Salsa de Guajes

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Travels of Guaje | Taste Cousins | Strange Botanical Harmonies | Working with guaje

Post 3 of 4 on ingredients from Houston’s less known (more local?) Tex-Mex sides: Xoconostle, Nopales, Guajes, Culantro. All of which grow in India as well, in some form or other, thanks to centuries of botanical exchange, colonial and other, and now have local stories to tell from either end of this wide world.

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Guaje, Leucaena esculenta [or Leucaena leucocephala]—is this small, fast-growing mimosoid tree native to central Mexico that gave the region of Oaxaca its name because the Spanish couldn’t pronounce the Nahuatl “Huāxyacac” [Wah-she-YAH-cack] when they arrived there in 1521 and so “Oaxaca” it became forevermore. “Huāxyacac” refers itself to ‘the place of guaje’; a derivative of the Nahuatl word in Spanish, uaxin or oaxin survives, however, as “guaje”. In Mexico it goes by the names cacalas, or cascalhuite, too.

I found guaje at Fiesta in Houston—and this unusual bunch of seed pods took me around the world in 80 seconds, for no sooner were my stories up than Meenal of @khaobowmeow made the Manipuri connection, and there we were chatting about an ingredient valued in two corners of the world. If I knew guajes primarily as an addition to a powerfully flavorful roasted tomatillo-jalapeno salsa verde, now I knew it as part of regional Indian cuisine, too.

The Travels of Guaje

Ever in search of the Spice Islands and only mistakenly having encountered the new world, Andrés de Urdaneta, a maritime explorer for the Spanish Crown and Augustinian friar, finally made the journey from the Mexican pacific coasts to the Philippines and back. “Beginning in 1565 and continuing until 1815,” therefore, “the ‘Galeon de Acapulco’ arrived to the Philippines and returned as the ‘Galeon de Manila’ or ‘Nao de China.’ Its objective was to trade gold and silver from Mexico for spices and various merchandises which strongly influenced the culture and economy of the New Spain and provided considerable profits for Spain” [Zárate 1997: 242]. Guaje came East likely on one of these voyages, but possibly as either fodder crop or an “involuntary passenger” in the ship’s ballast. And not the taxon with the greatest cultural and economic significance to the Mexicans, which was L. esculenta, to which the Nahuatl “oaxin” referred, but L. leucocephala, which turned out to be the more aggressive, groundwater-depleting botanical colonizer [resulting in efforts to control and curtail its growth, and to replace with the more controllable cultivar L. glabrata].

As with Europeans who may only have used guaje infrequently as a garlic substitute [Zárate 1997: 245], the “Old World sense of taste was not attracted to the guajes,” says Zárate [247]; “rather non-human consumption uses of economic interest promoted the intro duction of Mexican plants to the tropical world, and later back to their native land.” Not unlike the camachile, a name also from the Nahuatl, but known to us via the route of its travel as the Manila tamarind, or by shape in local idiom as “jungle jalebi,” guaje thus remained a wild tree, a “forageable” that is far less known culinarily than perhaps for its other virtues outside its native range. It continues to be called the wild or river or even horse tamarind, the “tamarind” rubric gathering together such diverse plants thanks to the similarities taste (usually) or (in this case) of their pendulous and edible seed pods, with characteristic bulges where each seed sits.

Side Note: the cameo appearances in these images by Mamoncillo or Melicoccus bijugatus –the so-called “Spanish lime,” which would have been good to try to ferment into something fizzy, but I didn’t have time this trip.

Taste Cousins

In India, guaje is “subabool” and a common shrub in the scrub forests of the Aravali which perpetuates the old colonial bias perhaps, being much more a fodder plant than one used for human consumption. This is also the case in Tamil Nadu, where it’s saundal. Note that the Asian taxon most available is likely to be L. leucocephala and not the more culinarily valuable L. esculenta that’s used in Mexico.

Guaje’s [L. leucocephala] edible value is really appreciated only in Manipur, and there the tender pods are used whole and raw, blanched, or seeds harvested–exactly like guaje in its native range. Locally it is Chigonglei angouba or Chinese Petai or just Chigonglei or Chigonglei tujomba–and listed now among the region’s medicinal plants, particularly for use in diabetes treatment regimens.

In Manipur, too, it is taste cousin to the SE Asian native yongchak/ stink bean/ petai [Parkia speciosa] which is used with dried/ fermented fish to make a mixed vegetable salad-like pounded-together dish called eromba [a basic sauce for which consists of bhut jolokia chilli, garlic, fermented fish or fish sauce, salt] and the similarly salad-like Meitei Manipuri dish singju. It’s hard to tell for sure without visiting Manipur to investigate fist-hand, but seems like Chigonglei is used as a substitute for yongchak, or independent of it, or confused with it culinarily, or used interchangeably with another cousin, Acacia nilotica/babul–or all four! At any rate, the overlaps and harmonies between these two quite distinct species, one old-world the other new, are hard to overlook.

