Chai, Street side, on the road to Rajasthan, photo Arun Kapil

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When the seasons turn, true Ayurveda isn’t a latte – it’s a feast

by Arun Kapil

September smells of woodsmoke and wet earth, of damp, lung-filling air that makes you want to walk the long way home. It’s the hinge between peaches and plums and the bramble-dark berries that stain eager fingers purple. When elderberries hang like ink drops. Damsons bloom with dusty skins. Mushrooms nose-up through moss. Game birds take flight and cross-hairs. Butchers string pheasants in the window, feathers still whispering of the field. You know the shift’s begun.

It’s my favourite month to cook. The moment to lay down summer’s lightness and pick up the shadows, the bass notes, the iron. To load the pot with roots, fat, slow flavour, the kind that clings to your ribs and keeps the bone-cold out. This is when Ayurveda, the real, living breathing Ayurveda steps out of the yoga studio, wipes its hands on its apron and pulls on a pair of rugged boots. Somewhere between the West’s turmeric-latte enlightenment and the supermarket’s “Ayurvedic herbal tea” aisle, its philosophy got flattened. Reduced to saffron-tinted foam, hash-tagged in white pristine kitchens, swallowed whole in influencer fugazi gulps. Not a crime – you can’t be born into something you’ve never lived – but still a loss. Because real Ayurveda isn’t a product or a prescription. It’s messy. Warm. Spiced. Generous. Seasonally stoked. Built on craving, not calorie-counting. It’s not what you avoid, it’s what you feed.

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Ayurveda – “Ayur” meaning life, “Veda” meaning knowledge – is one of the oldest systems of health we have, over three thousand years of lived instinct and hushed kitchen wisdom. It’s not a regimen. It’s a rhythm. A logic of the body, the seasons, the senses. It’s not about denial, it’s about deep nourishment. And at the core of it all? The gut. Long before science taught us about the microbiome, Ayurveda called the gut the seat of health, mood, memory. If your digestion’s off, everything’s off. This is why ghee is sacred – it feeds the fire. Why pickles are sharp. Why bitter greens still matter. Why rasam (tamarind broth), khichdi (rice and lentils) and bone broths, are ladled into bowls not just to soothe but to stoke. A strong gut is a strong constitution. It’s not just where health begins, it’s where resilience lives.

And the key to all this is taste. Not taste as indulgence, but taste as instruction. The seven rasas (tastes) are not rules to be followed: sweet, sour, salt, bitter, pungent, astringent and Madhura, (Madhura rasa, a sense of sweetness believed to increase strength, vitality and weight. It has a grounding and calming effect on the mind and body). They’re not boxes to tick or notes on a chart. They’re a frequency, a feeling. You don’t balance them with your brain, you balance them with your tongue. You know when a dish is right because it hits not just your palate, but your pulse. And to get a balance of all seven is key.

This is the Ayurveda I learned not from Instagram but from my aunts, my cousins based in UP and in the fields and welcoming homes of Rajasthan I visit every year, markets pressed with cumin, fennel, fenugreek and coriander, clay pots gleaming, everything alive with spice and sun. Rajasthan isn’t my ancestral home, but it is, unquestionably, my spice school. It’s where my close colleagues teach me and where I learn that instinct isn’t simply inherited, it’s tuned. It’s fed. And it grows, like appetite, season by season.

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The desert markets are their own kind of scripture. Bottle gourd, ridge gourd, okra, beans. Pale grains of bajra (millet) and jowar (sorghum) spill from burlap sacks. Ker berries and sangri beans – the Rajasthani answer to foraged resilience – lie bundled beside dusty citrus and sun-wilted dates. Cuts of goat hang beside iron pans, ready for Laal Maas. Rabbits bound for clay ovens. Grouse and sand partridge, all fire and sinew.

And yet, shift the scene. Walk with me through an Irish or British market, same month. Trestle tables heaving with carrots, squash, kale, beets. Mushrooms still carrying soil. Potatoes with the scent of rain. Game birds, venison, damsons, brambles, cobnuts and chestnuts. Apples with bruised skins, plums ready to collapse. The instinct is the same. Just different tools. Different languages, same context.

