Edible Louffah

For the first picking, I wanted to start off easy with a local shop on Mare Street, E8, called London Star Night. It's one of many Vietnamese shops and restaurants in Hackney and part of one of the largest Vietnamese communities in the UK. There is usually a woman at the counter who talks without pause and unashamed force, conducting her customers and staff in equal measure. I’ve seen her in action before and her generosity with instructions marked her as an ideal helper in my plan, that she will conduct me how to cook fruits and vegetables that I haven’t used before. Her shop is stocked with air-mile rich groceries, bunched green stalks, canned coconut, tamarind, rambutan and chrysanthemum juices thick with sugar, faking the fragrance of their fruit and flower origins. Heavy fishes are layered and buried in ice, scraped backwards of their colour and stacked in open polystyrene boxes. Deeper into the shop are rice bags, noodles, packets of Indian jeera neighbouring Turkish sumac, brined lotus and chestnut roots, jars of chilli-stained oil, freezer cabinets with dumplings, pork buns and octopus tentacles sucking frosty cassava, above which shelves rise in rungs as walls of tupperware and paper-made imitation valuables – wads of notes, suit jackets and sports cars – are folded in gift boxes as offerings for a dapper passage into the afterlife. Every space is full. It is a familiar scene.

My destination, the fruits and vegetables, are strip lit-up in refrigeration cabinets. I proudly scan over the mango, enoki mushrooms and galangal – tick, tick, tick - I need uncharted territory. Each of my potential lessons are plastic wrapped, labelled in Vietnamese and translated into English and barcode making identification easier for woman and machine. I stop at a small, speckled marrow-ish thing. But a marrow it isn’t, this is a “Mướp hương”, I need to “wash it carefully before eat”, and most importantly, I have never heard of one before. I admit I have probably ignored it on many occasions dismissing it as too similar before something fruitier transported me more and stole my attention. That said, familiarity is born from a history with marrows, which started in Suffolk, stealing one from a vegetable patch with my best friend (pinching really big things is particularly entertaining when you are 13 and need to run away with the swag), to a recipe that my Jewish Slovak grandmother used to make with marrow sweated in vinegar, sweetened with sugar and dill. It was a gherkin approach to a vegetable side dish. On the day that she came round to give me the recipe so that I could make my own, I was in the kitchen, naked, with a naked boyfriend. Of course she came round to the back of the house, unannounced, confronting the glare of the kitchen window. She appropriately stuck the marrow recipe to our transparent shield as we scarpered. Never scarper naked.

So, marrows. The selection is made and I look to the till. The lady, my leading lady, isn’t there and in her place is a blank looking man. Damn.

“Hi…..”

He takes the vegetable. Looks at it, looks at me.

“What’s the best way to cook this?” I try.

“£2.84.”

Another angle, “How should I cook this?”

He speaks, “You?” and points to someone else’s bunch of herbs.

“No…so, what is this, like?”

“£2.84”

Plan B: time for Google and some initial concerns about the project. I’ve just bought a barcoded vegetable in thick plastic. I have just spent £2.84 on what may well be a small marrow and I’d estimate that 90% of that price is jet fuel. My first world worry is distracted by my Plan B, the global hum of enthusiasts who reveal that this vegetable has an international appeal and is capable of feeding me and cleaning the pan afterwards. Known as a sponge gourd, an edible loofah, luffa, luffah, bhul, chinese okra, teroi, sebot, patola or ghosalva depending on where you are in the world, once mature it can be dried out, the disintegrated flesh leaving a network of skeletal fibres, ideal for scrubbing skins and floors. Medicinally, the juice of the fruit, the seeds and the dried crusts can be used as a natural remedy for jaundice. Commonly grown in Africa and Asia in tropical and sub-tropical areas where it hangs pendulous from vines, there are so many varieties that, my gourd, it became tricky to identify with certainty which one I had as most references in Vietnamese cookery are for a Muróp Kai. I don’t have reason to favour one name over the other, or experience to differentiate them – they are all new and as far as I know, right. For the sake of consistency, the most common translation in this country seems to be loofah.

Dual use is a feature of the gourd family. The bottle gourd or calabash is used across the globe from Costa Rica to Congo as an instrument, water container, medicine holder and pipe – anything that requires a vessel. Over in Paraguay, where loufahs have long been used as cleaning tools, they are now being introduced as a natural building material to construct furniture and housing panels. With an initiative training farmers how to grow and process them, thousands of families are sustained though these crops. The US have also picked up on the talents of the loufah, where the increase in demand for higher value crops has sparked an increase in cultivation in the southern states. As the first vegetable in my collection, I am pretty chuffed that this unassuming not-marrow has so much going for it and commanded such international interest.

Easily available across Africa and Asia, it is used loosely as a base green vegetable, much as courgette or beans – steamed, stir-fried and added to soups and curry. Its brother, the aptly named ridge gourd seems to be used interchangeably with the smoother version that I have, the only difference being their preparation, as the ridges are scraped off and either chucked or used to create chutney. The skin of the smooth gourd is edible and only removed if it has toughened in maturity.

The gourd is unexpectedly light for its bulbous shape and forearm size and reverberates a hollowness when tapped, like baked bread. A third use, I decide, it makes for an excellent tool for slapstick whacks to the head with its deceptive weight /size ratio. I go for the board – thud – the soft reptilian skin splits in two pieces revealing a wet, white, starchy sap, and a fresh, green nutty smell that is damp and foresty. I think I get a whiff of a mould and I think about the 6335 miles of distance between its Vietnamese ground and my mouth hoping that this mouldiness is part of its innate flavour.

Now and how to eat the thing. A tempting recipe is to use the gourd as a flavour vessel, stuffed with masala paste and coconut, but, I want something that will show off its own flesh and a thick, sweet paste with fatty licks of coconut may see the louffah playing second fiddle. Simpler options are to stir fry Thai style with pork and garlic or a pale Filipino soup with vermicelli noodles and chunky broth saturated gourd. True to its various dualities, the gourd is used to absorb the flavours of it neighbours, to be something else. But I am intrigued by the subtle green cob-nuttiness and want to see what it tastes like without too much interference. I decide to stir fry it sesame oil, lightened in flavour and thickness with equal groundnut oil and a few crushed garlic cloves and sea salt. The loufah slices quickly drink up all the fat in the pan. More? Yikes. I add another glug and that gets sponged up too. One more glug before I turn by dinner into an oil drum and then the the light, rigid flesh relaxes as it absorbs up its fill. The skin remains thick and strong (so this vegetable really would be good for stuffing) and the loosened flesh releases a thick gravy. Sponge gourds are known as Chinese okra in Canada and I can see why – there is a cellulose sliminess that enriches the gravy in the pan. I have a taste and the juicy, fatty slice is sweet, salty, buttery and nutty. Cooked in such a rudimentary way, and as an ingredient which is often used as a carrier, it is very tasty.

Admittedly, what I have here is a saucy vegetable side dish. And I am hungry. My response is unequivocally British – time to crack an egg. Good with chilli sauce and black toasted sesame seeds. It did not clean the pan.