MAHUA MANIA

April is the month of mahua flowers. A kind of mania spreads over our villages -- and entire families, women and children especially, are busy collecting the luscious sweet flowers in their baskets. The mahua flower is deceptively green and looks like a plump bud that never blooms. It hangs in clumps on the spread out limbs of the mahua branches, and spread a sweet nectar-like fragrance in the air. It's this flower that is dried and later turned into the local alcohol, mahua daru.
But I have another use for it at SALBAN. We collect the fresh flowers and dry them in the sun to make raisins. In the last couple of years I've stopped using kishmish or grape raisins. Instead I use my home grown mahua.

Salban has over 35 mahua trees and I can manage to sun-dry but a fraction of their bounteous offerings. It takes around 7 days for the flowers to turn from light green to brown, and then we pack up the raisins in clean containers to be used through the year. We put it into cookies, muffins, kheer, halwa, chutney and more! I've even started selling a limited stock to the organic cafe in Kolkata called Sienna, and they've come up with really innovative stuff like apple and mahua crumble, and mahua yoghurt. People might imagine these dishes are made with a generoud dash of the daru. But it's just my harmless, non-alcoholic raisins! Cheers to this iconic tree of Central India, poetically named by botanists as Madhuca Indica!