Dulceață de Aparajita

The prompt to make this delicate little confiture of shanku pushpam or aparajita flowers came to me from Irina Georgescu’s beautiful Romanian cookbook, Carpathia. She makes a dulceață de violete, with violas at the start of spring. Having no access to such flowers myself, of course I wondered about substitutions–and since the time after the rains is a lot like our spring, it felt right to try my hand this confit with shanku pushpam.

Green vines dotted with their unmistakable blue are everywhere, and the profusion of blossoms this time of year are for me as many invitations to do something with them. I have in years past extracted color to make syrup-concentrates and sabudana or tapioca pearl puddings (that can even be set in moulds like cakes), but I’ve resisted cooking the flowers both because that felt too obvious, and because there’s something so delicate about flowers that makes cooking feel just such a harsh treatment.

That changed with all my floral rasam-making forays: aavaaram/Tanner’s cassia, pavazhamalli/coral jasmine, murungai/drumstick flower, vepampoo or neem flower. But no, not shanku pushpam because the rasa of that is really all color and no taste. While I know the internet is ablaze with a thousand gorgeous photos of butterfly pea teas, let’s face it, aside from a certain light herbaceous flavor, the butterfly pea has no real distinctive taste or fragrance of its own. What taste it acquires is from the lemon that’s used to magically transform its blue to magenta, and the sweetener added in. Again, its rasa is color, not taste. So–no rasam, at least not in our traditional forms and a floral confit seemed as good a way as any to preserve the essence of the aparajita.

Now the butterfly pea is said to have memory boosting, nootropic, anti-depressant properties (known to Ayurveda, though this is not to be confused with “shankupushpi” or Convolvulus pluricaulis, a morning glory family flower with similar properties which causes some nomenclatural confusion). These are, indeed, its other essences, worth preserving, though I’ve paid them little attention and focused much more wholly on preserving the flower’s striking blues–Radha’s Consciousness, as we know it in Pondicherry, Radha’s yearning for her beloved Krishna’s own blues.

Achieving that has been a challenge, as most things added to butterfly pea to get it to taste good or to set a jam short of alcohol and flavorings are acidic and turn the blue to magenta: soda, tonic, lemon, green apples, pectin. Coconut milk keeps color but pales it considerably, as does milk. That was my other deterrent, in my quest for a true blue jam.

I wondered if using a proportionally small quotient of hibiscus petals would introduce just enough souring but not enough acid to change color. Interestingly, hibiscus petals added in did not change color, did improve taste–but also introduced a mucilaginousness which didn’t help the set and which I found kind of icky. That idea went out the window.

I tried using just lemon rind: nice for flavor, insufficient to set.

I might have settled for just the flowers cooked in a sugar syrup, but that was really only a syrupy candy and not a confiture. So in the end I buckled: lemon juice it had to be to get this confiture to set and taste more complex and actually jammy rather than just straight-sugar-sweet.

Now for the process.

STEP 1: Collect the flowers

You will need a minimum of 100g of flowers, so this may take days depending on your sources and the size of your harvest. The good news is that shanku pushpam keeps fresh, unwashed and refrigerated in a bottle with a little water sprinkled on top. Just collect daily and store until you’re ready to use.

STEP 2: Prep the flowers

You want just the flower petals for this jam. Gently hold the flower in one hand and pinch-bend-pull-out the calyx and reproductive parts with the other.

Rinse the flowers very lightly, drain and set aside.

STEP 3: The Confiture

Truly, this is the easiest jam you ever made. Weigh the flowers (a digital weighing scale helps). Whatever their weight, you want the same amount of white sugar.

No scales? I had about 2 handfuls of petals, and I used about a 1/3 cup of sugar. That was about 70g each.

Set the sugar in a heavy-bottomed pan, and add a 1/4 cup water or just enough to dissolve. Heat gently and stir until the sugar is dissolved.

Now continue to heat, undisturbed until the mixture starts bubbling vigorously–just a few minutes.

Add the flowers in, a little at a time, allowing the heat to wilt them well before the next addition. The flower addition will turn the sugar syrup watery again, so keep heating steadily.

Once again the mixture will start to bubble violently. This is a sign that the water is mostly gone and the temperatures are rising as the syrup thickens and starts to transform. Don’t worry about string tests and jam-set tests. Once it has bubbled for a minute or two, even if the jam seems still quite liquidy, toss in the lemon zest and squeeze in the juice of 1 small lemon or largish lime.

Mix well, and turn off the flame. That’s it. The whole process shouldn’t take longer than about 10-12 minutes, start to finish.

100g of flowers and 100g of sugar gives you in the end just about 2 30g small sample sized jars of confiture—enough for small, special treats. Store this in the refrigerator for a week or more.

We spooned our dulceață de aparajita on to some ekmak, a bready Syrian pastry filled with a mildly sweet cheese like mascarpone and topped typically with fruit preserves, the recipe for which I found from my friend Aparna’s My Diverse Kitchen blog. I didn’t pinch my “boats” tightly enough, so they opened in the oven, and the confit ran–I think thanks to the moisture of the ricotta filling and my too-cautious use of only-so-much-lemon–at first to my dismay and then to my delight, for the blue-violet of shanku pushpam was so much more evident for that than in the magenta confiture.

All those blues, and such a happy ending.