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Climate writes the recipe

by Arun Kapil

We don’t really do heat over here.

I grew up in Britain, now live in Ireland and I can report that both nations react to a heatwave with admirable determination and almost no practice. The thermometer nudges past twenty-five degrees and, almost overnight, we become a nation on manoeuvres.

The London Underground becomes one of evolution’s most testing of sauna like environments. Supermarket shelves groan beneath pyramids of rosé. Pimm’s returns from hibernation. Aperol spritzes glow radioactive orange across pub gardens. Ice disappears from shop freezers. Fans and aircon machines whirr in bedroom windows. Social media fills with earnest advice on cold plunges, frozen flannels and whether sleeping with damp socks is really a thing.

We become wonderfully inventive. Curtains permanently closed. Windows opened at precisely the wrong time of day because somebody’s neighbour once read an article. The annual debate begins about whether opening both ends of the house creates “a through draught” or merely turns the house into an assault course for wasps and bluebottles apparently determined to head-butt the windows all afternoon. Someone inevitably buys an air-conditioning unit two days before the weather breaks. By Wednesday it’s raining again and the machine spends the next eleven months sulking in the garage.

Every summer, we declare war on warmth

Yet I’ve often wondered whether we’re fighting the wrong battle. Because while we’re desperately trying to make home less hot, billions of people around the world simply get on with living in places where thirty-five degrees is considered pleasantly ordinary. Heat isn’t an inconvenience; it’s geography. It’s the backdrop to childhood, farming, markets, afternoon cricket, roadside chai and evening conversation. You don’t defeat it. You grow up with it. Which made me think. Perhaps the people who understand heat best have something to teach the rest of us. Not through air conditioning. Through lunch.

Years ago, on a cardamom estate in the hills of southern India, I was handed a tall glass of deep ruby kokum sherbat. Around me, cardamom bushes spread beneath a cathedral of silver oak trees, their trunks wrapped in twisting black pepper vines climbing patiently towards the light. Everything smelled faintly of damp earth, spice and rain waiting to happen. The drink arrived without ceremony. Dark. Sharp. Sweet. A little saline. Entirely unfamiliar. It didn’t announce itself with umbrellas, crushed ice or slices of cucumber balanced theatrically on the rim. It simply belonged there, as naturally as the cardamom growing all around me.

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That glass has stayed with me ever since.

Not because it was delicious, though it was, but because it quietly carried centuries of accumulated wisdom. Climate had become culture. Geography had become flavour. We often think of recipes as expressions of taste. I’m not sure that’s true. I think they’re expressions of landscape. Gujarat cools the day with lightly spiced chaas. Kerala reaches for kokum, for lime, basil, kala namak – sweetened with sugar syrup. Mexico makes tamarind into agua fresca. Andalusia turns tomatoes, cucumbers, olive oil and sherry vinegar into gazpacho.

None of these appeared by accident. Each is an edible conversation with the weather. Modern life tends to teach us that discomfort is something to eliminate. Turn the thermostat down. Turn the fan up. Add more ice. But perhaps we’ve mistaken cold for cooling. They’re not always the same thing. The answers are wonderfully local.

Persia offered sekanjabin: a syrup of honey and vinegar, sharpened with herbs, once prescribed by physicians as much as enjoyed by thirsty travellers. (The origins of the modern day shrub?) As it journeyed east, it evolved. Indian limes replaced Persian vinegar. Roasted cumin, black salt, ginger and on special ‘shahi’ occasions, saffron has joined the conversation. The result became shikanji, less a methodology than a philosophy: balance sweetness with acidity, salt with spice, cooling with digestion. It wasn’t simply refreshment.

Climate had written the recipe.

