A lingering aftertaste

Aromatic memories from the highlands of Kerala (6 minute read)

Soon after I returned from Kerala in India, I found myself in trouble for a photo I posted on social media. I had shared a photo of some of the spices I had brought back with me, but I’d forgotten to state that I had brought them in legally. Someone saw the photo, looked up my name online and found that I worked in the Ministry for Primary Industries, the government agency responsible for biosecurity. So they phoned the Ministry and reported that I’d imported the spices. I then received a please explain message from someone who had the task of investigating.

While I was surprised by the phone call, I had no difficulty in explaining. Well before I left for India I’d already looked up the import requirements for spices. I found out that it was legal to bring in a wide range of spices, both whole and ground, as long as they were in unopened packets and were visibly free of pests. Before I began my journey home, I inspected my spices, wrote up a list of everything I had and packed them in an accessible location in my suitcase. When I arrived at the border, I declared everything I was carrying by handing over my list.

The website advice about importing food as a passenger says that some types, such as fresh fruit, are prohibited, some types, such as sweets and chocolate, are permitted and that the rest sit in a grey area. Many foods may or may not be permitted and are at the discretion of the inspector. Crucially, though, everything must be declared. If you turn up at the border with a couple of mangoes crawling with pests and declare them, you won’t get into trouble. You’ll simply have to hand over the mangoes for destruction. But if a search or x-ray picks up food which hasn’t been declared, even if it’s permitted, it can result in a fine.

While the biosecurity inspector you meet at the airport does have a high degree of discretion over what a passenger may bring in, they are guided by specific rules for many products. I’d spent some time looking into the specific rules and improved my chances by ensuring that my spices complied. My list also helped, because it ensured I didn’t forget anything I was carrying and demonstrated to the biosecurity officer that I was serious about declaring everything. It’s a good practice for anyone carrying more than a couple of items which need to be declared. There was one piece of information I didn’t volunteer, though. I didn’t mention my job. I never did unless I was asked directly, so I didn’t appear to be asking for special treatment.

Almost all the spices we use when cooking in New Zealand are imported, but in Kerala I discovered it was not uncommon to have spices growing in the garden. One house I stayed at had a nutmeg tree with a pepper vine growing up through its branches. Peppercorns are the ripe fruit of the pepper vine and I climbed up a ladder to help harvest them. I picked up the fruit of the nutmeg tree from the ground. When the fruit is split open, there’s a seed inside, which is the nutmeg. Wrapped around the seed is a layer which is known as mace, also used as a spice. Another house had a cinnamon tree. If anyone needed cinnamon, they could simply take a knife and scrape off a piece of bark.

During the few days I spent travelling as a tourist, I also visited a plantation which grew many different kinds of spice, herb and medicinal plant, as well as some unusual food plants. This was the source of most of the spices I brought back with me. Among the spices I saw were two of my favourites, clove and green cardamom. Clove is member of the myrtle family, a cousin of our mānuka and pōhutukawa, and the cloves are unopened flower buds. Green cardamom is a member of the ginger family, but unlike the ornamental and invasive gingers we are familiar with in New Zealand, the flowers grow at the base of the stems, just above the ground. Both whole seed pods and individual seeds of green cardamom are used in savoury and sweet cooking.¹

Green cardamom, flower on left, seed pods on right (image credit: Melanie Newfield)

The spice plantation was near the town of Munnar, in Kerala’s highlands. It’s the centre of a tea-growing region and the surrounding hills are covered with row upon row of close-clipped bushes. In a few places, there were citrus bushes, spices and shade trees every few metres among the rows of tea. In other places, there was only the occasional spindly tree punctuating a vast expanse of plantation. I couldn’t work out why those trees were there, since they cast little shade and didn’t produce anything edible for humans. Many were Australian grevillea trees, so they may have supplied nectar for birds or bees, or they may have had value for timber.

Tea is now an everyday part of Indian culture, but it’s cultivated in only a few regions, so the plantations are of considerable interest to tourists visiting from other parts of India. I joined a tour of a tea plantation and processing factory to learn a little of its history. Commercial plantations were first established by British colonists in the mid-19^th century, based largely on tea plants stolen and smuggled out of China. The best of India’s tea crop was exported to Britain and the powdery residue was available to the local population. Today, tea is deliberately powdered for the Indian market as that is what people are familiar with. It’s usually prepared by boiling with water, milk and sugar, although our tour guide attempted to convince people that tea leaves should be added after, not before, boiling.

Harvesting tea is physically demanding and skilled, but it’s long been under-valued and the work of women. Today, many plantations face difficulties in finding the skilled labour they need, as people realise they can be paid more for less difficult work. Mechanical harvesting frees people from the hard labour of harvesting, or plantation owners from the necessity of paying a fair wage to skilled workers, but machines are less effective at plucking precisely what is needed and do more damage to the tea bushes.

A tea plantation shifts its mood and character as weather and light conditions change. Under a clear sky, the glossy tea leaves shine in the sunlight. As dusk falls, the sun’s angled rays paint stripes along the hillsides and silhouettes against the sky. In the fine rain which often falls in the mountains, twisted grevillea trees emerge from the mist like wraiths. But no cheerful sunshine or soft evening light can disguise the lingering injustices of tea cultivation. The housing around the tea plantations is rougher than I’ve seen anywhere else in Kerala. Tea is still a long way from escaping its colonial past.

The many moods of tea plantations (image credit: Melanie Newfield)

1. There’s another kind of cardamom as well, known as black cardamom. It is also a member of the ginger family but has much larger pods and a very different flavour, smoky and resinous. It’s a Himalayan species used in Nepali, Pakistani and northern Indian cooking, and I never encountered it in Kerala.