R063Cabbage Thoran
The master thoran: shredded cabbage, crushed coconut, turmeric
Recipes › Vegetables: The Half of the Plate
R071
Chena Erissery
Elephant foot yam and cowpea in coconut paste, crowned with dark roasted coconut
Photograph: Adobe Stock · representative of the dish
Plan ahead: plus overnight soaking for the cowpea — required.
The re-engineeringThe roasted-coconut crown is made with 5 g of oil rather than the 15–20 g it usually swims in, and the total coconut is 100 g across six servings rather than the 150–200 g a festival erissery would carry. The roast itself is not shortened, because the roast is the dish.
Erissery is the roasted one of the sadya's four curries: a body of raw coconut paste, and on top of it a separate handful of coconut fried dark until it smells nutty with an edge of smoke. Skip that crown and you have a decent vegetable curry with no reason to be called an erissery. It is also the best-designed dish in this chapter for a fat-loss plate, because it pairs a starchy tuber with a pulse in the same pot, which is the arrangement with the strongest evidence behind it in this whole book.
Before you start: Soak the cowpea overnight. Weigh out the roast ingredients before you start roasting: once the coconut reaches pale gold you have about four minutes of decisions and no time to measure.
Chena Erissery
Active 35 minutes Total 1 hour 10 minutes
Scale
6 servings
Ingredients — tap to tick off
- ✓80 g (½ cup) brown cowpea (vanpayar), soaked overnight
- ✓400 g (about 2¾ cups, cubed) elephant foot yam (chena), peeled and cut into 2 cm cubes
- ✓2 g (⅓ tsp) ground turmeric
- ✓3 g (½ tsp) salt, or M07
- ✓70 g (1 cup) freshly grated coconut, for the paste
- ✓10 g (2) green chillies
- ✓2 g (½ tsp) cumin seed
- ✓30 g (scant ½ cup) freshly grated coconut, for the crown
- ✓10 g (2 tsp) coconut oil, divided: 5 g for the crown, 5 g for the tempering
- ✓2 g (½ tsp) mustard seed
- ✓2 g (1) dried red chilli, broken
- ✓3 g (2 sprigs) curry leaves
Allergens: Mustard.
Equipment: Heavy pan, 24 cm, with a lid; small heavy pan for the roast; mixie. Substitute: for the roast, a cast-iron or thick steel pan, or skip it entirely and use a frozen portion of M09. A thin pan scorches the coconut before it dries, and there is no recovery from burnt coconut.
Per serving (estimated)
| Energy | 185 kcal |
| Protein | 5.3 g |
| Fibre | 6.4 g |
| Net carbohydrate | 20.5 g |
| Total carbohydrate | 26.9 g |
| Sugars | 1.8 g |
| Fat | 9.1 g |
| Saturated fat | 7.6 g |
| Sodium | 210 mg |
From ICMR-NIN IFCT 2017 and USDA FoodData Central. Per-serving figures stay the same when you scale.
Method — tap a step to mark it done, tap a time to start a timer
- Cook the soaked cowpea in unsalted water until tender with the skins intact, . Drain, keeping the liquid.
- Simmer the chena with the turmeric, salt and 250 ml of the cowpea liquid, covered, until tender and beginning to break at the edges, . A little breakdown is wanted here; unlike avial, erissery is meant to be partly mashed.
- Grind the 70 g of coconut with the green chilli and cumin to a coarse paste with 3 tablespoons water.
- Add the paste and the cooked cowpea to the pan and simmer uncovered, mashing about a third of the yam against the side of the pan with the back of the spoon, until the raw coconut smell lifts and the mixture is thick but still spoonable, .
- Roast the crown while that simmers. M09 Varutharacha Thenga is the same roast made in batches and frozen, and one 30 g portion, thawed and dried briefly in a pan, will stand in here — though a crown ground to a paste is a different texture from a crown left loose, so scatter it knowing that. Heat the small pan dry, add 5 g of the oil and the 30 g of coconut, and stir constantly over a medium-low flame through three stages: white to ivory smelling of hot milk, ; pale gold smelling of biscuit, ; then the colour of dark toast, visibly releasing oil and smelling nutty with a distinct edge of smoke, more. Stop there. Past that point it turns ashy and bitter and no amount of jaggery or acid will bury it. Tip it onto a cold plate immediately.
- Temper in the same small pan: 5 g oil, mustard popped 20–30 seconds, dried chilli 10 seconds, curry leaves 5–10 seconds.
- Assemble. Spoon the tempering over the erissery, then scatter the roasted coconut on top. Do not stir the crown in; it is meant to be met in the first mouthful and to keep some of its crispness.
Why this worksRoasting the coconut runs Maillard reactions between its own sugars and amino acids and generates aroma compounds no spice imitates, while rupturing cell walls so a little of the coconut's fat renders out and carries them. That is why a crown made with 5 g of oil tastes of far more, and why erissery reads as a rich dish at 185 kcal. Mashing part of the yam thickens the body with starch instead of fat.
Sourcing note
See R070 for chena, including the oxalate warning, and R068 for cowpea. Erissery is traditionally made with pumpkin (mathanga) as often as with chena, and pumpkin is far easier to buy abroad: 500 g of peeled butternut or crown prince pumpkin needs 8–10 minutes rather than 16, gives a sweeter dish at about 3 g more sugar per serving, and is entirely authentic. Frozen cubed chena and frozen grated coconut both work here without compromise.
If you are watching…
Blood sugar: 20.5 g net carbohydrate, and as with kalan this is a starch dish. But it is a starch dish with 13 g of cowpea per serving in it, and a pulse eaten with a better grain took glycaemic response 22.9% below white rice in Mohan's trial, against 19.8% for the grain change alone. Treat erissery as your rice for that meal, not as your vegetable.
Blood pressure: 210 mg sodium, the lowest in this chapter alongside R066, or about 160 mg with M07.
Cholesterol: 7.6 g saturated fat per serving. Chapter 14's alternative applies here: replace half the paste coconut with 30 g of roasted chana dal for about 40% less fat and much the same thickening, at real cost in aroma.
Swap it
Chena → 500 g pumpkin. See the sourcing note. Sweeter, faster, equally traditional.
Cowpea → 200 g cooked chickpeas or butter beans. Coarser and less characteristic; fibre stays high.
Roasted coconut crown → 20 g roasted cashew pieces. Pleasant, and not an erissery. Do not make this swap and keep the name. (Allergen: this swap introduces tree nuts (cashew).)
Vegan already, and stays so with every swap above.
Scale it
Roast the crown in two batches above 40 g. One large batch steams rather than roasts and will not reach the third stage.
Make ahead · store · freeze
Cook the cowpea and roast the crown up to 3 days ahead, the crown kept in a sealed jar at room temperature. Fridge 4 days. Freeze 2 months — the body freezes well because it is a suspension rather than an emulsion; freeze the crown separately or add it fresh. Reheat on a low flame with a splash of water.
Leftovers
Erissery mashed smooth with a little water is a good filling for a pathiri or a wrap. It also thickens a thin sambar usefully.
Troubleshooting
Bitter, ashy crown: it went past dark toast into burnt. There is no correction. Roast another 30 g; it takes seven minutes.
Body too thin: not enough yam was mashed at step 4, or too much cooking liquid. Simmer uncovered a further 4–5 minutes.
Crown gone soggy by the table: it was stirred in, or added too early. Scatter it as the dish leaves the kitchen.
Serve with
R015 Matta Rice · R063 Cabbage Thoran · R065 Cheera Thoran · R081 Moru Curry
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