Gujarat's cold fennel cordial: seed steeped overnight, ground, strained and sweetened, served over ice through the hot months
Origin: Ahmedabad, Gujarat & Western India
From the journey of Fennel.
Variyali is the Gujarati word for fennel, and the sharbat made from it is a plain, pale, faintly green drink served very cold through the months when Ahmedabad is too hot to do much else. It is made by steeping the seed overnight, grinding it with the soaking water, straining it hard, and sweetening the liquid; some households add a little lemon, a few strands of saffron, or a spoonful of gulkand, the rose petal preserve. The logic is the Ayurvedic classification of foods as heating or cooling, which governs a great deal of what Gujarat eats and drinks and when. Fennel is emphatically cooling in that scheme, along with rose, sandalwood, vetiver, and the various things that go into the summer sharbats of western India; the same reasoning puts fennel in the mouth freshener at the end of a meal and in the water jug during Ramadan in the Muslim households of the region. Whether a fennel infusion actually cools anybody is a fair question and the honest answer is that the evidence is thin. What is not in doubt is that a cold, lightly sweet, aromatic drink is a good thing in forty-degree heat, and that the tradition is old, consistent, and shared across communities that agree on very little else. Sharbat itself is an Arabic and Persian import, from sharba, to drink, and it arrived in India with the Delhi Sultanate along with the technology of ice and saltpetre cooling. The word travelled further west too and became sorbet and sherbet, so a glass of Gujarati fennel cordial and an Italian water ice are distant cousins by way of the same Arabic root.
The cold overnight steep is the technique and boiling the seed is the standard way to ruin it: heat draws out bitterness that no amount of sugar will cover. Squeeze the muslin hard, since a good deal of the flavour is held in the ground seed. It keeps for a week refrigerated and separates as it stands, so stir before serving. Green fennel seed gives a brighter, grassier drink than old brown seed, which is worth knowing when buying. The saffron and rose are optional and traditional; the lemon is not traditional everywhere but lifts the whole thing.
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