Yam Bean

I needed to go back to London Star Night. I had eyeballed a basket of round belly roots stickered with name tags: Yam Beans. Yam bean? I had never heard of them before.

Yam Bean

Yam bean. YamBean-Yambe-yambe-yummy. I like saying Yam Bean. My childhood best friend’s mum Debbie was the first to introduce me to the word yam. She was from Trinidad and amazed at our ability to yam (eat) and also spoke of yams when telling us of back home. She never cooked us yams and I didn't know what they were, but how comforting and importantly, filling they sounded. Years later, I'm sitting in the front seat of my teenage friend’s accelerator-worn Ford Orion. He’s trying really, really hard not to be a good Jewish boy, and in his best learnt London-centric patois, waving the greased paper remnants of a Chicken Cottage burger, boasts  “I yammed dat down, rudegyaal”. 

Back down Mare Street into the shop. It's the after work dinner pit-stop and hipsters with elongated beards and empty canvas bags hover by Vietnamese families. They are contemplating aisles and rummaging for untouched packets at the back of the shelf. I head straight for the yam beans and select a firm lantern shaped root. This time, the lady is back at her counter casually holding a plastic cup of opaque milky liquid – sucking bubbles through a straw and rattling ice. Her hairless monotone eyebrows rise as I near with my solitary selection.

“What’s this one?” I offer her the root.

The eyebrows lower to frown, “Very delicious. But expensive”. She catches the yam bean out of my hand and places it on the scales. “£2.84”.

Bloody hell. That’s the same price jet fuel guzzling price as the edible louffah. “It’s fine”, I say, shaking my head in contradiction. I’m not going to let £2.84 get in the way of the mission. 

“So can you tell me what the best thing to do with it is?”

“Nothing…” She palms the yam bean like an apple, stretches her mouth open and mimes a big bite closed, “Just raw, or in salad. Chop-chop”, her hand slices the air above the root, “very delicious, you like it.”

“Ok, is it like an apple, or a potato? What else goes in the salad then?”

“Vegetables.” Obviously. My yam bean is returned to me with instructions and a carrier bag. “Try this first, and then you come back.” If I hadn’t been so consumed with the yam bean, I might have remembered to ask her what her name was. Fail.

I know London Star Night Lady has been firm with the salad advice, but I want to cook something so I indulged in a little extra reading. Hours later I re-emerge from the yam bean's sprawling history. The yam bean isn't a yam or a bean; it’s tap root, native to Mexico where it is called jicama. Yams proper - such as the ones Debbie spoke of from Trinidad - were first taken from native West African soil by Spanish and Portuguese explorers in the 16^th century, to Brazil and then through the Caribbean where they remain a staple ingredient. In Mexico, the Spanish colonialists encountered the Atztec and Mayan worshipped jicama and its seafaring virtues - it can be stored for months and remain edible – as it did on their journey to the Philippines, from where the yam bean spread to the rest of Asia. 

The word yam is also West African in origin, where in Nigerian Fulani nyami translates as “to eat" and the Ghanaian Twi word anyinam is a species of yam, with citations that yummy is also born from this root. The word was carried through slavery, colonialism and selfish interference at the hands of the Columbian exchange (history says exchange, I say violent robbery) of crops, people and ideas. African slaves drew visual familiarity between the native sweet potatoes in America with the yam crops from which they had been stolen as fodder for the growing sugar and cotton industries and the name is now embedded into American patriotism through the traditional Thanksgiving candied yam dish. The US Department of Agriculture has tried to initiate a failed reclamation enforcing that sweet potatoes be dually labelled as “Sweet Potato / Yam”, but this has mostly been a waste of labels, as I'm yet to meet an American who has relinquished the contentious word from their Thanksgiving meal.

The re-naming of sweet potatoes by a forced West African diaspora was a rare (but not singular) counter movement: Those who were stripped of the power and network of their mother tongue left a lasting stamp of identity on their suppressor’s language.  A brilliant macro-victory exposed above the hidden backbone of capitalism, carried from Africa, to the Caribbean and US and then, even wider, dispersed by European colonialists as they took their appropriated words, harboured diseases and collected crops across the globe and towards Asia where my own yam bean was grown and named. In Vietnam, it is locally known as cây củ đậu or củ sắn - the củ refers to a potato-like substance and in translation into English, this starchy root is likened to starchy yams and becomes the yam bean. This is the 500 year journey of how an Central American root arrived in London by way of Vietnam with a name whose origins lie in West Africa. 

In its native Mexico, Jicama - whose name comes from the Aztec Nahuatl - has remained embedded in culinary and cultural traditions and ceremony. It is also one the largest export crops, predominantly sent to the US - perhaps they need a break from Sweet Potatoes. During the annual Dia de Los Muertos festival, Jicama are given as offerings to the souls of those that have passed, often carved into ornate skulls. The American champion of Mexican food Rick Bayless describes a raw jicama served with lime and chilli as “one of the best ways to experience Mexico" so London Star Night Lady and Rick are in agreement, the jicama is not a thing to be cooked. Fine, fine. I'm making a salad.

The travels are not yet over for the globe-trotting yam bean, it is coming full circle. It has been proposed to African farmers by a European lead research initiative as an alternative to the continent’s most staple crop  – the yam – owing to its higher protein levels (and so potential to reduce the high rates of the protein deficiency disease) and strength in cultivation during droughts. But the jicama has no roots in Africa. Our staple carbohydrates are at the heart of cultural stories, mythologies, magic and ceremonies: Mayans believed they were created from corn; Chinese mythology tells of white rice fields growing from the milk of a goddesses breast; Ghanain and Nigerian farmers honour new crops with an annual yam festival.  It is not just that you are what you eat, but that we come from what we eat and as such, ancient foods are innate and irreplaceable. 

Now for the salad. Whether in the Philippines, Malaysia or Mexico, Jicama is eaten raw with fruits and vegetables, something tangy and something hot. There is a reassuring unity between a rojak - a combination of chopped vegetables and fruit laced with a sweet, hot, tangy tamarind and fish sauce dressing and the Mexican fruit stall serving of jicama with hot chilli and tangy lime, so I'm going to try and combine the two.

The skin peels off the jicama like bark - the Mayans mention jicama a number of times in the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, comparing the root to the calf of a woman's leg and peeling the jicama with tucking back a skirt. The exposed pale flesh is watery to the touch and I slice the end to taste. It is crunchy and fresh, with a sugary starchiness of sugar snap peas. I make a chilli sugar by soaking and roasting a mix of smoky chipotle and tart kashmiri chillis, pounding them into a paste and then grinding with demerara sugar – Jaggery would also be good but I made this with a friend after the pub too close to midnight and  my flat mate would have gone ballistic if I’d started hammering  away at hard discs of palm sugar. Thankfully the rest is pretty simple (and quiet). Jicama is cut into batons with mango, pea shoots, avocado and peanuts and served with the chilli sugar for dipping. It was the kind of crudité munching that would have been perfect with gin before going out to the pub, but no matter, it was good as a post gin munch too and we yammed it down.

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.