Frugal Indian cooks rediscover vegetable peel and fruit rinds during lockdown, and light up Facebook and Instagram with recipes
- Cooking groups sprang up online to swap recipes using scraps and leftovers when Indian housewives caught out by sudden coronavirus lockdown had to improvise
- Many used peel, stems and rinds they previously discarded, and recalled their grandmothers’ kitchen smarts. Will this conscious cooking outlast the virus?
When my journalist friend Anita Rao Kashi described her orange rind gojju – a thick spicy-sour-sweet stew – I was intrigued. Not only had I never heard of this stew before, but the idea of using citrus rind as a main ingredient in a dish was also novel to me.
A casual query on Facebook got many other friends responding with their own recipes, including one from food writer Ranjini Rao, who says: “[I’ve been] keeping in mind the need to eat healthy and stretching ingredients as much as possible by using rinds, peels and stems in innovative ways.
“I made a lemon peel thokku – a sweet-spicy-sour condiment that is great on toast too – orange peel curry, coriander stem chutney, and I used sweet lime peel to make a face pack for my acne-prone teenage daughter.”
In the past two months, in the midst of what has become the world’s strictest lockdown, the spotlight within Indian kitchens has been on an unlikely superstar: vegetable peel.
Previously discarded without a second thought by people of my generation, peel and scraps are now being carefully collected and ground into chutneys or boiled into stock, while stems and shoots are being turned into preserves and pickles. I now find Facebook groups and Instagram stories alight with the halo of home cooks sharing tips about adding sour curd to instant dosa batter or touting the virtues of green banana peel bhaja (stir-fry).