Okra: What’s in its ick?

On a planet as diabetic as ours has become, the okra’s medicinal properties might well spell salvation for us

Indian cuisine celebrates the okra like no other. | Photo Credit: SUSANSAM/Getty Images

“Kokrabokra” was my father’s onomatopoeic rejection of anything awry: tangles, asymmetry, scatter, spillage. A messy guy, he could by simply entering a room, catapult it into chaos. But “kokrabokra” never applied to that. It was his label for my geometry homework.

“What is this kokrabokra?” he exclaimed over my take on Euclid and Pythagoras.

At the word, I pictured a bunch of demented Greeks jabbering in dismay as they huddled over my notebook.

“Nonsense!” retorted my father. “Your geometry book would have cheered them. Shouting ‘What next?’ they would have raced home to invent more magic. Kokrabokra is the takeoff point. After that, zoom! You are airborne.”

Since he worked with planes, I took his word for it.

At first glance, kokrabokra could never apply to okra.

Supremely elegant

The fruit of Abelmoschus esculentus has nothing awry about it. It is supremely elegant. Colour it pale pink, make its beribboned hat a trifle frothier, and you could mistake okra for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. And it is, like Eliza Dolittle, deliciously low. For all that sophistication, it is bursting with that most primitive of life’s juices: slime.

There is a whole lot of kokrabokra in that okra.

The bhenda’s delectable juice restores all appetites. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock

In my childhood, it was never called okra. We called it bhindi, vendaikai, lady’s finger. That last cannibalistic taint made me avoid the vegetable. It was just the name that bothered me, never the slime. Bhindi was always tricked out of ick before it reached the table.

Indian cuisine celebrates this vegetable like no other. Yes, bhindi is perennial, ubiquitous and cheap, but there is another reason. Okra is the cook’s daily crossword, her instant validation of skill, the triumph of craft over slime.

Inexplicable aversion

The human aversion to slime is pretty near universal. Inexplicable, really, considering how much of it our bodies joyously hoard. We keep our own slime so fiercely private, we disown it altogether.

Slime is downright insulting, mucus is a tolerable euphemism, and mucin is so very nearly science you can find it on health food labels. Even as mucilage, okra’s ick is way past risqué. Such flagrant ooze in a mere vegetable is nothing short of public indecency and calls for instant reform.

Okra’s kokrabokra can be daunting. It can spin a cobweb that glues your fingers together and films over your knife. Do not clutch your head in panic for okra ick will gel your hair. Tempted to rinse out the gummy mess in cold water and slap it on the sizzling pan? Desist! A floral jaali of okra slices will solder down as perpetual memorial to your insanity.

You could leave the kitchen at this point and holiday in a padded cell.

Or, you could start over, take the coward’s way out and get brutal.

Hack okra into half-inch chunks. Stunned with fumes of ginger-garlic paste, drowned in a roiling morass of tomato-onion gravy, this restaurant-version bhindi will obligingly float belly up, brain dead.

On the home route, quickly tutored with oil and turmeric, bhindi emerges a different animal. Gone is the bright green pod. Rebellion has been leached out of it. It is docile now to the point of idiocy. No longer vertebrate, its molluscan glide leaves a glistening yellow trail across the plate. Its cavities clogged with masala, its walls tender as garden hose, the okra at ease is full of grease, but gone is its kokrabokra.

Is such violence necessary?

I pick a small, bright green okra. It has a sassy, mildly lordotic curve as if standing tiptoe, head thrown back to have a good look at me. If it had arms, they would be akimbo. It is too young to bristle. Its baby down is a faint silvery lanugo. It protests at first bite with a shrill green aroma. It is crisp and cuts clean. Those fine hairs raise a mild lingual frisson, lost quickly in the generous squirt of slime, which, funnily enough, is far from unpleasant. Tiny seeds scatter with little pops of flavour. The aftertaste is nice: a crisp green memory that has left the mouth clean.

Slime?

Who noticed?

Green succulence

That raw encounter civilised me. As it had civilised the ancients, African, Indian, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and of course those note-taking Greeks. They all asked: What’s in the ick?

An engraving of the musk mallow from 1894. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock

The bhenda’s delectable juice restores all appetites, claimed Indian vaidyas who used it by the gallon as infusions, poultices and stews. Okra’s first cousin, the fragrant musk mallow, was the top-selling aphrodisiac of the ancient world as latakasturika or habb ul mishq—this last, literally meaning grains of musk, became Latinised as Abelmoschus, and its edible version, our bhindi, got tagged as fit for consumption: esculentus.

Did okra work for those ancient physicians?

Today we have the chemical profile of its kokrabokra. Sugars, mostly polysaccharides: galacturonic acid, rhamnose, arabinose, xylose, mannose, galactose, glucose, xylan, starch, and all of them briskly bioactive. The okra might yet do things we haven’t achieved with drugs, if only it is permitted to retain its slime. Is that important? On a planet as diabetic as ours has become, this might well spell salvation.

Okra is more than pod on the plant and plumbing on the plate. Banish those strident masalas please, neither nuke nor blister it with acid. Let the musk assert its green succulence and you will taste not slime but sweet fragrant juice. What could be more esculentum?

Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed are surgeons who write together as Kalpish Ratna. They are the authors of Gastronama: The Indian Guide to Eating Right (Roli, 2023).