Tamarindus indica L. (the sole species of its genus); grown in two broad culinary forms, the common sour tamarind and the low-acid sweet tamarind (Thai makham wan)
Origin: The dry savannas and Sahel of tropical Africa, from Sudan and the East African drylands westward across the belt to Senegal; carried in prehistory to the Indian subcontinent, where it naturalised so completely that it was long believed to be native
Tamarind is one of the great paradoxes of the plant world: a tree whose name proclaims it Indian, whose cooking the world associates above all with India and South-East Asia, and which is in fact a native of Africa. It is the single species of its genus, Tamarindus indica, a large, long-lived, evergreen tree of the pea and bean family, and what the kitchen uses is neither leaf nor seed but the pulp: the sticky, fibrous, intensely sour brown flesh that packs the curved, brittle-shelled pod around its hard, glossy seeds. That sourness is unusual in its chemistry, for where most fruits owe their acidity to citric or malic acid, the tamarind is exceptionally rich in tartaric acid, the same acid that dominates the grape, and this gives its sourness a particular depth and roundness that no lemon or lime can imitate.
The tree is native to the dry tropical savannas of Africa, most likely the belt running from Sudan and the East African drylands across the Sahel to Senegal, where it grows wild and is gathered still. But its domestication is really a story of prehistoric transport. Carried across the Arabian Sea to the Indian subcontinent in the second millennium BCE, probably by the same seafaring trade that linked East Africa to India across the monsoon-driven Indian Ocean, the tamarind found in the Deccan and the Dravidian south a second homeland so perfect that it naturalised utterly, seeded itself along every roadside, and was woven so deeply into the cooking and the culture of India that Sanskrit named it, the Ayurvedic physicians prescribed it, and the world came to believe it Indian.
Because it is one species, the tamarind has no scattering of separate wild origins in the manner of the raspberry or the passion fruit. What it has instead is a division of cultivars, and one of these matters greatly in the modern kitchen: alongside the common sour tamarind, the workhorse souring agent of half the tropical world, there is the sweet tamarind, a low-acid selection whose pulp is mild and date-like enough to be eaten fresh out of the hand, cultivated above all in Thailand as makham wan and sold as a dessert fruit. The two are the same tree put to opposite ends, the one a sour seasoning, the other a sweet fruit.
The tamarind's travels divide cleanly into two great ages. The first was ancient and eastward. From its African cradle the tree reached India in prehistory and became, within the subcontinent, the defining souring agent of an entire culinary world; and from India its use radiated outward along the trade routes of the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. Arab merchants carried it, and it is to them that the tamarind owes its universal name, for encountering the sticky brown pulp in India they called it tamr hindī, the 'date of India', and from that Arabic phrase, through mediaeval Latin tamarindus, descends the name in every European tongue. Eastward the same maritime trade carried the tree into South-East Asia, where it became the makham of Thailand, the asam jawa of the Malay archipelago, the me of Vietnam, and the sampalok of the Philippines, the indispensable sour note of the region's soups, curries, and sambals. Along the Swahili coast of East Africa the Indian Ocean trade brought the Indian manner of cooking the fruit home again to the continent that had given it, and the tamarind entered the coconut-rich cuisine of Zanzibar and the coast as ukwaju.
The second age was the age of European empire and of the Columbian exchange, which carried the tamarind at last across the oceans it had never crossed. The Spanish, who had met the tree in their Asian possessions, carried it eastward across the Pacific on the Manila galleon from the Philippines to Acapulco, and tamarindo took such deep root in Mexico that its cooling drink and its sweet-sour candies are now amongst the most characteristic flavours of the country. Across the Atlantic the tree travelled a different road, carried in the terrible traffic of the slave trade, for the enslaved peoples of Africa knew the tamarind of their homeland and planted it wherever they were taken; it became a fixture of the Caribbean, reinforced in the nineteenth century by the Indian indentured labourers who brought their own tamarind chutneys to Trinidad and Jamaica.
The Dutch East India Company carried the tamarind-cooking of the Malay world to the Cape of Good Hope with the people it enslaved and exiled there, and it became a pillar of the Cape Malay kitchen of South Africa. And the British, who had learned to love the sour fruit across their Indian empire, carried its flavour home and hid it in a bottle: the Worcestershire sauce compounded at Worcester in 1837, said to derive from a recipe brought back from Bengal, rests on tamarind for its dark, sour depth, and through it, and through the brown sauces that followed, the tamarind entered the Western table by the back door, tasted daily by millions who have never seen the pod.
Tamarind today is one of the most widely used and least conspicuous of all the world's flavourings: a souring agent of the first importance across a swathe of the tropics from West Africa to the Philippines, and, in the West, a hidden ingredient in some of the most familiar bottled sauces on the shelf. India is by a wide margin the largest producer and consumer, and the fruit is sold there, and across most of its range, as a sticky pressed block of de-seeded pulp, or as a ready-made concentrate, to be soaked, squeezed, and strained into the sour 'tamarind water' that is its usual working form. Thailand is the other great producer, and the centre of the trade in the sweet dessert tamarind eaten fresh.
