Murunga-Keerai Omurice [Japanese omelette-rice with drumstick leaves]

Jump to Recipe

I refuse to call what we grew up calling “drumstick” (in English) and “murungai” (in Tamil) this new-fashioned name it has been globally assigned: moringa.

I know this is a losing battle, one of many such that will be lost like the ones over split infinitives, and now the apostrophe: there’s an Auto driver guy in our neighborhood with a sign on his vehicle: “Jesus Love’s You.” And a sign on a new tea shop on the JIPMER road: Alway’s Hot. Enough said? Or the terrible loss of “me” and the indiscriminate use of “I” in all phrases involving singular pronouns, i.e., “X-person and I.”

It’s actually funny that this one in particular is a losing battle when every city in this country and in many others have long since reverted from those Anglicized colonial names like Bombay or Calcutta or even Tinnevelli and Madras to local language equivalents: Mumbai, Kolkata, Tirunelveli, Chennai. We know why those names were changed; we know why those names needed to be changed. It was a reclaiming of language, enunciation, identity; it was a decolonization.

And yet with murungai it’s just been a race to re-christen it “moringa” though we had a perfectly good English name for these before: drumstick leaves. I had never heard the name “moringa” throughout my own childhood, though it derives from the botanical Moringa oleifera so has always been around. Let’s face it, the Western powers-that-be hadn’t then woken up to its wonders and weren’t marketing it as a trendy “superfood,” the “new kale.” They were really only targeting “wealthy health food enclaves” but with a benevolent eye to areas of the world where malnourishment is at its highest, and where, wouldn’t you know it, also the areas where “moringa” already grows [Source: The New Yorker, 2016].

Maybe there are honest folks, in those far-away regions of the world where there are all those ‘poor starving malnourished Africans,’ who are working to encourage greater reliance on local foods like the drumstick. But otherwise this is a classic ploy of colonial trade: export cotton, weave it in England, sell it back in the colonies–or, tax local salt production prohibitively and sell the imports from elsewhere back to the Indians. We never knew of something called “moringa” until stuff like this started to happen, and suddenly the stuff from the backyard trees we all knew started to appear in powdered and capsuled form in fancypants bottles, with fancier-pants promises. Except now all kinds of Indian health fad companies are on the same bandwagon marketing “organic,” handmade” “moringa” to folks who always knew it as murungai.

What’s in a name, you say?

Even the name “moringa” from Moringa Oleifera is a derivative of the Tamil murungai [முருங்கை]; its etymological origin is Tamil. The leaves (keerai or greens) and drumstick-like fruit [முருங்கைக்காய்/ Murungai-kai] of the Murungai tree have long been an integral part of Tamil cuisine (and South Indian fare more generally) and are well-recognized for their nutritive value, particularly for women: high in calcium, iron, protein, fibre and vitamin B. In some regions, the greens are not even sold because each household will have a murungai maram, part of a standard easy-to-grow set of backyard plants that take neither much care (they’re kind-of always naturally “organic” like that) nor much space. And if one doesn’t have a tree or a backyard with a tree–well, I’ve seen women in both town and country walking home (one presumes) with tender murungai greens enough for an afternoon meal, evidently plucked from a neighbor’s tree or foraged.

If all our urbanized elite Indians have gone and forgotten these old ways, if they no longer search for murungai greens in the local urban markets where they are available aplenty or grow the trees in yards and even in large balcony pots, then it’s them that’ve gone and created the health fads and the companies which now sell their own heritage back to them, in premium packaging. A salt tax, by any other name.

The word “murungai” itself, as I read from Prabha T’s very insightful posts on Quora, is etymologically muru [tender] + akam [inner] + kai [hand], or muru+angai [tender wrist-palm]: quite literally a description of the shape of the node from which drumstick fruits emerge, a wrist with several long, knobbly fingers–but tender, edible. [The Kalyana murungai’s leguminous fruits hang similarly from the tree’s “wrists,” so the two hardy, invaluable native Indian plants bear a common family name.]

