Vikram Doctor on why kale is a hot favourite with health-obsessed Americans
Sunil, who sells vegetables at Pali Market in Bandra, is one of the smartest vendors I know. His veggies are good, but really overpriced, even compared to stalls close by, yet he easily out-sells them. He has great recognition, remembering what everyone's weak point is (mine is Portobello mushrooms) and with an almost sixth sense for what else he can sell them.
Even more, he manages to get others standing around interested in what he's selling you, and gets them to buy too. It is true that in that location he has an advantage in getting lots of expats and it is masterful watching how he plays them, cheerily tempting them to up their orders and happily hand over huge amounts of cash. But my respect for Sunil really shot up when I found that, long before any so-called gourmet store, he was the first vendor in Mumbai to stock kale.
This was, I'm sure, in response to some of the expats, since Americans have become obsessed with kale. It is high-fibre, low-calorie, full of anti-oxidants, minerals and other nutrients and suitable for the trendy Paleo Diet where you eat like a Stone Age man because kale is like a Stone Age form of cabbage. In places like New York and Los Angeles you have people who seem to live exclusively on kale, eating it raw, liquidized, steamed, stir-fried, boiled, baked and probably made into puddings, except that these sort of people don't eat sugar.
Mind you, I suspect that Sunil, having twigged about this kale craziness, was quietly selling leaves from his cauliflowers as kale, and at a premium too. His kale had the same thick veins and leathery leaves, and it wouldn't even have been entirely wrong since kale is a type of cabbage that remains at the leaf stage and doesn't form the swollen or tight packed heads of cauliflower or cabbage.
The scientific name for this variant is Acephala, which means 'headless'. The leaves are thick and firm and there are variants developed as ornamental pot plants with stiff rosettes of leaves in colours ranging from green to silvery grey, violet and pink. Because it is so firm and durable, ornamental kale is often planted in public places, and the writer Tahir Shah has a story of being broke and starving in Tokyo and surviving by stealing ornamental kale planted outside hotels and making it into a nourishing soup.
Nourishing isn't the same as tasty, of course, and one taste of raw kale leaves will have you convinced you need to be reincarnated as a cow to enjoy this bitter, chewy stuff. This is probably why kale never took off earlier in India, though it was introduced by the British along with other members of the cabbage family. R Barton West's Practical Gardening in India (1892) mentions it as barikhol, a clever name that means both big cabbage in Hindi and is also a version of its alternative English name of borecole, which derives from the Dutch boerencole, or 'farmer's cabbage'. It was grown by farmers as a fallback crop, very cold resistant and useful as cattle or even human food if winters were bad.
Of course, such cold weather use meant, as Barton West says, "in this country no object would be gained in cultivating them" - at least until American born diet crazes hit us. It is true that this craze was mostly born around newer curly variants, which are a bit better tasting. Growers like Trikaya have started producing this now and I was interested to note that Sunil now only keeps this curly kale, and rather sheepishly told me that this was better than the old type! Long cooking also improves it and the best option is actually to bake kale leaves, after rubbing them with oil and salt. This half cooks, half dries them into large, crackly kale chips which have a nice deep vegetal taste beneath the salt.
But it was only recently that I learned the real secret of using kale is not to cook but massage it. Yes, seriously, and not one of those prim and pointless light-rubbing Kerala massages, but a serious, hard massage aimed at breaking down the cellulose tissue in the leaves. You tear the leaves away from the central spines, tear them into smaller pieces, add oil, salt and lime and then really scrunch, squeeze and pummel the leaves. It is good fun and the leaves will change under your fingers, compressing in size and turning a dark wounded green, but never into the mush that spinach or lettuce would become.
Then you leave the massaged leaves for a while and when you taste them again everything has changed. Most of the bitterness has gone, except for an elegant undertone, greener notes have emerged and the salt and lime has penetrated deep into the kale tissues. All you need is to chop up some tomatoes or radishes and you will have an instant salad. You can even keep this for several days in the fridge and thanks to kale's toughness it won't rot like other salad leaves would.
This is wonderfully convenient for someone like me who would often likes a salad when I come home late at night, but have either forgotten to buy fresh leaves or doesn't have the patience to wash, dry and dress them from scratch. With a bowl of massaged kale in the fridge, I can have an instant, tasty, super-healthy salad any time I want. It is reason enough to line up with the health nuts and expats to become one of Sunil's regular kale customers.
vikram.doctor@timesgroup.com
