This year, when India experienced its longest ever heatwave, locals turned to cool drinks like never before.
Caught in a sudden downpour on a July afternoon, I carefully walked down the crowded, muddy sidewalk in old Delhi to reach Khari Baoli, Asia’s largest wholesale spice market. I soon found what I was looking for in an array of bowls heaped with spices at the entrance of a narrow shop. Here, small, uneven, translucent crystals, their off-white colour infused with the slightest rusty hue, lay in a cardboard tray. A small plastic sign set among the crystals read, “Rs 120 [£1.12] for 250g, Gond Katira”.
My curiosity about this lesser-known ingredient began some years ago on a sweltering summer day during a visit to a friend’s house. Her mother offered me a popular drink with a twist: a glass of lemonade but with small pieces of white jelly in it. She told me it had a cool taseer(the cooling or warming property of a food) that reduces body heat. The tasteless and odourless jelly, made from soaked crystals, was gond katira, or tragacanth gum.
Tragacanth gum can be derived from more than2,000 plant species of the Astragalus genus, found from Greece to south-western Asia, with Iran and Turkey being the top producers. When incisions are made on the roots and bark of a plant, gum oozes out of them in the form of a long curving string or ribbon that hardens rapidly. This dried gum is collected and processed into flakes and powder.
One of its main components is tragacanthin, which is soluble in water and swells to form a gel-like structure; because of this, tragacanth gum is widely used in the food industry as a thickener and emulsifier. It is added to baking mixes, relishes, condiments, oils, sauces, fruit juices and meat. It is also used in antibacterial, anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant treatments in the pharmaceutical industry.