The fruit's culinary role is remarkably consistent across the many cuisines that use it: it supplies sourness, but a sourness rounder, darker, and more lingering than citrus, and one that stands up to long cooking, so that it is the acid of choice for slow-simmered dishes where a squeeze of lime would be lost. It is the sour heart of the South Indian rasam, sambar, and tamarind rice, and the tang in the North Indian chutneys of the chaat stall; the souring of the Thai pad thai and sour curry, the Malay and Indonesian asam dishes, the Vietnamese and Filipino sour soups; the tartness in the Mexican agua fresca and the Latin American candy; the acid in the Cape Malay curry; and the depth in Worcestershire and brown sauce. It is also, across its whole range, a medicine, mildly laxative, prescribed in the Ayurvedic and Unani traditions and drunk as a cooling remedy in the heat, and a household chemical, its tartaric acid used across India to scour the tarnish from brass and copper.
From a wild tree of the African savanna, the tamarind has become the invisible sourness beneath a thousand dishes on every inhabited continent, so thoroughly naturalised into the cooking of India and South-East Asia that it is thought native there, and so thoroughly hidden in the sauces of the West that most who eat it daily do not know its name.
Historical Journey of Tamarind
The Sahel & Savannas of Tropical Africa — c. 2500 BCE
The tamarind is a native of the dry tropical savannas of Africa, and though its name and its fame belong to India, its home is the great belt of wooded grassland that runs across the continent from the East African drylands and Sudan westward through the Sahel to Senegal. Here the tree grows wild and is gathered still, a huge, long-lived, drought-hardy evergreen that gives shade, fodder, timber, and, above all, the sour brown pulp that African cooks have used since long before writing. Across the Sahel the tamarind, the tsamiya of the Hausa and the aradeb of the Sudanese, is turned above all into drink and into gruel: its pulp is soaked and sweetened into a cooling infusion drunk against the heat and, throughout Muslim Africa, to break the Ramadan fast, and it is stirred into the millet porridges and gruels that are the staple food of the region. The Hausa kunun tsamiya, a smooth, tart, spiced drink of fermented millet soured with tamarind, is one of its characteristic forms, at once food and refreshment. It was from this African heartland that the tree was carried, in prehistory, across the Arabian Sea to the India with which the world would forever associate it.
Tamil Nadu & the Dravidian South, India — c. 1300 BCE
Carried across the Indian Ocean in prehistory, the tamarind found in the Deccan and the Dravidian south a second homeland so perfect that it naturalised utterly and became, more than in any other place on earth, the defining sourness of a cuisine. Nowhere is the fruit so central as in the cooking of the Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayali south, where the very word for it in Tamil and Malayalam, puli, means sourness itself, so that a whole family of dishes is named simply for the tamarind. It is the sour foundation of rasam, the thin, peppery, digestive broth taken with rice; of sambar and the many kuzhambu, the tamarind gravies simmered with vegetables, lentils, garlic, or fenugreek; and of puliyodarai, the tamarind rice in which cooked rice is tossed through a dark, spiced paste of tamarind, chillies, and toasted spices to make the great travelling and temple food of the south, packed for journeys and offered to the gods. The southern cook keeps a block of the pressed pulp always to hand, soaking and straining it into the sour tamarind water that begins a thousand dishes. From this Dravidian heartland the tamarind and its uses spread north across the subcontinent and outward across the seas to South-East Asia, to Arabia, and, in time, to the world.
Cairo, Baghdad & the Arab World — c. 700 CE
It was the Arab traders of the Indian Ocean who gave the tamarind the name the world still uses, and who carried it into the cooking and, above all, the drinking of the Middle East. Meeting the sticky, sweet-sour brown pulp in the markets of India, they saw in it a kind of date and called it tamr hindī, the 'date of India', not knowing the tree was African; the name passed with the fruit into Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, and thence into every European language. In the Arab kitchen the tamarind became above all a drink. Sharbat al-tamr al-hindī, the tamarind sharbat, is one of the great cooling refreshments of the Arab summer and one of the defining drinks of Ramadan, sold from great brass urns by street vendors across Egypt and the Levant and poured out sweet, dark, and bracingly sour to break the fast at sundown. The fruit found savoury uses too, souring certain fish dishes and stews of Iraq and the Gulf, where its round, deep acidity suits the slow-cooked dish; but it is as the tamr hindī drink, carrying its own name, that the fruit is most beloved and most characteristic of the Arab table.
