Panangai Paniyaaram

We don’t have a great many sweet steamed cakes or fritters in Tamil cookery—savory versions rule, idli batter as base is king, and sweet versions were for us growing up just a rare festival treat or the specialty of some aunt’s kitchen, rare or forbidden enough to set off the most powerful cravings. Even in such rare form, the tastes of choice were limited: some combination of banana, coconut, and jaggery, and my family was one to find a favorite and stick with it—till the ends of time. There’s value to that, of course, but wither expansion of taste and innovation?

It surprised me later in life to find out about the panagai paniyaaram/ பனங்காய் பணியாரம், which really should have been a staple alongside banana versions, in season, because the fruit is that common. Instead, it was a staple for Jaffna Tamils—communities that have lived with scarcity and war-shortage enough to know the value of all the plenty that falls from the trees, and the rest of us so take for granted [thanks to Mathy Chandra for this insight].

The panagai paniyaaram is a simple snacking cake, as we’d call it now, made sometimes with rice, sometimes with wheat flour, sometimes பனங்கட்டியும் தினை மாவும்: with thinai [foxtail millet] flour. Or sometimes with all of the above. Witness here the “all of the above” version. Soaked raw rice, ground to a finer-than-coarse paste, the thick roasted panampazham pulp of my prior post added in, sweetened with a little panavellam or palmyrah jaggery, flavored with cardamom, coconut for texture, a little thinai maavu and whole wheat flour added in to help bind it all—and these can be made in the same kuzhi paniyaara/gunthapanganalu patrams we use for the savory types, or just deep fried like gulgule. Unlike other fritters which are best eaten hot, these can be smooshy and inedible at first, but settle into a sweet mini-cake upon cooling.

Odias call them tala or talaw bara and Sweta Biswal reports also that eating these fresh and hot was a no-no: they cause the runs. Panangai paniyaarams are therefore often stored and eaten over the next day or two. So, they’re a perfect snack to make ahead and store.

It’s a little peculiar that this little cake is called a panangai paniyaaram–emphasis on panan-kai, which referrs to unripe fruit. But the panampazham has to be ripe, very ripe, for its pulp to be extractable at all, so there’s no question of using unripe fruit. I asked around again; one theory is that the dish once was called the panankali paniyaaram [பனங்களிப்பணியாரம்]: a reference to the kali-like or custardy texture of the pulp, which overtime just became பனங்காய்ப்பணியாரம்/ panangai paniyaaram.

Extracting pulp

Now it’s time to extract the panampazham pulp–that’s the step that takes the most work and the most planning. There are two options here, and each has its advantages and down-sides, so choose accordingly.

Method 1: from the fresh, ripe fruits

The first is to use fresh panampazham pulp, extracted from ripe fruits. The process is depicted in images below, and you can read more about it in my prior post. Since panampazham pulp ferments very easily, it works wonders in keeping rice cakes naturally soft and spongy, and it produces a panangai paniyaaram with a lovely crumb, as you’ll see below.

Some recommend soaking the seeds in water to make the pulp extraction a little easier. Sure, add a little water if it helps, but I don’t recommend this for any recipe that involves later cooking that same pulp down–that just feels like a waste of energy resources. Plus the time saved in extraction gets used up in cooking anyway, so…

Also, depending on what stage of ripeness your panampazhams are, the pulp might be a very thick orange as in the images above, or have an already foamy-fermenting layer on top, as in the image below, which is already liquidy enough without needing to get watery. No need for a pinch of baking soda when you have a foamy pulp like this! All that’s needed is to make the batter and let it rest for a while before frying the paniyaarams.

And you see then how a foamy fruit pulp like that results in a paniyaaram with a perfect crumb. But it means that you cannot cook the batter down to a desired thickness.

If you’re going to add water and then cook the pulp down, you may as well use method #2, roasting, as below and improve flavor while you’re at it.

Method 2: Roast the panampazham first

The second option is to roast the whole panampazham on an open fire–and then follow the same steps as above in extracting the pulp. Roasting produces a fruit pulp that is thicker, smokier in taste, and preserves much longer than the fresh pulp. So if you are not going to use the pulp right away, it’s best to roast it first and preserve the pulp in jars (refrigerated) until you’re ready to use it.