An East Cork stew of pheasant, roots, rosemary and dried fennel seeds isn’t far from a Rajasthani goat curry tempered in ghee, with jaggery and clove. Roast duck with blackberry relish spiked with fennel, black pepper soothed with jaggery tempered by vinegar has the same sweet-pungent-stinging harmony as a rose-scented Laal Maas. Even your nan’s kale with boiled potatoes and butter has an echo in mustard-leaf saag blistered with garlic.

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Ayurveda says: work with the season, not against it. Layer warmth into the cold. Ground flightiness with root. Bring in sour when the mood gets heavy, pungent when it dulls, sweetness when you feel frayed. It’s medicine, yes, but it’s pleasure first. That’s the secret. If it doesn’t taste good, you won’t come back for more. And food, in Ayurveda, is not just fuel – it’s treatment. It’s daily therapy. It’s the original preventative medicine. But mainly, it’s joy.

The Rajputs understood this. Their autumn tables flex with the logic of fire and strength. Gravies thick with ghee. Game meats slow-cooked with dried fruit, chilli, saffron, whole black pepper. Dishes built for warriors, yes but also for balance. This isn’t macho cuisine. This is the cuisine of endurance. Of repair. Of cold-season joy.

And that brings us to ghee. Oh, ghee. Maligned by margarine, rediscovered by wellness, miscast as a trend when it’s really a pillar. Ghee isn’t just fat. It’s a carrier of flavour, of medicine, of memory. It pulls fat-soluble spices deep into the tissues, helps calm inflammation, eases digestion. But mostly? It makes things taste bloody good. And if you’re going to heal you want joy in the pot.

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We see this logic in Rajwaadi food, Rajasthan’s royal cuisine. Yes, it’s grand. Yes, there’s saffron, nuts, silver leaf. But behind the opulence is a fierce seasonal intelligence. Dried ingredients, preserved flavours, perfumed intensity, spice-layered depth. Think Laal Maas’s smoky heat or the slow perfume of grilled and BBQ’d soola meats. Think milk reduced to solids. Fennel, nutmegs and mace crushed into yoghurt. Dried lentils soaked back to life. Not excess – essence.

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A little callback – indulge me – last month in these pages I wrote about cooking with waters, flowers, and perfume. Rose, kewra, vetiver. This month, we’re still in that logic. Because Ayurveda doesn’t divide perfume from plate. It knows that a drop of ghee perfumed with saffron is a kind of prayer. That to eat well is to feel strong. That to feel strong is to live well, to feel truly alive.

Back in 2016, I initiated and co-wrote Masala for the Mind with renown food scientists Professors Paul Ross, Catherine Stanton and their UCC, Cork team, a science paper on the bioactive compounds in spices and their effects on body and brain. Piperine from black pepper, curcumin from turmeric, eugenol from cloves, cineole from cardamom, these aren’t just aromats, they’re powerful polyphenols and they’re packing. They modulate digestion, inflammation, even mood chemistry. Ancient cooks didn’t know the molecules, but they knew the moods. What soothed. What stirred. What carried you through.

So yes, drink your golden milk and chai lattes if it soothes you. But know it’s only the porch light of a much bigger house. Inside, the pots roar. The ghee crackles. The rasas swirl. And the food works on you long after the plates are cleared.

This isn’t a trend. This is a practice. A rhythm. A resistance to cold, to dullness, to forgetting. A way of eating that makes you feel carved from oak, not air. Joyous. Bright. Alive. Eat like this and the winter’s sting won’t touch you.

Masala Note: The Seven Rasas – Not a Menu, a Moodboard

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Sweet, sour, salt, bitter, pungent, astringent and Madhura. In Ayurveda, these aren’t just flavours, they’re forces. You don’t tick them off like a to-do list. You feel them like chords in a raga (traditional Indian song), weaving through the meal. In Rajasthan, they might appear in a single dish: mustard’s sting, ghee’s sweetness, tamarind’s bite, fenugreek’s whisper and mango launji’s soothing. In Ireland, they scatter across the plate – beetroot’s earth, apple’s acid, the umami of slow lamb.

