Maṇathakkali Berry Jam

Maṇathakkali/ மணத்தக்காளி, black nightshade, Solanum Nigrum complex, from the family Solanaceae—this is a plant a lot of us have grown up with, practically a weed in our gardens and a source of greens and good health for daily meals. They’re famously good to treat mouth and stomach ulcerations—have a mouth ulcer? chew on the leaves and the berries; sore tongue? forget the riboflavin and the corticosteroid lozenges, chew maṇathakkali leaves instead—in addition to gastric ailments generally.

Unripe berries were harvested for soaking in yogurt and making vathals in the summers, or just used in spicy puli kuzhambus where their slight, burnt bitterness is a welcome complement to tamarind-based sours. The processing there is a way of curing the berries of their toxicity, as is also done with pirandai vathals.

But the ripe berries were always my favorite because they were garden loot: sukkutti pazham. I always loved watching them go from green to a kind-of-purple and then become the cutest little bunches of inky black fruit, not unlike the balsamic vinegar pearls that are all the rage just now but straight from the wild garden, little bursts of juicy taste so good for instant gobbling.

As an adult I confess to having giggled like the schoolkid I’ve always been around maṇathakkali berries, and watching (with surprise) videos of foragers in other lands “discovering” the black nightshade or dispelling myths about their toxicity so that we can be liberated at last to eat them. Black foragers in the United States recovering their own reliance on wild food that was itself a product of gross denial and the circumstances of slavery is one thing, but not knowing how to know plants is a separate, systemic food-and-education issue entirely, endemic to hyper-regulated urban worlds. For some peculiar reason, maybe just the name, black nightshades have been confused with so-called deadly nightshade, Belladonna or Atropa belladonna. But flowers, plant, berries are all very distinct, and the fear of getting it wrong in this case vastly overdone.

For my part, I’m grateful that my world has never been divided into edibles and poisons—though I fear that it will be for our children if we let them forget how to nibble their way through the wilderness. Indian gardens, much like gardens everywhere that have been not just pretty places of respite but vital sources of sustenance, have only things eaten raw—and those that need processing, knowhow, and care. Even rice has phytotoxins if you look at it that way, pirandai would be a poison if we didn’t know to find the diamond in it [as Boga-Siddhar once said], erukkam/milkweed has its own topical medicinal uses, and gosh even the toxicity of belladonna can be harnessed as a medicament. It’s not about eliminating ingredients you can’t eat. It’s about learning to wind your way to all the secrets that plants hold.

Pharmacology and toxicology are two ends of a single spectrum, after all. And just because a plant can be consumed by humans does not at all mean that it should be consumed in abundance and all the time. A good example of a cultural method of regulating specific plant consumption is in the use of agathi keerai or Sesbania grandiflora greens only after dwadashi fasts: this way you don’t eat it too often, and when you do eat it, your body is primed to get the best of it.

Here are some images to help understand some of the more unusual nightshades that are common in (rustic, Tamil) Indian cookery–but it’s a large family that includes everything from tomatoes to eggplant to chillies and peppers of all kinds and potatoes of course, so not comprehensive. Note how eggplant-like the flowers of

A Wee Berry Jam?

I also got to thinking that hey, maṇathakkali is a wee-tomato [thakkali! which in Tamil means tomato; maṇathakkali is literally scented or ‘with-a-unique-scent’ tomato] and therefore a berry—and I do so miss berry jams in these largely berry-less tropics—so why not a berry jam?

Turns out my idea was far from original. Msobo jam or Nastergal (Afrikaans for nightshade) jams are a regular farmstead stall feature in South Africa, where the plant grows mostly in the Highveld of Mpumalanga, and the Free State.

I’ve never had enough berries for jars and jars of jam, but a handful one early morning with a little sugar and a squirt of lime took me exactly 5 minutes at the stove for a princely 3 tablespoons of maṇathakkali berry jam. Enough, right? Toast for two. Crackers-cheese-jam for four. Three dosas or a jammy topping to the smallest cheesecake ever served at a faerie picnic. Join me?

Sources Consulted

Mohyuddin, Ayesha, Tonni Agustiono Kurniawan, Zaheer-ud-din Khan, Sohail Nadeem, Mohsin Javed, Ayed A. Dera, Shahid Iqbal, Nasser S. Awwad, Hala A. Ibrahium, Mohammed A. S. Abourehab, Sameh Rabea, Eslam B. Elkaeed, Muhammad Nadeem Asghar, and Shagufta Saeed. 2022. “Comparative Insights into the Antimicrobial, Antioxidant, and Nutritional Potential of the Solanum nigrum Complex” Processes 10, no. 8: 1455. https://doi.org/10.3390/pr10081455