The Periplus, Journeys and Diversions, is a fortnightly column penned by the author duo Ishrat Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan, who write as Kalpish Ratna. The column navigates and documents journeys of simplicity in everyday life. In the first piece, the authors bring to you the enigmatic story of the exotic hing and the humble rasam..———.DESPERATE for a coffee break, this grey and rainy morning? Try a hot cup of rasam instead..Coffee, black, latte, or even unabashedly instant, is great chug-along stuff. It is all about speed, focus, intent, now, guaranteed not to derail thought. And tea? Tea is just natter. But, if it is a solitary periplus you crave, a lazy cruise, past adventures real or imaginary, then rasam is your brew..Oh, you don't know the stuff? Perhaps you've only met at lunch, where it speaks a polite line and bows out..Mid-morning rasam, I assure you, is an entirely different animal..This is rasam dégagé. A shuffle of subtleties, of aroma, of flavour, of impossibilities, of soul..All this from just one ingredient. Asafoetida..Hing. Perunkayam..Familiar names, right?.But asafoetida has an older, less familiar twin, one that's synonymous with rasam. How many rasam connoisseurs have even heard of silphium?.Asafoetida and silphium are both aromatic gums from plants of the genus Ferula. You can buy hing in the shop around the corner, but silphium hasn't been seen for two thousand years. Yet, it is silphium that explains rasam..For years I found the Southern insistence on rasam inexplicable. Northern cuisine uses hing generously to temper delicious dals, but rasam is peculiar to the south. Deconstructed, it is simply an acidulated essence of asafoetida, spices and herbs. Still, its brief appearance between thrilling first course and happy ending, is so much more than punctuation. Call it the caesura that makes a poem of the simplest meal. Women critique it, bards sing it, brides dread it—for many a woman's destiny has been decided by the quality of her rasam. Families are famously obstructive over recipes. The word is generic—there are at least a dozen sorts of rasam in circulation, and most of them rely on asafoetida..There is nothing southern, northern, nor even Indian, about asafoetida. It is a traditional import from Uzbekistan—connoisseurs still demand 'Khorasani kayam.'.When the exotic becomes parochial, the journey gets me curious. Which led me to the oldest extant recipe of rasam..Written in the first century AD in Rome, the cookbook was named for Apicius, a notable gastronome of that time. Certainly, the recipe isn't listed as rasam in the book, which merely calls it a method of preparing and preserving—silphium..So how did rasam leap the synapse between Apicius' fabled feasts and a modest household meal?.Apicius was the Anthony Bourdain of his age. He once made a trip from Campagna in Italy to an unknown port in Africa, where crawfish were crowding the nets that year. Local fishermen, their boats laden, buzzed about Apicius' polyreme as it sailed in. The celebrated gourmet, and pretend astacologist, peered down at the merchandise on display, turned up his aquiline nose, and made a rapid U-turn. The crustaceans back home looked far better..Around the time that Apicius was sorting out his lobsters, an Unknown Sailor, possibly Roman, transcribed his voyages as the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea. One of his stops was Damirica, Roman for Tamilakam..Archeologists have unearthed enough Roman coins at Arikamedu and Muziris to tell us of a thriving trade. That's probably how the southern palate acquired its insatiable taste for silphium..Why should a smelly lump of gum be fit barter for spices, silks, and ivory?.Asafoetida is, even today, an acquired taste..Very likely then, silphium made the chefs of royal Cerebothra [Chera puthran] wrinkle their noses..Silphium's appeal was not gastronomic. It was simply the most prized commodity in international trade. In 1 AD silphium enjoyed a bull market, and Rome had monopoly, because it controlled coastal Libya, the only place where it grew..Cyrenaica, as Libya was then called, was bequeathed to Rome when Ptolemy Apion died in 96 BC. It had belonged to the Greeks for 500 years, and they had plenty of pretty stories about its origin. Dismissing the natives as barbarian, they had settled down to grow rich off the vegetation, mainly silphium. The plant grew wild in Cyrene [present day Shahhat] but couldn't be successfully cultivated. But grow it did. Within a century, Cyrene was minting silver coins that flaunted its most lucrative produce. Used to treat a dozen ailments, silphium's fame was far more populist. It was the ancient world's most popular aphrodisiac. And the most trusty contraceptive. For half a millennium its commerce sustained the economy and the Roman treasury of Julius Caesar held fifteen hundred pounds of the resin..Any surprise then that it should be traded at the ancient ports of Karkala and Poompuhar?.Apicius' careful recipe was probably traded too, verbatim. Out of the pharmacy, into the kitchen..By Apicius' time, silphium had all but disappeared from Cyrenaica. Over- harvested and over-exploited commercially, its career in concupiscence and contraception was over. The last leaf of silphium was sent as tribute to that most decadent of youthful monarchs, Nero. You can bet he gulped it down without qualm..Will today's asafoetida, with its limited provenance and delicate nurture, vanish like silphium? Will coffee? Cocoa? Tea?.(Ishrat Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan write as Kalpish Ratna. They are both surgeons, who explore the interface between science and humanities in their writings. Their book 'A Crown of Thorns, The Coronavirus and Us' is available on Amazon.in.)
