Food of the day: Butter Beans

The butter bean is a small, sweet cake shaped like a bean and covered in green icing. It contains no actual butter beans. So why "butter bean"? Real butterbeans are somewhat flat and light brown on the outside. The green butter bean pastry looks a bit more like a lima bean.

Don't worry, the butter bean's name is well earned. A typical butter bean consists of two bean-shaped vanilla cakes sandwiched together with butter and covered in a green sugar icing that is flavored with rose essence.

Yes, the bean is filled with butter. Not buttercream. Just pure, whipped salted butter.

So it's essentially a butter-filled cake coated in sugar. This was the only appropriate response I could think of:

Butter beans, as far as I can tell, are a very Kerala thing. I googled "butter bean pastry" and the only result that came up was from a large bakery in Kochi, Kerala's largest city. Butter beans are sold in most bakeries around the monsoon season and purchased as a tea time snack. I remember they were very popular in my old Indian high school. I'm not a big fan of pure butter and sugar on a pastry whose primary ingredients are already butter and sugar, so I once traded my butter bean for two chocolate Bourbon biscuits at tea time. The girl I traded with thought I was crazy. Everyone in that room thought I was crazy. They all would have killed for that extra butter bean.

Anyone who wants to is always welcome to have my butter bean. Seriously, I couldn't last more than three bites.

On my second bite. Also, I'm pretty sure that was fake rose essence.

The Monsoon

When I tell people there is a season in India where it rains, they are shocked. A whole season? What do you do? How can you ever go outside?

The image of it raining for an entire season sounds pretty awful. Like a gloomy day in childhood where you can’t go outside to play, so you stay inside and drive your parents crazy by banging on pots because you’re so bored. Or maybe like Portland, Oregon, where my parents and I lived for a year when I was three. I don’t remember it much, but my parents told me there wasn’t a single time they went to the park to the park where the benches weren’t too wet to sit on. It drove them crazy. This was only a few years after they had moved out of India, out of monsoon country.

But the monsoon isn’t like Portland or London, or any other rainy city. In London, for instance, it drizzles for hours, stops briefly, then drizzles again. From what I’ve seen, the monsoon never drizzles.

Today was a sunny morning during the monsoon, not an uncommon occurrence. An hour before lunch the clouds had come in, but I didn’t think much of them. It just felt like a slight change in the light. I went to go wash my hands for lunch when the power went off with a click sound. The TV beeped off, the fan began to slow from its white noise drone into an audibly slow rotation. Washing my hands in the sudden dark, I felt like I lived in another time, without electricity. All the doors slammed one after another. “There’s a ghost in the house,” my uncle joked. The monsoon wind was coming in. Right before the rain hits, there’s the most wonderful cool breeze that makes you feel like you’re standing at the top of a ship. You feel like you could do anything. I used get confused when people said they could smell rain coming. Now I know. Somehow you can smell the damp. There is this earthy smell in the air.

The rain came down just a little harder than a drizzle at first. It was like being caught in a summer rain, where it falls softly at first enough for you to pray it can stay off until you reach shelter, but right when you start praying it pours and you’re already soaked. And technically, it is a summer rain. India’s summer actually happens during the northern hemisphere’s spring, but it’s the hottest time of the year, 90-110 degrees on average. The monsoon saves India from what would be an unbearably hot summer. I’m pretty sure we would all literally die without it. Compared to what would probably be 120 degrees, a couple of storms aren’t so bad.

Today the monsoon rain was coming down in pip-plops, small ripples in puddles. The contemplative kind of rain. It’s not always like this. More often it pours down in huge drops that soak everything instantly. It gushes out of the rain gutter like a waterfall and forms lake puddles. It makes you worried it’s going to flood if it doesn’t stop within the next ten minutes. Once in a long while it actually does flood.

Then it clears and it’s wet but quiet. The sun makes everything the ickiest kind of humid. When it dries it’s all sunny again like a summer day, a summer day till the clouds come in and it monsoons all over again.

Bharatanatyam

I was taking a bath, with a large steel bucket of water and a plastic mug, the Indian way. In the silences between taking up mugs of water and pouring them on myself, I heard a dull, long chant from somewhere. I thought it was maybe a car with speakers from a temple going by, which happens from time to time in this area, though I'd never heard it here specifically. It was still going on when I toweled up and got dressed. I heard people talking in the living room. Maybe they were playing an old TV show? I walked in casually, not expecting to see a man I'd never seen before standing in the living room with my cousin, Rosa. He smiled at me. I was in my pajamas with a towel in my hair. Oops. I went out of the room, embarrassed, and watched from the doorway. The chanting sound had been music coming from the stereo. The man stomped his feet and made elaborate, flowing gestures by folding his fingers and hands in a pattern, while Rosa made the exact same motions, though with a five-second delay. So Rosa was taking Bharatanatyam lessons.

Bhartanatyam, or Bharat Natyam as it is sometimes known in the north (we have longer words in the south) , is a classical Indian dance originating from Tamil Nadu, the state next to ours. If I had to, I'd say Bharatanatyam is like an Indian ballet - both dances are centuries old, require years of practice before the dancer can put on an adequate performance, and are set to classical music. One thing I've noticed in both Bharatanatyam and ballet are that the female dancers dress more elaborately than the male dancers. One difference between the two though, is that Bharatanatyam is done barefoot, so the dancers don't need to wear anything like those dainty but bone-crushing steel shoes that ballerinas wear.

But dancing barefoot isn't all that easy. Were you to listen to someone practice, as I am now, you'd probably be hearing,

(soft classical singing)

"ta-ka-ta-ka-ta-ka"

STOMP! STOMP! STOMP!

Yup, Bharatanatyam involves a lot of stomping. We used have a Bharatanatyam class back when I was in high school in India. I used to sneak around and watch them practice from the back of the room. I'd bend my legs and stomp my feet like them, but it only worked for a few poses before I was exhausted and my knees hurt. Worse though, one of them might see me and think I was mocking them, but even though I giggled a lot and ran away, I wasn't mocking them. I wanted to be able to dance like them, but I was too lazy to sign up for a class that required seven years of practice before you actually went on stage for your arangetram (It's pronounced "aa-ran-geh-thrum". When I first saw a notice for it at school I thought it was "arrange-a-tram", like a game show where students were supposed to solve tangrams), your debut performance. Sometimes I show off the few moves I memorized at parties. They all seem to love it. I'm still waiting for someone to pop out of the crowd and tell me my performance is bullshit.

I've been writing for about a half hour. Rosa is still practicing. She moves with the same energy as when she started, not apparently tired, but her moves are smoother. She starts out with one leg extended and her arms folded up close to her chest, like a stereotypical ninja pose in a movie. The ninja pose turns into a series of arm movements that look like tai-chi, but faster and with more stomping. Sometimes she forgets a move and starts grinning that childish Rosa grin that I'm used to seeing, but throughout the rest of her practice her face is serious and unaffected. She's seems older than I'd ever imagine she could be.

Outside my dad and my boy cousins are playing badminton on a red clay-dirt court. My grandma and my girl cousins are sitting on the steps and peeling the skins off nutmeg. Smoke is coming out from a wood fire in the storehouse. It's not a typical evening in India, of course, but it's a good one.

Except for the little bugs crawling on my computer screen. That's one of the less exotic parts of this trip.

A professional Bharatanatyam dancer. Also, on behalf of the little sign in the corner, please visit Kerala.