The smelliest spice in the world

SPEAKING OF SCIENCE

— photo: R. Ragu

Super spice: Asafoetida is used in cooking and as a natural medicine.

One of the more expressive sayings in Tamil is the phrase “Perungaayam vaitha paandam”, or the box that once had the spice asafoetida in it.

The spice is gone but just the smell lingers. This pithy phrase, which describes what was once great but now empty or vainglorious, pays tribute to asafoetida and its value in cuisine and medicine.

Now a new use for this spice has been claimed- that it helps plants grow well by killing the invading parasites and pathogens (see The Hindu, July 16, 2009).

Dr. K.T. Achaya’s books “A historical dictionary of Indian food” and “Indian food – a historical companion” talk about how asafoetida has been imported from Afghanistan since ancient times. Called “hing” or its variants in North Indian languages (and of course Perungaayam in Tamil, meaning the big lump, not big injury), it was known in Vedic times. And the Mahabharata describes meat being cooked at a picnic, using black pepper, rock salt, pomegranates, lemon and hing.

Flavoured gum

A resinous, strongly flavoured gum that exudes from the root of three kinds of plants of the Ferula family (a cousin of the carrot and fennel plants), it comes in two varieties – the water soluble and the oil soluble.

Dr. Chip Rossetti, who calls it “The world’s smelliest spice”, in his July/August 2009 issue of “Saudi Aramco World”, describes how the farmer digs away the soil around the plant and makes an incision in the top of the thick carrot-like root, which then exudes, for about three months, as much as a kilogram of the milky resin. It hardens on exposure to air and gradually turns brown.

Major component

What gives it the pungent smell? It is the sulphides, the simplest of them being the one from the Kipp’s apparatus of high school chemistry lab.

The major component, 2-butyl 1-propenyl disulphide, is so “stinking” that the Europeans called it asafoetida – Asa from the Persian word for resin and foetida meaning ‘stinking’ in Latin. More colorfully it was called the devil’s dung – both for its shape and smell.

Ferula asafoetida is not grown in India, and is a native of Afghanistan, Iran, Turkmenistan and that region of central Asia.

Widespread export

The gum has been exported from there all over the world for centuries, both for cooking and as a natural medicine. Rossetti writes that today, as much as 2 tons of asafoetida is bought by India from a single vendor in Herat, Afghanistan alone.

Rossetti describes how when he bought it in Cairo, the lump smelled of a mixture of manure and overcooked cabbage. But when he put a bit of it in oil and heated it, out came a rich, savoury scent, reminiscent of onions and garlic. These two contain the more pleasant diallyl sulfide that is so favoured in seasonings and high cuisine.

It was from Herat that the asafoetida trade ran northwest to Mashhad in Iran and there it joined the Fabled Silk Route, which ran from Mongolia and Central Asia all the way to the Mediterranean via the Caspian coast and Turkey.

It was the Italians who coined the word asafoetida. The Silk Route was thus also the Spice Route. As the resin moved west to Europe, it also moved East to Moghul India. And Indian cuisine and medicine became richer than before.

Not unnaturally, the resin has been thought to have very many medicinal uses. Its most common use is to treat indigestion and flatulence. Even today, a bit of it is pasted on the stomach (belly button) of an infant, with the idea that it relieves “locked” gas and aids in digestion.

Apparently this is one of the reasons why it is usually added to dishes containing lentils and beans.They contain molecules that disturb the enzyme carbonic anlydrase and thus produce gas. And asafoetida helps in relieving this effect – or so the theory goes.

Several other beliefs

Indeed, there are several other beliefs and theories about the medicinal and health effects of asafoetida, from Unani and Ayurveda, that are worth validation. Materia Medica says it is good for goitre (iodine metabolism?), bronchitis (anti-infective?), baldness (hair follicle stimulant? though I cannot see how, looking at my own head), and even to bring on menstruation (female hormone moderator?).

Other components

Apart from the volatile oils, other important components of asafoetida are the class of coumarins, particularly the one called umbelliferone, asareninotannols and ferulic acid.

We have some understanding of the biochemical properties of these molecules. Some of them act as insecticides and disturb nematode growth.

Ferulic acid acts as an antifungal, but is also known to disturb plant nutrient balance, and inhibit the effect of plant hormones. There must then be a balance of these effects that benefit the plant.

I wonder whether this might be why the Kodumudi farmer, Mr. Chellamuthu, says that when he puts in a bag of asafoetida in the irrigation channel in his field, many vegetables grow better and infection free.

When I talked to him, he said that it helps in killing caterpillars, and thus helps flowering plants and turmeric flourish.

It is good that the Centre for Plant Protection Studies at TNAU, Coimbatore, has taken on a study of Mr. Chellamuthu’s claims (see The Hindu, July 16, 2009).

D. BALASUBRAMANIAN

dbala@lvpei.ఆర్గ్

(The Hindu, 29:07:2009)
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