Agua Fresca 2: Tamarindo

Well, on to this week’s agua fresca. It’s another of the great basics of the Mexican kitchen, agua de tamarindo. Here’s a pitcher, a warm brown color, lightly sweet, addictively sour. It’s a widely familiar flavor because it’s an important ingredient in Worcestershire sauce.

Here’s the agua being poured into a pitcher. The pitcher will be topped up with water because the dark brown color indicates that it’s quite a strong potion.

It’s made from the pods of a leguminous (that is, of the bean family) tropical tree and you can read all about it, including a nice selection of photos of its food uses, on the excellent website run by Purdue University called NewCrop.

A handsome tree it is, too. Tall, with feathery leaves, it casts welcome shade in many hot places. On the University of Hawaii campus it was used as an ornamental to the great delight of a Sri Lankan friend of mine who would go and gather the hanging pods for nothing.

It’s often said that you can distinguish cuisines by their fats or oils: olive oil for the Mediterranean, butter for the well-watered lands, sesame oil for the Middle East. It’s not such a bad idea to think about their sours too. Many places have vinegar, easily made from alcoholic drinks, or today with their global spread, members of the citrus family: lemons, limes, and the like. The fruits, too, divide up the world. I once heard Sucheta Mazumdar, one of the few people to have the linguistic skills to compare Indian and Chinese food and agriculture, say there was a tipping point in Southeast Asia between the peoples in China and Japan who used the sour apricot (ume) as their souring agent and the peoples of the Indian Ocean who used tamarind.

So this is a sour with a venerable heritage. It must have arrived in Mexico early in the colonial period. Now there are 10,000 acres (15 square miles) dedicated to tamarind trees for the commercial market. That’s in the tropical part of Mexico. They don’t grow in the highlands where most Mexicans live.

They are sold in every market though. You take off the brittle, cardboardy shell. Here are a pile of discarded shells. We’re using about a dozen pods for a couple of liters of agua.

You then put the pod itself in water. We boil it though I have seen recipes that simply soak it over night.

Then you sieve the soft flesh leaving the stringy membrane and the little haba bean-like seeds to one side.

Add water and sugar to taste and there you are.

Edited to add a nice discussion of tamarind recipes and use in the LA Times.

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