Top your rasam with these delicious seasonal flower petals

The stretch of road by the neem tree near our apartment in Chennai is treated to a shower of neem flowers every summer.

The tiny white flowers, with mere wisps for petals, would come apart even as you pick them up for a closer look. Tyres and feet powder them down to a mustard yellow, resulting in a mellow fragrance hanging in the air. It’s the same aroma that fills the house when vepam poo rasam is prepared. The rasam is topped with the flowers fried in ghee.

Neem flowers are an unlikely ingredient for rasam, one would think. Besides, they’re bitter. But the flowers have been incorporated in South Indian dishes for years, for this exact reason — bitterness.

Neem flowers are used in the pachadi made for regional New Year celebrations across Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada cultures. “We ought to incorporate the bitter taste in our dishes more than we do now,” says cookery expert and cookbook author Mallika Badrinath, “I ensure that I do.”

Minimal intervention

“In our household, we would spread a mat under the neem tree every summer to collect the flowers,” she says. “We wash them well, mix them sparingly with buttermilk and salt, and put them out to dry in the sun.” Around three days later, the flowers are bottled to be used through the year. “I make thuvayal and kozhambu with them,” she says, adding, “I also simply fry the flowers in ghee and mix them with ghee and rice. We have this dish at least once a week at home.”

Badrinath has written a book on thuvayals (thicker versions of chutneys) in which she has featured around three recipes that have neem flowers. “I make something called vepam poo puli thuvayal,” she says. “It has ghee-fried neem flowers, red chillies, onions, a few cloves of garlic, and some tamarind and jaggery mixed with salt, all of which are ground using mortar and pestle.”

The flowers are used in Kannadiga cuisine too. Says Chennai-based foodie Sukumar Jamadagni, “We use neem flowers in saaru, our rasam,” he explains. “A Bengali friend once offered me baingan subji (brinjal curry) with neem flowers added to it. It was quite tasty.” He adds that bevinahoo, a chutney using the flowers, is prepared in parts of Karnataka.

For a lot of people, neem flowers mean nostalgia; and summers standing under the trees, looking up into the leaves as sunlight filters through them, waiting for a gust of wind to send the flowers raining. This is what Bengaluru-based Archana Doshi, who runs web food portal Archana’s Kitchen, remembers from her childhood in Coimbatore. “My mother and I collected the flowers from our terrace,” she recalls.

Doshi says she keeps a bottle of the dried flowers at home to use when needed. “They can be ghee-fried and topped in poriyals and dry subzis similar to shredded coconut,” she explains. Doshi has spent considerable time in Kolkata. “My husband’s family is based there,” she says. “I’ve seen that Bengalis use ghee-roasted neem flowers in their bhajas and postos.”

Sprinkle atop

Bengali potato roasts and pumpkin roasts taste good with a final sprinkling of neem flowers. Doshi, however, adds that the flowers may get overpowered by other flavours if incorporated in puli kozhambu (tamarind-based gravy). Doshi feels that the ingredient is losing its popularity with the current generation, owing to its limited availability. “A lot of us live in apartments; where is the chance to encounter a neem tree?” she wonders.

Chennai, for one, has several shops selling herbal medicine that stock the dried flowers. V Karthikeyan, who runs Sri Murugan Naatu Marundhu Kadai in the city, packs 50 grams for ₹30, saying, “We source the flowers from villages around the city.” He has several customers who buy the flowers from him regularly. “The older they are, the better they taste,” he adds.