Mahashais or Stuffed Onion Leaves

The first time I went to the 16^th century Cochin “Paradesi” Jewish synagogue was when I was barely 15, with a class group. It made an enormous impression, and the photo I took of the floor tiles–imported from China and none two alike, we were told, presuming that a virtue and not a flaw in accurate reproduction–remained for long among the best I ever took with the old, trusty Yashica I always lugged about. The synagogue no longer permits photography, so feast your eyes as did we:

Years later, I’d go back with my sister-, father-, and brother-in-law, finding the ride into that historic area of Cochin more quaint than I did the first time, lifting one eyebrow at the nonchalant way in which it was named “Jew town” by locals, and finding it now surrounded by shops full of old things like those that line the ECR coming into Pondicherry. What makes a heritage town is that heritage, materialized in the form of all these broken, discarded, and sometimes, as one local dealer would refer to the distressed look faux antiques: “original new”; incomplete sets and other such pieces which have lost their sheen, along with family photos of people whose families no longer claimed them because memory lasts barely a single generation. All this, for sale. Bric-a-brac awaiting assemblage into some new bricolage. Jew town was in the midst of and alongside all this.

Over the years, I would find articles, short films to use in teaching about this little Jewish community which has been on the Coromandel coast since 75CE, having fled Roman persecution on the coast of what is now Israel after the fall of King Solomon’s second temple. I would hear about the food, as we hear about communities and their foods all the length and breadth of this country, but didn’t claim it in my own cookery until Paachakam, this new Kerala heritage cookbook by Sabita Radhakrishna quite literally invited me to do so. The dishes pictured here are really the 3^rd or the 4^th or 15^th stops on a somewhat meandering, doubtlessly roundabout ethnographer’s journey to know a community that I never myself studied, but found fascinating nonetheless.

The community’s food acquires some coherence in Paachakam, a review of which I wrote for LiveMint Lounge and which you can find here. This is Radhakrishna’s second “heritage fare” compilation after Annapurni, which covered recipes from communities in Tamil Nadu. Her organization of “heritage” is by community, which makes sense when lines are clearly drawn and lives are somewhat more insular, but with all our histories of movement, mixing, intermarrying, centuries of trade—where? This is how we cook, with some threads old, some new, some borrowed, some blue is the best any of us can really say, even as we love to claim otherwise.

The newness of recipes, however, is not so alluring as their age or the way they point backwards through lifetimes and across lifeways to some ancient or mythologized moment of originary existence. “Community” helps us hold this longing together. At the same time as we nourish this enduring romance quite literally with food, we have also this fight-to-the-bitter-end with “community” as the source of oppression and repression (timeless, of course), from without and within. We’d love to keep the food and get rid of the strictures maybe, dreaming them to be separate things. So does food float into the blinkered nowhere spaces of a-politics, coming out only once in a while to hold hands with others on some grand multiculturalist’s feasting table. Or, it simply remains quite happily insular: the we do it this way insistence I’ve heard more times than I can count, until your vegetarianism clashes with my love of lamb and the headmistress says “only veg lunches” and a clash of civilizations begins in a school lunchbox all over again.

But perhaps reckoning with all this complexity is too much for a cookbook like Paachakam? The book wasn’t the place where I learned the meaning of the word “mahashais” or its lineage. I got that via other culinary interests–and from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem. Mahshi are stuffed vegetables, so beloved and so common that each North African/Middle Eastern region will have its own stuffed speciality: “kubbeh, stuffed vine leaves, stuffed prunes wrapped in goose breast, filo stuffed with chicken liver and veal, cigars stuffed with foie gras, and pears stuffed with walnuts and raisins” for Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel. These became known as the “Kissinger platter,” for having been served up to then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on a 1974 visit to Jerusalem.

“Stuffing is an activity suitable for old times, when people had more time and less money; when women spent hours at home but could afford much less. What stuffing does is stretch your meat or rice much further…” as indeed, the Cochini mahashais does, becoming something of a light meal unto itself. Many other mahshis are stuffed and then stewed in stock, stuffed on Fridays and served cold for Shabbath, stuffed with rice or just meat, served with yogurt or kishk–but the “mixture of sweet and sour is typical Jerusalem.” Ottolenghi’s own stuffed onion recipe uses rice, pine nuts, fresh herbs and spices and calls for the cooking of the onion leaves prior to stuffing, and a final, slow stewing in stock and pomegranate molasses.

I think I understood Paachakam‘s mahashais far better for having some familiarity with Ottolenghi, in other words, and that both a relief (for me) and a shame (for the book). If we’re going to safeguard recipes as “heritage,” after all, it would help to let them do so as fully as they must. That needs both research and storytelling, and Paachakam leaves us rather wanting on both those fronts. The dexterity of stuffing, the pride associated with the dish, the long, slow stewing, the specific combinations of tastes and textures–these are the things that perhaps carry back enough to make the long lineage of Cochini Jews and their culinary history more apparent. The vinegar in Cochini mahashais substitutes for pomegranate molasses or is just a Portuguese-influenced adaptation, to keep that sweet-sour mixture that remembers Jerusalem. But that detail, too, I didn’t learn from Paachakam. I learned it from a few other Kerala cookbooks: Ammini Ramachandran’s Greens, Grains, and Grated Coconut (2008) and Tanya Abraham’s Eating with History. Once again for Paachakam, a shame.

