and let this ooze a little from the sides, as it would with a good thokku. Finish with a tempering in sesame oil with red chillies (or just use chilli powder). Some folks use a pinch of cardamom, but I like the spicy tones in this; cardamom feels like a misfit. Your choice though.

You can well consume this jam as a lehiyam, or a “lickable” medicinal preparation, by the spoon. Or bring it to your breakfast table and have it with crisp toast and crackers. It’s a bit of an acquired taste, but one that’s sure to grow on you.