India is losing the taste for toddy

One of the most alluring recipe openings I know is given in Katy Dalal’s Jamva Chaloji 2, her collection of lesser-known Parsi recipes, many of which are drawn from villages in Gujarat. The recipe for Tadi-no-Batervo, mutton cooked in toddy, calls for “2 kgs top quality mutton leg from a male goat/ 7 bottles toddy, should be on the sweeter side...”

Her son Kurush Dalal, an archaeologist and food scholar, confirms that the recipe is excellent and can be made with “two litres [of toddy] for half a kilo of good fatty goat meat and you are set”. But he notes sadly that good sweet toddy is harder to find these days. Toddy was clearly a favoured ingredient since the book also has a vegetarian recipe for drumsticks cooked in toddy and a drink of toddy warmed with garlic, pepper and jaggery.

In Goa it might be possible to try this someday. Stories in the media regularly bemoan the dwindling numbers of toddy tappers in the state, but there are still enough of them climbing tall coconut trees, incising the flower stalk and fixing pots to collect the sweet sap that drains out. This sap is then distilled into coconut feni, boiled down into palm jaggery,...

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