Savoury sweetness: Experiencing the seasonal joys of jaggery
Sugarcane features prominently in Pongal and other Indian festivals at the start of the year. My early memories of Pongal in Chennai are mostly about waiting for the two tall stalks my grandmother tied outside the front door to be chopped up, so we could chew it for the juice.
Chilling the pieces in the fridge made it taste even better. In a glass of freshly crushed juice, the sweetness can be cloying, but chewing releases just the right amount of sweet.
There is a story that sugarcane is what two traders, Trapusa and Bahalika, offered the Buddha when they met him just after he attained enlightenment.
They became his first disciples and sugarcane gained its special status in Buddhist society (another version has them offering rice cakes and honey). The story may also explain the close links Buddhism established with trading communities, who then took both religion and sugarcane as they travelled eastwards from India.
Arab traders similarly took sugarcane westward and these two patterns of trade might explain the two common words for sugarcane products, misri (meaning Egyptian or brown sugar crystals) and chini (meaning Chinese or white sugar crystals).
This also indicates that the techniques for refining them were developed outside India. Within India, unrefined jaggery remained the preferred mode of consumption, until the British started promoting sugar mills in the 19th century.
Sugarcane jaggery continued to be valued for certain purposes, like ritual contexts, the drink called panakam which mixes jaggery sweetened water with pepper, and for certain sweets like those made with sesame and consumed this time of the year.
