Why Your Garden Needs a Roselle Plant

The roselle is a versatile flowering plant, whose leaves and flowers are both nutritious and packed with flavour. Proiti Seal Acharya studies the roselle, and how, despite efforts by agricultural colleges and federal governments, its popularity has remained limited to a few regions and cuisines in the country.

Despite being a lifelong and devoted fan of berry jams, when my mother first told me she was having our cook make jam from the ‘tok-dhyraoshi’ in our garden, I was not particularly interested. In Bangla, the literal translation of tok-dhyraosh is sour ladies’ finger. And as someone whose favourite way to consume ladies’ fingers is deep-fried in a spiced batter, I was not intrigued. I changed my mind the moment I saw the colour of the jam: a bright crimson with undertones of magenta. I went out to the garden to take a close look at the source of this unbelievable richness, and found myself staring at a plant covered with hibiscus-like leaves and flowers, and red calyxes.

Meet the roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa) or red sorrel.

The roselle is a strikingly versatile plant that travelled from Africa to South Asia, sometime in the 16th or 17th century. Being part of the hibiscus family, it spread across the subcontinent over the centuries with relative ease. It is a plant that requires no tending or special attention, dispersing seeds where it grows, allowing nature do its thing in the monsoon, and blooming again in winter.

You would think a plant like that would be easy to find around us, but the roselle has suffered a curious fate. Instead of being a household name or everyday ingredient, it is remembered only by certain communities in specific parts of India.

In Andhra cuisine, roselle is called gongura and is a deeply beloved ingredient in local cuisine. The leaves are cooked into a pachadi, a pickle, a pappu, a pulihora (tamarind rice) and even used in mutton and chicken curries. In Bihar, they make a kudrum chutney with roselle, garlic and chillies. In Tamil homes, pulicha keerai (sorrel) thokku is popular condiment, made with the sorrel leaves. In Maharashtra, roselle is called ambadi. Ambadichi bhaji is popular in certain areas in Maharashtra, made with the leaves, some peanuts, rice, and yellow split peas.

Within Bengali cuisine (and in typical Bengali fashion), it has a wide variety of daaknams — chukai, chukuri, mesta, horgora, hoilpha, and tok dhyarosh. Across Bengal (more so in Bangladesh than in West Bengal), the roselle sepals find their place in bhortas, small fish curries, jhols, and achars. The sour roselle leaves are eaten as ‘shaak’, and certain varieties of roselle plant fibres make an excellent replacements for string. The chukai shaak made by chopping the roselle leaves and frying them with dried red chillies, mustard, sugar and salt in mustard oil.

Interestingly, in the early 20th century, efforts were made by the US federal government to popularise the use of roselle to make wines and syrups. VH Kulkarni and GB Deshmukh, scientists at the Agricultural College in Poona, were inspired by these efforts and decided to take up a similar endeavour in their own city.  Between 1932 and 1937, they wrote letters to the Marathi newspaper Jnanaprakash, informing readers about the roselle and its many benefits. They hoped that Pune’s residents would begin to include the roselle in their everyday diets — their letters also included recipes for jams and jellies, and that farmers, with their guidance, would be encouraged to cultivate the plant.

Unfortunately, their efforts were mostly in vain. It was largely consumed by poorer families as ‘greens’, lagging behind the likes of spinach and fenugreek when it came to preference. It did not find acceptance among wealthier households. Marathi cookbooks from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries do not contain recipes featuring the roselle.

Roselle syrup at Smell of the Earth Farm.

Roselle sorbet at Smell of the Earth Farm.

Roselle is quite a versatile plant, and known to have health benefits. it can be consumed in a tea, as a syrup for infusions in cocktails, in jams, and jellies where it adds colour and lends a bright, tangy flavour.

Aparajita Dasgupta of Smell of the Earth Farm in Birbhum, West Bengal tells me that she first knew the roselle as chukai. Her father would occasionally get them from the local bazaar, and the family would enjoy a sweet and sour chutney for lunch that day. “The fun part of growing roselle plants is that you don’t have to do anything. They grow on their own from existing plants. All they need is some monsoon rain,” says Aparajita. One of her farm’s signature products is the roselle syrup, made by boiling the crimson sepals with water and sugar. Aparajita also makes a roselle sorbet with the syrup — one that I had the pleasure of tasting at a pop lunch on the farm this spring. This dollop of pink joy served with a mulberry was a perfect finish to a lunch made of local produce and indigenous ingredients.

Roselle is slowly finding its way into the menus of some restaurants and cocktail bars in the form of stir-fries, infusions and granitas.

If you have sour ladies’ finger at home and don’t know what to do with it, here’s a simple recipe for a roselle jam.  

RECIPE FOR ROSELLE JAM

Ingredients
2 cups roselle flowers
2 cups water
Sugar, to taste
Lemon juice, to taste

Method
Separate the calyxes from each other and give them a good rinse.
Boil them in a pot of water for 20 minutes.
After boiling, take the pot off the heat and pour in a generous amount of sugar and some lemon juice into the roselle mixture. Cook for another 10 or 20 minutes, until it reaches a jammy consistency of your liking.

Proiti Seal Acharya is a writer and arts researcher. Her writing has appeared in anthologies by Scholastic Inc., Bee Books and Rupa Publications. Follow her on https://substack.com/@proiti

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