Your gut knows before your brain does. That’s the point. And yes, I’ve mentioned umami. Did you think I’d forgotten it? It’s not a recognised taste in India. It doesn’t exist in traditional cooking. Then in the late 1770’s, enter stage left the Chinese Hakkas to the East Coast town of Kolkata, India. They brought their flavours of home to the Tangra markets and now beyond, introducing the Manchurian style – an Indo-Chinese cuisine mix with all its delicious soy, umami additions. So yes, now India gets to experience a new taste sensation along with all its glorious others.

This month’s recipe is a simple, well, actually a traditional dish I’ve simplified, for full Ayurvedic and happy eating enjoyment, a most delicious Laal Maas, meat curry from Rajasthan. Onward!

Rajasthani Red. Ten-Minute Laal Maas

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Leftover lamb shoulder on a Monday night or fresh, fast rump, shoulder chop or neck fillet on a Friday – this one doesn’t care. What matters is that the meat is tender and the sauce roars. Begin with ghee in a hot pan, the kind of smell that makes the neighbours talk. Throw in cumin seeds, cloves, cardamom (green and black), a cinnamon stick, 2 dried red chillies and one smug bay leaf. Let them sizzle into gossip. Then in go the onions, thinly sliced, turning gold as they soften into sweetness. Add ginger and garlic paste, a good heaped spoon of each and cook till the raw edge melts.

Now the fire: two teaspoons of Kashmiri red chilli powder, enough for colour and kick, with a pinch of smoked paprika, turmeric and salt to balance the red-hot riches. Lower the flame and slowly swirl in full-fat Greek yoghurt, never the thin stuff, one tablespoon at a time, stirring like you mean it, whisking if you must – thickening, glossing, painting the pan with decadence. Let this masala deepen for a couple of minutes, then in goes your meat – either soft scraps of leftover lamb shoulder, or flash-fried lamb rump or fillet slices, seared beforehand if raw, just enough to blush.

Coat it. Toss it. Let it sit in the red for just long enough to fall in love. Finish with chopped coriander if you fancy and serve with rice or roti – or nothing if you’re eating it straight from the pan like a rogue prince. This is not slow. This is not polite. This is Laal Maas as I know it – scandalously rich, hot-blooded and ready in ten.

…..and the ideal cocktail to sip whilst you cook, try my…

Blackberry ‘Uisce’ Fall

(pron: ish ka)

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A late-season cocktail for wild skies and wild hearts

Take 50ml of Powers Red Label, the only real everyday whiskey worth its salt, and set it aside like your afternoon’s wager. In a solid glass or shaker, drop in 6 to 8 blackberries, a thick coin of fresh ginger, a teaspoon of fennel seeds, a pinch of crushed black pepper and three or four strands of saffron, not too many, just enough to stain.

Now crush it. Muddle like you mean it. Not a polite press, a full bruising. This is where perfume escapes: fennel flares, blackberries bleed and saffron sighs. Add in lemon juice, jaggery syrup (or simple, if that’s what you’ve got), then the red-gold whiskey.

Load it up with ice. Shake or stir like you’ve got something to forget. Strain into a short glass over fresh rocks. Top with a punchy ginger ale, no shy bubbles, just heat and bite.

No garnish if you’re feeling stormy. But maybe a bruised mint sprig or basil leaf if you want green to kiss the burn.

My Tips & Tweaks:

Smoked salt rim? Tempting, but no. Salt belongs inside the mix, try a pinch during muddling.

Add a splash of Amaro or a drop of orange blossom water for a second-wave finish.

Freeze your blackberries with fennel seeds inside them if you want a garnish to impress.

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Arun Kapil, Food Editor of Ars Notoria, and punk food poet, founded and owns a spice company, Green Saffron Spices. He works sustainably direct with partner farms mainly to the west and north of India and some in the south. He works directly from source. He owns total chain of custody, depleting links in the chain, bringing direct line of sight to fields of cultivation. Arun and his partner Olive began by selling one or two sachets a week of bespoke blends with accompanying recipes at a farmers market stall in Mahon Point, Cork. They now sell spices and seasonings to globally based blue chips, onward food processors and are just in the throes of re-launching their brand, based on Modern India meal solutions, sauces, spice blends, naan, condiments and basmati. They started the business boot-strapping from the bottom up, managed with a good deal of jugaard. He considers himself to be a masaalchi and at best a khansama supported by a strong network of Irish, Indian and British agri-experts and businessmen.