Sourashtra Pangarapaan Bhairi

This is an excerpt from a longer essay on the Madurai Sourashtra community’s migration and foods. The Pangarapaan Bhairi is unique for being a rice-vada when most these days are lentil or wheat-based, and using an especially significant trio of medicinal greens.

A sizeable Sourashtra community lives in the basins of the Kaveri and the Vaigai: Kumbakkonam and Madurai, mainly. Traditional, some say orthodox, endogamous, proud of their language, customs and most especially food, the community are referred to in Tamil as pattnūlkara, the erstwhile “clothiers and master craftsmen of the [Kathiawar] peninsula,” who speak “Pattunuli” or “Khatri” or just “Sourashtra,” a dialect which bears little to no resemblance to present-day Kathiawari for having assimilated Telugu, Canarese, and Tamil over centuries of migration.

You can read more about the community’s migration in this post, but to it also belongs an impressive array of culinary innovations, each immediately recognizable as Tamil but always with some unique Sourashtra twist: ambad bhaat [sour rice, tamarind rice] has cut coconut pieces, tomato rice has a distinct cinnamon flavor, and serki bath [sweet rice, chakkarai pongal] is made with parutthi paal or cottonseed milk. “Its like Lord Krishna who had two mothers, one who gave birth and another who took care of him,” says one eloquent contributor to this forum, “He is son for both mothers not for only one. Likewise, I belong to Mother Sourahstra [sic] and Mother Tamil.”

The pankarapaan bhairi is one of those deep-fried snacks also billed as healthy because it combines three very nutritious, medicinally potent greens: kalyana murungai (or mullu murungai) leaves [Erythrina variegata], murungai leaves [Moringa oleifera], and thoothuvalai leaves [Solanum trilobatum]. The first gives the dish its name: pankarapaan or pankara paanu is kalyana murungai, the Indian coral tree, which grows wild and almost unnoticed in most regions, used in the hills amidst tea gardens as a column for climbing pepper, betel and yams because it grows that straight and that tall. Its flowers are a strikingly deep coral red, petals curled like calla lilies, and these give the tree some ornamental value.

I learned of the pankarapaan bhairi from a woman in Madurai who was talking to me about rice, native ingredients, and traditional preparations. She broke off a kalyana murungai branch to show me its thorns: the reason it’s also called mullu murungai, or the murungai with thorns. The cutting was mine to carry home and plant. A worthy activity because, she said, the leaves of this plant possess kalyana gunangal or mangala gunangal: auspicious qualities. They are placed alongside the arasanai paanais at weddings for the bride and groom to propitiate.

The Process

It’s typical to use parboiled rice, but you can also use an aromatic raw rice for this recipe. Either way, soak it first, for a few hours.

Clean the kalyana murungai leaves taking care to remove their fibrous veins, which will not grind well or which will make the dough unpalatably stringy. If you’re using dry sithirathai, then soak that, too. Clean also the murungai leaves by pulling them off their stalks. Thoothuvalai just needs rinsing.

Then drain the soaking rice and blend everything together into a fine paste with no additional water or with as little water as possible. [OR, see the recipe below for a method using just rice flour].

Add the spice powders. If you soaked a piece of sithirathai, then you’ll need to make sure you pound that well by hand before grinding or it won’t grind! You can skip all the other powders except this one, which gives these vadais their unique taste. Add a little rice flour if needed to bring the dough together into a ball.

Now make small lime-sized balls of the dough and form these into small, thickish patties. Don’t make them too thin; they should be just smaller than the palm of your hand. You can use a wet cloth to get these ready or an oiled banana or other edible leaf–these are our traditional, eco-friendly methods. No question of non-biodegradable plastic!

Deep fry these patties in hot oil, just as you’d deep fry pooris.

They will sink to the bottom, but slowly start to rise. Use a slotted spoon to keep them immersed, coaxing them to puff. Once they’ve puffed and are floating—flip them to cook the other side.

And once they’re turning just slightly golden, you can lift them out and set them on paper towels to absorb any excess oil.

Arrange the warm vadais on a plate and sprinkle each with paruppu podi (the recipe is below). You can store any remaining podi for subsequent use (or substitute for your regular chutney podi or idli podi).

And enjoy the pankarapaan bhairis with an afternoon chai or coffee, knowing that these simple little snacks pack a nutritional punch and carry all the weight of a community’s history that stretches back to 5 CE without adding an equivalent weight to your stomach!