It doesn’t help that several Parkia species bear the same common names “stink bean”: fruits of Parkia timoriana (syn. P. roxburghii), Parkia biglandulosa [the badminton ball tree!], and Parkia speciosa are stinky, strong and lingering, right down (literally) to next-day eliminations. In that, they share taste-and-olfactory resonances with guaje, which has an equally enduring stinkiness of its own, with “bittersweet, grassy, earthy, and garlicky taste with green, nutty, and mineral-forward nuances,” even if yongchak is the official owner of the colloquial title. Evidence: the day after I made my first salsa de guajes in Houston, my older one remarked that while it had been no-doubt delicious, but strong after-tastes sure did unpleasantly linger. Zárate corroborates this: “The characteristic smell of the seeds, and leafs of the genus Leucaena is comparable of that of garlic. When eaten it leaves a more or less strong odor in the mouth of the consumer, which some people dislike and others enjoy” [1997: fn7, 249]. Yongchak seeds are said to be rather more mushroomy than garlicky like guaje/Chigonglei, but it’s undeniable that both have strong, persistent odors, and in that sense are probably acquired tastes, too.

On both ends of the world, Guaje and Yongchak’s tender seed pods are chopped straight; older ones are opened for these beautiful, shiny, light green seeds, toasted to release a subtly sweet taste among all those others, though yongchak’s seeds are larger and a lot more morphologically almond-like than guaje’s little tear-drop seeds ever get.

Last, there’s the strange harmony of medicinal properties. In their own ranges, guage/Leucaena leucocephala and the yongchak/Parkia species have been used traditionally for sugar balancing, though yongchak/Parkia speciosa is more effective than guaje/Leucaena leucocephala [with Laurus nobili or the aromatic Bay Laurel sitting somewhere in between] [Harith et al., 2013].

Summing up: Yongchak is petai and Guaje is Chinese petai, and the “Chinese” qualifier notwithstanding there’s is clearly local nomenclatural confirmation of the odd similarity of these botanically distinct species: morphologically they resemble one-another; they have similarly strong, lingering tastes; they are used similarly (whole young pods or harvested for beans), and have similar medicinal properties.

Strange Botanical Harmonies

I’m going on about this because it continues to fascinate me that distinct botanical species which originate in far corners of the world can appear and act similar enough to be used interchangeably or even confused. The two kapoks [Bombax and Ceiba Pentadra], are another case in point, and so are nannari and mahali kizhangu though those are already and natively proximate. But the question remains: how is it that these far-flung species are still so similar? And while we can certainly track or theorize their routes of travel to a common landscape like India, on what basis or by what process did local communities determine that their morphological similarities were in fact indicators of less-visible medicinal properties, too?

All this got me reflecting also on regionalism: as unique as regions are in a country such as ours, so important to document and to celebrate, we know also that boundaries are perpetually shifting, porous things and cross-regional exchanges have equally made our world as it is. Around the planet, too, we need real ways to account for such interconnections and all our thousands of consonances, not just our differences, no matter how these consonances have been acquired. In a world already so full of pain and strife, interlinkages like guaje might just start to matter a great deal, too.

So, instead of endlessly repeating tired Kumbaya-singing-circle multiculturalist cliches about how food brings us together and creates community, think of ingredients as bridges between far-flung worlds in the global south that were once connected only via colonial intermediaries or stories but now need neither because, well, we have much more in common vocabularies like guaje.

Working with Guaje

First of all, if you find guaje in India, you can have the double satisfaction of having (1) foraged and that (2) for seeds that have all this interesting global history, and (3) found the seeds of a terribly invasive species whose seeds could well do with a little extra eating.

For this salsa you do need not just the tender pods but the seeds of the river tamarind–and if the pods are a little too young–or, if, like me, you transported them to India to use optimally and they get a little browned in the process–then opening them for the seeds is a touch tricky.

I found it easiest to make a slit with a knife as you see below…

… and then opening them down one length first, and then peeling the other length open like so … (or else the pods are tender enough they keep breaking.

Then here are your ingredients to fire roast or roast on a lightly greased griddle + toasted guajes seeds with garlic and salt…

… all pounded together like so (make sure you work the guajes first with garlic and salt into a fine paste before adding tomatillos and other wetter ingredients) and finished with fresh chopped coriander + more toasted guajes seeds.

Notes

Harith, Siti Suhaila, Hasbullah, Amirul Hafidz, Amat Sehab, Muhammad Shafiq Aqmal, Mohd Hassan, Mohd Shafiq, “Hypoglycemic Effect of Parkia speciosa, Leucaena leucocephala and Laurus nobili in Oral Glucose-loaded Rats.” KONAKA, 2013.

Zárate, Sergio. “Domestication of Cultivated Leucaena (Leguminosae) in Mexico: The Sixteenth Century Documents.” Economic Botany 51, no. 3 (1997): 238–50. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4255964.