That, I think, is the important distinction. These drinks weren’t invented simply to quench thirst. They were designed to help people live well in heat. There is a difference. Take Gujarati chaas. At first glance it’s just buttermilk. Except it isn’t. It carries roasted cumin, sometimes ginger, perhaps fresh curry leaves, a little green chilli, fennel, black salt or asafoetida. Every family swears by a slightly different version, every grandmother quietly convinced hers is the one that really works. Whether they knew the language of electrolytes or gut microbiota scarcely matters. They knew what a long afternoon in forty degrees demanded.

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Thandai – from the Hindi thanda, meaning ‘cool’ – a chilled, sweetened milk drink from northern India. Rich with saffron, cardamom, fennel, warming black pepper and nutritious melon seeds, it’s less about quenching thirst than quietly restoring equilibrium. On festive occasions, particularly during Holi, bhang thandai makes a welcome appearance, the addition of cannabis takes the drink – and occasionally the drinker – into an altogether different realm. Falooda tells another story. Rose syrup, basil seeds swollen like tiny pearls, vermicelli, milk and often ice cream; a glorious collision of Persian ancestry and Indian exuberance. Half dessert, half drink, entirely unapologetic.

Then there was Kerala. Not in a restaurant. Not in a resort. Just a man almost invisible behind a small mountain of coconuts at the roadside. I remember melting. The sort of humid afternoon where your shirt gives up before you do. My cousin smiled, ignored every chilled bottle in sight and asked the vendor for the antidote. Without a word, the man reached for a coconut.

One hand held the fruit. The other wielded a machete that looked as though it had lived several previous lives. Chop. Turn. Chop. Turn. Great ribbons of green husk spiralled to the ground until, with one final, almost delicate flick of the blade, he found one of the three eyes, pierced it cleanly, pushed in a straw and blankly thrust it toward me.

No branding. No promises. No influencer telling us it was a superfood. Just the sweetest electrolyte nature ever invented. Looking back, what strikes me isn’t the coconut itself. It’s the instinct. Nobody reached for an energy drink. Nobody spoke about hydration strategies. They simply drank what generations before them had learned worked. Climate had already written the recipe. The cook merely remembered it.

Perhaps that’s what fascinates me most about traditional food cultures. They rarely separate nourishment from pleasure, or flavour from function. A glass of kokum sherbat isn’t medicine, but nor is it simply a soft drink. Chaas isn’t merely refreshing. Shikanji isn’t just lemonade with notions. Each carries, quietly hidden beneath its flavour, a long conversation between people and place. Landscape, over centuries, teaching kitchens how to think.

When I was about six, Mum was encouraging us to get our own drinks. Sometimes it was as simple as pouring out pink milk. Sometimes Ribena. Always through those ridiculously glorious curly, slightly flexy plastic straws that looped and spiralled like miniature rollercoasters before finally delivering the drink to your mouth. I was absolutely convinced they made everything colder. Children have an extraordinary faith in objects. A favourite mug makes milk taste better. A blue plaster heals faster than a beige one. And somehow, inexplicably, a curly straw made Ribena colder.

Perhaps I wasn’t as wrong as I thought. Not about the straw. About the idea. Because cooling, it turns out, is every bit as much about perception as it is about temperature. Take mint. Ask almost anyone what ‘tastes cool’ and they’ll say mint. Toothpaste. Peppermints. Mojitos. Mint sauce with new potatoes. That unmistakable icy sensation has become so familiar that we rarely stop to ask a rather obvious question. Is anything actually getting colder?

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The answer is no. Menthol is one of nature’s great illusionists. Hidden throughout your body, not just on your tongue but in your mouth, nose and skin, are microscopic proteins called TRPM8 receptors. Think of them as tiny thermometers constantly reporting back to your brain about the world outside. Except they’re surprisingly easy to fool.

Cold air activates them. Ice activates them. And so does menthol. The mint doesn’t lower your temperature by so much as a fraction of a degree. It simply whispers to your nervous system, ‘Everything’s fine. It’s cooler than you think.’ The brain believes it. The body follows.