Thailand & the Sweet Tamarind — c. 1200 CE
In Thailand the tamarind, the makham, is both the sour seasoning of the savoury kitchen and, uniquely, a sweet fruit eaten for its own sake. The sour form is fundamental to Thai cooking, supplying the tart note in the four-way balance of sour, sweet, salt, and heat that defines the cuisine: it is the sourness of pad thai, the tang of the sour curry kaeng som, and the acid that rounds the rich, Persian-influenced massaman. But Thailand is also the world's centre of the sweet tamarind, makham wan, a low-acid cultivar whose pulp is mild, brown, and date-like enough to be eaten fresh from the pod as a dessert fruit, grown above all in the northern province of Phetchabun and sold as a prized seasonal delicacy. Between the two lies a whole family of tamarind sweets and snacks, of which the most beloved is makham klook, 'tossed tamarind': the pulp rolled and kneaded with sugar, salt, and chilli into a soft, chewy sweet that is at once sour, sweet, salty, and hot, sold in every market and by every roadside. In Thailand, more than anywhere, the tamarind is allowed to be a pleasure as well as a seasoning.
Delhi & the North Indian Chaat Table — c. 1300 CE
If the tamarind is the savoury sourness of the Dravidian south, in the north of India it is above all the sweet-and-sour heart of the chaat, the vast and beloved family of street snacks that reached its full flowering in the kitchens and bazaars of Delhi and the Mughal north. There the tamarind is cooked down with jaggery or sugar, dates, and warm spices into imli chutney, the thick, glossy, sweet-sour brown sauce, also called saunth or meethi chutney, that is the indispensable dressing of the chaat stall. It is drizzled over the crisp puffed shells of the samosa and the kachori, spooned into the hollow globes of pani puri and the mounds of papri chaat and aloo tikki and dahi bhalla, its dark sweet-sourness balancing the fried, the starchy, and the yoghurt-cooled in the layered play of textures and tastes that is the whole art of chaat. Where the southern cook wants the tamarind sharp and savoury, the northern cook tames it with sugar and spice into something rich and mellow, and the little bowl of imli chutney, set beside the green coriander-and-mint chutney, is one of the two sauces without which no plate of chaat is complete.
Malacca & the Malay Archipelago — c. 1300 CE
Carried east by the maritime trade of the Bay of Bengal and the Strait of Malacca, the tamarind became one of the essential sour agents of the Malay and Indonesian kitchen, so much so that its name entered the language as a synonym for sourness itself: asam jawa, the 'Javanese tamarind', in which asam means sour, and a whole class of sour dishes is called simply asam. Its supreme expression is asam pedas, 'sour and hot', the fiery, tangy stew of fish or other proteins simmered in a brick-red gravy of pounded chillies, aromatics, and a generous measure of tamarind, one of the defining dishes of the Malay Peninsula and the western Indonesian archipelago and a byword for the region's love of the sour-hot balance. Beyond it the tamarind sours the sambal tumis that dresses the national rice dish nasi lemak, cuts the richness of the many coconut-based gulai and the fried sambals of aubergine and other vegetables, and flavours countless marinades and dipping sauces. In a cuisine built on the balance of chilli heat, coconut richness, and bright acidity, the asam jawa is the sourness that holds the whole in tension.
The Mekong Delta, Vietnam — c. 1400 CE
In Vietnam the tamarind, me, is one of the cherished sour notes of a cuisine that prizes brightness and balance above almost all else, and it is used both green and ripe. The unripe pods, sharp and astringent, and the ripe pulp, sour and rounded, are the classic souring of canh chua, the 'sour soup' of the Mekong Delta, a limpid, aromatic broth of fish simmered with pineapple, tomato, okra, beansprouts, and a tangle of fresh herbs, in which the tamarind supplies the defining tartness that makes the dish. The ripe pulp, cooked down with fish sauce, sugar, garlic, and chilli into a thick, glossy, sweet-sour-savoury glaze, is the sauce for some of the most beloved dishes of the southern Vietnamese table: cua rang me, tamarind-glazed crab, and tôm rang me, tamarind prawns, in which whole shellfish are tossed in the dark, sticky sauce and eaten with the fingers. The interplay of the tamarind's sourness with the salt of the fish sauce, the sweetness of the sugar, and the heat of the chilli is the essence of the southern Vietnamese palate, and few ingredients express it so completely.
The Philippines — c. 1500 CE
In the Philippines the tamarind, sampalok, is the soul of the dish many hold to be the national one: sinigang, the sour soup that is perhaps the most beloved of all Filipino foods. Sinigang is a clear, savoury broth in which pork, fish, shrimp, or beef is simmered with a medley of vegetables (water spinach, radish, aubergine, okra, long beans, tomato) and soured, above all, with tamarind, whose bracing, mouth-watering tartness is the whole point and pleasure of the dish. So central is the souring that Filipinos speak of the particular sourness of sinigang as a comfort and a craving, and though other souring agents are used in season, from unripe guava to the small native calamansi, it is the tamarind, the sampalok, that is the classic and the standard, the young leaves and green pods as well as the ripe pulp all pressed into service. Around the sour soup the Filipino sweet tooth also claims the fruit, boiling the ripe pulp with sugar into sampalok candy, sweet and sour and dusted with more sugar or with chilli and salt, a sweet sold in every market. But it is sinigang, warming and sour and endlessly variable, that makes the tamarind indispensable to the Filipino table.