Roasting will improve the taste of the panangai paniyaaram significantly, but it will result in a slightly denser, maybe also chewier paniyaaram.

It’s a bit harder extracting the pulp from roasted fruits because it will have thickened considerably in the cooking. Here you can add a little water to ease pulp extraction if you like, but diluted pulp won’t store as well as the un-mixed pulp. Keep that in mind.

And then below are the paniyaarams made from thick, roasted panampazham pulp (and a rather coarser rice grit). They were on the chewier side, so I think it’s best to make the rice batter semi-smooth, add flours, and adjust consistency at the end with sprinkles of water.

Then to sit with books telling tales of bygone eras when more use was made of the panamaram and the fruit in all its stages, wondering if all this — foraging the fruit, saving it from worms and weevils, roasting the panampazham, sitting for hours and hours extracting pulp–has been worthwhile. Panampazham is an acquired taste, there is no doubt, and even my boys like it, but always with some reserve.

None of it is easy. But the panampazham feels like one of those ingredients that makes the telling easy or at least possible, in a way Raja Rao said so long ago it wasn’t:

“The telling has not been easy,” he said in his famous preface to the novel Kanthapura, in which a grandmother narrrates, in her own particular dialect with her own unique style of expression, the story of how Gandhi’s struggle for Independence came to a typical village in South India: a notable innovation for Indian writing in English in 1963.  “The telling has not been easy.  One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own.  One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language.  I use the word “alien,” yet English is not really an alien language to us [Indians].  It is the language of our intellectual make-up – like Sankskrit or Persian was before – but not of our emotional make-up.  We are all instinctively bilingual…” 

The panampazham is a part of our bilingualism, I think. It behooves us to find it, work with it, and finally develop a relationship to it… which is what I hope all the posts in this series have, with love and care, done:

1. How to process a panampazham
2. Panampazham rice cakes
3. Paanattu or Panampazham fruit leather
4. Sutta Panampazham Payasam, and now
5. Panagai Paniyaaram

Panangai Paniyaaram

Small fried sweet cakes made from fresh or roasted panampazham/palmyra/toddy palm fruit pulp, and a batter of fresh ground rice, wheat flour and thinai or foxtail millet flour. A Sri Lankan Tamil delicacy.

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Ingredients

  

• ½ cup aromatic rice such as jeeraga samba, gobindo bhog or ambe mohar
• 1 cup of panampazham pulp, either fresh or roasted, extracted as indicated in the post above
• ¼ cup whole wheat flour
• ¼ cup foxtail millet flour or thinnai maavu
• ¼ cup fresh grated coconut or small coconut pieces
• 1 cup of grated or powdered panavellam/jaggery, or can substitute with sugar
• 2-3 pods of cardamom, powdered
• A pinch of baking soda (optional; see instructions below)
• Water to mix the batter
• Oil for deep frying

Instructions

 

• Soak the rice for 2-3 hours. Drain partially and grind to a semi-smooth paste. A little grit is ok, but not too much. Transfer to a mixing bowl.
• Add the panampazham pulp, the flours, sweetener, coconut and cardamom.
• Adjust the consistency by sprinkling a little water if needed or adding a little extra wheat/thinai flour if needed. You want a thick batter you can shape with your fingers into small donuts, not something so runny that it spreads and splutters in hot oil.
• If the panampazham pulp you are using is fresh and foamy/fermenting, you might want to adjust sweetness to balance the natural souring, and leave the batter to rest for a ½ hour-1 hour before frying.
• If you’ve used a roasted panampazham pulp, a pinch of baking soda is recommended. If not, and the batter feels light enough, you can omit this.
• Heat the oil in a deep pan. When it is very hot, reduce the flame to medium-high, and start dropping in small spoonfuls of the dough. You can use your fingers if you like, roughly shaping the batter and dropping it in tear-drops into the oil.
• Fry until a deep golden brown. Lift from the oil, and drain on paper towels.
• Allow these to cool before eating—it’s not advised to have them too fresh. But these keep well for some days in the fridge, and are a very pleasant accompaniment to afternoon teas.