It’s remarkable when you think about it. We don’t really taste flavour. We interpret signals. In exactly the same way that our ears transform vibrations into music and our eyes convert wavelengths into colour, our nervous system translates chemistry into experience. Flavour isn’t simply something that happens on the tongue. It’s a conversation between spices and the brain. Which brings us, rather wonderfully, to chilli.

Spend enough time in northern India, Rajasthan, Mexico, Thailand – in fact the closer to the equator you get – and you’ll notice something curious. The hotter the climate… the more readily people seem to eat chilli. At first glance it appears completely irrational. Why would anyone choose to feel hotter on the hottest day of the year? Except they aren’t trying to feel hotter. They’re trying to cool down.

Capsaicin – the remarkable compound inside chillies – plays the opposite trick to menthol. Instead of activating the receptors that sense cold, it wakes up TRPV1, the receptors that normally respond to painful heat. Your mouth protests. Your forehead beads with sweat. Blood vessels near the surface of your skin gently widen. A breeze passes across damp skin. Evaporation begins. And suddenly your body is doing what it has evolved to do for millennia. Cool itself.

The chilli never made the day hotter. It persuaded your body that action was required. Traditional cooks, of course, knew none of the names. TRPM8. TRPV1. Capsaicin. Menthol. They didn’t need to. They observed. They tasted. They sweated, then remembered.

Generation after generation, kitchens quietly became laboratories. Not laboratories of microscopes and white coats. Laboratories of grandmothers. Perhaps that is the greatest lesson hidden inside so many traditional food cultures.

Science often explains wisdom.

It rarely invents it.

So perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question all along. Instead of asking, “How do I get rid of the heat?”, perhaps we should be asking, “How do I live with it?” That isn’t a culinary question. It’s an ancient one. Modern life has become extraordinarily good at eliminating discomfort. Air conditioning. Ice. Fans. Cold plunges. Climate control. The moment we feel the slightest hint of inconvenience, our instinct is to reach for a switch, a gadget or an app. Yet for most of human history there was no switch. Only adaptation.

This isn’t to dismiss modern science or the quiet miracle of air conditioning on a forty-degree afternoon. Sometimes technology is exactly the right answer. My curiosity begins elsewhere: what if culture had already learned to negotiate with heat long before compressors and thermostats arrived?

Communities that lived beside deserts, monsoons and tropical forests couldn’t escape the climate. They negotiated with it. They learnt when to work, when to rest, what to drink, what to ferment, which spices to roast, which fruit to pickle and which leaves to crush into yoghurt. The weather wasn’t the enemy. It was another guest at the table.

I’ve often wondered whether that’s one of the quiet lessons hidden inside traditional cuisines. They’re rarely trying to dominate nature. They’re trying to collaborate with it. A pinch of roasted cumin. A squeeze of lime. A handful of basil. Black salt. Tamarind. Kokum. Fresh coconut water. None of these ingredients arrived in a recipe by chance. Each is the accumulated memory of countless people who observed carefully enough to notice what worked.

Climate had written the recipe. Generations simply learned how to read it.

Not in laboratories. In fields. On fishing boats. In spice gardens. At roadside stalls. In family kitchens where knowledge was passed from one pair of hands to the next, long before anyone thought to write it down. That’s what fascinates me most about being a Masaalchi. People often assume spices were invented to make food taste better.

Of course they do. But they also tell stories. Stories about trade routes. About migration. About botany, perfume and preservation. About survival. About climate. About empire, currency and conquest. Every spice has travelled. Every recipe remembers. Even today, if you stand in the shade of silver oaks in Kerala, vanilla and pepper vines climbing patiently towards the canopy, cardamom bushes all around you, and someone places a glass of kokum sherbat in your hand, you’re not simply being offered a drink. You’re being offered an idea. An idea refined over generations. One that says perhaps the answer isn’t always to fight the world. Sometimes it’s to understand it. Sometimes it’s to season it. Sometimes it’s simply to drink it.