So, I’ll keep the name I grew up with, thank you very much, and not wait to be told by someone two generations down and twice diasporically removed from here that, wow, did you know?! Moringa is really murungai! Nor for the decolonist’s reclamation of something Anglicised to the point of unfamiliarity to its original form, like the names of so many of our cities.

Let’s skip all that, shall we? It’s not moringa, damnit, it’s murungai. Y’all can learn a Tamil word or two.

Cooking with Murungai

Murungai leaves are not the easiest of greens to work with, their commonness notwithstanding. They tend to wilt once plucked, refrigerated or not. The solution to this is just to remove them from their stems as soon as possible–a time-consuming and somewhat niggly task which the marketers do not like, but which, once done, allow the leaves to be stored as they are for a few days at least. They are naturally slightly bitter, but are at their very best as simple poriyals (with fresh coconut), in omelets or scrambled eggs, or light dals that could nearly be confused for soups. By that same token, a rasam is always on the cards. And the leaves can be added to adai batter for fast, no-ferment, but filling lentil-pancake dinners.

If you must use the leaf powders, those are best as a morning medicine with a little honey–or, just dump a bunch of murungai podi into your bin of chapati flower. It’ll become a part of your daily intake, each time you make chapatis.

The drumsticks themselves–well, gosh, no end of Bengali chorchoris use them [try this Sojne data Charchari from my Shalikuta comadre, Sayantani], and they’re delicious in everyday sambars.

The murungai tree’s gum or pisin has known medicinal (though not culinary) uses, as does its bark: both are used to correct vitamin deficiencies [Source].

Once in a good while, the bunches of murungai from the market will come with several flowers, too, or the rains will shower the flowers everywhere, making them a forager’s delight. Murungai flowers are less extolled than leaves and drumsticks, but they not less valuable. Perhaps even more so:

• They are detoxers, really good for both blood and liver.
• Both leaves and flowers are good for women’s health, they say, not only because of high calcium content, but because of their effectiveness in regulating menstrual cycles (ie, for irregular periods)
• They improve circulatory/cardiovascular health
• They reduce hairfall, improve hair health

The flowers can be used just like the leaves in just about anything. I also love to make a rasam from these; it became a favorite around the time Appa decided to leave us last year, so somehow I associate that just with him. More on that in my next post.

Now, to Omurice

Omurice is a conjugation of two English words which are, by their very joining, made entirely Japanese: omelette+rice. This is classic yōshoku (western-style Japanese food) and the word is classic wasei-eigo (Japanese-made English). Like the title of that old documentary investigating how all things foreign became quintessentially Japanese, it’s “the Japanese version” of the classic omelette breakfast.

We love the combination of murunga-keerai and eggs. The greens take almost no cooking, and are a perfect match to savory, salty eggs in fried, scrambled, and omelette forms. Tamilians will scramble extra-extra and make a murungai-muttai podimas: literally, a more crumbly sort of poriyal or simple stir-fry. What form you choose is up to you, but it’s a widely known fact that eggs and murungai are a match made in heaven.

The omurice choice here is not incidental. It’s attractive because it’s a quick meal in a single plate; it’s attractive because the Japanese use of ketchup makes it more appealing to kids. But I like it all the more here because it takes something non-Japanese and claims it local-style–whereas “moringa” does the opposite.

What can I say, I vastly prefer the Japanese version.

“Among us,” says the writer Malek Alloula in his famous critique of postcards sent home by French soldiers stationed in colonized Algeria, “we believe in the nefarious effects of the evil eye (the evil gaze). We conjure them with our hand spread out like a fan. I close my hand back upon a pen to write my exorcism: this text.”

That text for me is in the word murungai, and in this recipe.

Sources Consulted:

Kumari L., Baghel M., Panda S., Sakure K., Giri T.K., Badwaik H. (2021) Chemistry, Biological Activities, and Uses of Moringa Gum. In: Murthy H.N. (eds) Gums, Resins and Latexes of Plant Origin. Reference Series in Phytochemistry. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76523-1_10-1

Diksha Manaware. (2020) “Drumstick (Moringa oleifera): A Miracle Tree for its Nutritional and Pharmaceutic Properties.” International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences. Volume 9 Number 9.