Preparing Onion Leaves for Stuffing

Paachakam‘s illustrations (by Nupur Panemanglor) are very beautiful, but its instructions are often insufficient. Photos don’t do much to help or to evoke; they just are there and are just of finished products. The work of hands, the company of women, the raw beauty of things just made in a kitchen that’s alive–none of these are in this book. Even the people who Radhakrishna met to gather all these recipes are just a list in the acknowledgements and nothing more. Plus the section on Thiyas speaks of the fabulous cakes and biscuits they make–and there’s not one Thiya cake recipe. Disappointing! All told, there’s a certain deadness to the heritage represented in Paachakam. It could have been so much richer, the sense of traditions-in-the-making still so alive, with a little extra thought, care and planning.

My images here don’t attempt to remedy any shortcomings (they can’t), but they do show you what words cannot in just a glance, at least for this one recipe: how to prep those onions for stuffing.

Cut away the onion base or scoop it out. Make a single slit through a couple of layers only on one side of the onion. Slowly work with your fingers around the onion bulb and prise them off the inner layers.

The onion layers separate in somewhat cochlear forms, giving you peep holes through which to call out to your patiently waiting company:

It’s easy then to see how they get stuffed, and easier still to imagine how gently they must be turned as they’re fried. One note here: do use coconut oil to fry. It imparts a very inimitable and unmistakable Kerala flavor.

A note for vegetarians & vinegarians

This recipe uses lamb mince, but could very easily become vegetarian or even vegan if you swap out the lamb for some combination of pine, almonds, and/or walnuts. I’ve seen several versions using feta cheese, too, which would bring in a welcome tartness.

Radhakrishna’s recipe also calls for malt vinegar, but really any robust vinegar on the edge of fruity will do beautifully. For me this recipe was a fine excuse for me to use a mangosteen vinegar that had been languishing on my kitchen window since last year, alongside jamun, pomelo peel, cashew apple and several others which I find fascinating to make, but use only so rarely. Swapped out malt for mangosteen, and this was a real winner of a recipe.

A mahashais meal

We made a meal out of three different recipes in Paachakam’s Cohini Jewish section: layered vegetables cooked with fresh herbs, coconut oil and coconut milk (“all blazes”), the softest stack of naan-like breads that get called Cohini doshas, the mahashais and an onion theeyal made like a spicy chutney.

I’ve no idea whether this is traditional or not, but it was all quite delicious.

Yeah, she got a taste, for all that very polite and patient waiting.

Mahashais, or onion “leaves” stuffed with mincemeat.

This is a Cochini Jewish recipe adapted from Sabita Radhakrishna's new Kerala Heritage cookbook, Paachakam. The word mahashais derives from mahshi, or stuffed vegetables of which there are a grand variety distinguishing a good many North African and Middle Eastern regional cuisines. In this recipe, onion leaves are stuffed, browned lightly in coconut oil, and then stewed in a sweetened vinegar whereas other mahshis might call for the cooking of the onion leaves first before stewing—perhaps an adaptation to accommodate the rounder, juicier shallots more common in Indian cookery. For a vegetarian version, you could use a mix of pine nuts, walnuts, feta and rice in place of the lamb mince.

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Ingredients

  

• 4-5 large onions
• Coconut oil to shallow fry

For the stuffing:

• 6-8 garlic cloves
• 1 ” piece ginger
• 1 dry red chilli
• 1 green chilli
• 1 generous bunch coriander leaves
• 1/2 lb minced lamb or chicken
• 1 tablespoon basmati or other aromatic rice
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 1 teaspoon red chilli powder
• 1 teaspoon salt

To stew or bake:

• ½ cup malt or fruit vinegar
• 1 teaspoon powdered jaggery

Instructions

 

• Clean the onions, remove the papery skin, and trim tops and bottoms. Make a vertical incision down the length of one side, cutting only through 1-2 layers. Working gently with your fingers to loosen the onion leaves, prise them off the rest of the onion. Repeat the process for one additional layer, and then for the other onions. Set the hollow onion “leaves” aside. Reserve any unused onion cores for another use.
• Finely mince the garlic, ginger, red and green chilli and coriander leaves. Mix well with the minced meat and the remaining ingredients for the stuffing.
• Divide the stuffing into small balls and fill the onion skins. Do not overstuff—the rice needs room to expand as it cooks.
• Heat coconut oil in a heavy-bottomed pan and gently fry the stuffed onion skins until lightly browned. Transfer to a baking dish.
• Mix the vinegar and jaggery together and spoon over the mahashais. Cover lightly with foil and bake in an oven preheated to 325F/170C for about 30 minutes. Baste with the vinegar liquid periodically, to allow flavors to permeate throughout.
• Alternatively, you can stew the stuffed-fried onions in the vinegar-jaggery liquid on a stovetop on very low heat until all liquid is absorbed and taking care that the onions do not burn. It helps to baste periodically, so the vinegar flavors penetrate fully here, too.

Notes

For a vegetarian version, you could use a mix of pine nuts, walnuts, feta and rice in place of the lamb mince.