As I finish writing this, we’re once again discussing how to survive another heatwave. We’ll stock up on ice. We’ll argue over fans. Someone will insist on a cold shower. Someone else will swear by frozen grapes. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not pretending I’d turn down an ice-cold glass of pilsner in London or, better still, a properly chilled pint of Beamish or Guinness on an afternoon constitutional in the sweltering heat of a rare East Cork summer’s day. I’ll always be up for that.

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Perhaps my six-year-old self wasn’t entirely wrong after all. The curly straw never really made the Ribena colder. It simply made drinking it feel different. Looking back, perhaps that was my first lesson in cooling. Not lower temperature. Different perception. Decades later, standing beneath fruiting vines in Kerala, sipping on a chilled glass of kokum sherbat, the lesson finally made sense.

Masale bolte hain.

Heat isn’t the enemy.

Perhaps it never was.

Perhaps we’ve mistaken cold for cooling. And perhaps the wisest cuisines on earth have been trying to tell us that all along.

And recipe of this month…

Summer Negotiations

Melon, Raspberry & Burrata, Saffron Gooseberries, Frozen ‘Jal Jeera’ Snow

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This isn’t really a dessert. Nor is it quite a fruit salad.

Think of it instead as a conversation between a summer garden and an Indian spice tin. Gooseberries bring their glorious tartness, raspberries their perfume, melon its effortless sweetness. Burrata offers cool, rich creaminess while frozen jal jeera arrives like an unexpected gust of wind, carrying roasted cumin, mint, black salt and lime through every slightly mischievous mouthful.

Begin with the jal jeera. Fresh mint, plenty of lime juice, some roasted cumin, pinch or two of black salt, a little sugar and ice-cold water. Taste until the balance feels alive: bright, savoury, refreshing and ever so slightly, pleasantly unexpected. Pour into a shallow tray and freeze. Every hour or so, scrape enthusiastically with a fork until it becomes somewhere between crystalline snow and shaved ice.

Meanwhile, place the gooseberries in a small saucepan with just enough sugar to soften their tart edge and a splash of water. Let them simmer gently until some collapse while others, unrelenting hold their shape. Bloom a generous pinch of saffron in a tablespoon of warm water, then stir it into the warm compote and leave everything to cool completely. The saffron shouldn’t shout. It should simply deepen the fruit, quietly adding memories of honey, hay and warm summer meadows.

Using a melon baller, scoop as many neat spheres as your patience allows. Slice the remaining melon into generous wedges and colour them quickly in a smoking-hot dry pan, on a barbecue or beneath a fierce grill until lightly caramelised around the edges. Maybe a dusting of icing sugar to encourage the burn. Leave the centres cool and juicy. Smoke and sweetness have always been good travelling companions.

Build the dessert in individual chilled jelly moulds, a glass bowl or family style in your favourite trifle bowl. Or, if you’re feeding friends in the garden, take the more relaxed route. Spoon the saffron gooseberry compote across a large, chilled platter or lipped serving plate. Scatter over the melon balls and charred melon slices, followed by generous handfuls of raspberries, piling high into a generous ‘tumble’. Nestle in some burrata balls and leave them whole, encouraging your guests to break them open – the cool cream slowly finding its way into the fruit.

Now the Masaalchi that you’re becoming steps forward: finish with generous handfuls of frozen jal jeera snow, a scattering of delicate fennel fronds. Some torn basil leaves. A fine grating of fresh lime zest and two or three confident twists of black pepper.

Serve immediately while the jal jeera snow slowly melts into the burrata cream, saffron gooseberries and fruit, changing the dish with every spoonful. Nothing here is trying to conquer the heat. Everything is learning to live with it. Heat isn’t the enemy. Invite it to the table.

Masale Bolte Hain.

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Arun Kapil, Food Editor of Ars Notoria The Art of the Noteworthy, is a punk food poet and 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.