Mexico & the Manila Galleon — c. 1600 CE
The tamarind crossed the Pacific on the Manila galleon, the great trade that for two and a half centuries linked Spanish Manila to Acapulco, carrying the plants and foods of Asia into New Spain, and in Mexico the tamarindo found a home so welcoming that it became one of the most characteristic flavours of the country. Its first and greatest role is as drink: agua de tamarindo, the tamarind water, is one of the beloved aguas frescas, the 'fresh waters' of fruit and seed and flower that are the everyday soft drinks of Mexico, made by soaking and straining the pulp and sweetening the dark, sour-sweet liquid to be served ice-cold from great glass jars on every market stall and taquería counter. Its second is as sweet, for Mexico has an unrivalled love of the sour-sweet-spicy, and the tamarind is boiled with sugar and rolled or coated with chilli and salt into a whole confectionery of dulces de tamarindo, the pulparindo and the tamarindo enchilado, that are amongst the most distinctive sweets of the country, and the ancestors of the chilli-tamarind flavour now found across the Americas. From Mexico the tamarindo spread through Central America and the Spanish Caribbean as drink and sweet alike.
Trinidad & the West Indies — c. 1650 CE
The tamarind reached the Caribbean by a darker road than the Pacific galleon. The enslaved peoples carried across the Atlantic from West Africa knew the tamarind of their homeland, and the tree was planted throughout the islands, where its deep shade and sour fruit became a fixture of the yard and the market; in the nineteenth century the Indian indentured labourers brought to Trinidad, Jamaica, and Guyana to work the plantations after emancipation reinforced it with their own tamarind cooking, so that the Caribbean tamarind carries both an African and an Indian inheritance. Its best-loved form is the sweet: tamarind balls, the sticky brown pulp kneaded with sugar and often a bite of hot pepper into little rolled spheres crusted in more sugar, are one of the classic sweets of Trinidad and the wider West Indies, sold at every roadside and school gate, sour and sweet and sometimes fiery all at once. The fruit also sours the chutneys that the Indo-Caribbean kitchen serves with its doubles and its curries, and flavours drinks and sauces across the region, a small, dark, sour thread linking the Caribbean table to both of the tamarind's older worlds.
The Cape Malay Kitchen, South Africa — c. 1700 CE
The Dutch East India Company carried the tamarind-cooking of the Malay world to the southern tip of Africa, not as a trade good but with the people it enslaved, exiled, and transported to the Cape of Good Hope from the Indonesian archipelago, India, and Ceylon from the later seventeenth century. These people, whose descendants became the Cape Malay community of Cape Town, brought with them the spice-and-sour cooking of their homelands and adapted it to the ingredients of the Cape, creating one of the world's great creole cuisines, and the tamarind is one of its signature flavours. It sours the mild, fragrant, deeply spiced curries and the slow-cooked bredies of the Cape Malay kitchen, and above all the coconut fish curries and the sambals in which the community's Indonesian and Indian inheritance is clearest, its round, dark acidity balancing the sweetness of coconut, sugar, and dried fruit that marks Cape cooking apart from the fierier curries of the subcontinent. Brought to the Cape by the forced migrations of the age of the spice trade, the tamarind became, in the hands of the Cape Malay cooks, an essential note of a cuisine found nowhere else.
Worcester & the British Store-Cupboard — c. 1837 CE
The tamarind entered the British table by stealth, hidden in a bottle, and through it became one of the most widely eaten flavours in the Western world without ever being seen or named. When the chemists John Lea and William Perrins compounded their Worcestershire sauce at Worcester in 1837, from a recipe said to have been brought back from Bengal by a returning colonial nobleman, they built its dark, complex, sour depth upon tamarind, alongside fermented anchovy, molasses, vinegar, onion, and spice; the tamarind is what gives the sauce its particular lingering, fruity sourness, quite unlike vinegar alone. Worcestershire sauce became a fixture of the British and then the global store-cupboard, splashed into soups, stews, marinades, cheese dishes, and the Bloody Mary, and it spawned a whole family of British brown sauces, the HP and its rivals, that likewise lean on tamarind for their sweet-sour character and that are eaten daily with the bacon and the pie. Through these sauces, the returning legacy of the British Indian empire, the African tamarind became an invisible everyday taste of the West, savoured by millions who have never handled a pod nor known its name.
