Bronze Age Brinjal Curry

Bronze Age Brinjal Curry is a reconstructed Indian recipe for an curry of brinjal (aubergine/eggplant) with mango and spices that is based on archaeological evidence from 4000 year old pots. The full recipe is presented here and I hope you enjoy this classic Malaysian version of: Bronze Age Brinjal Curry.

prep time

20 minutes

cook time

30 minutes

Total Time:

50 minutes

Serves:

1-2

Rating:

Tags : Curry Vegetarian Recipes Spice Recipes Indian Recipes

The Harrapan culture was a bronze-age civilization of the Indus valley that reached maturity about 4600 years ago. The Harappan civilization was located in the Indus River valley. Its first identified cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, were located in present-day Pakistan's Punjab and Sindh provinces, respectively. However, a larger city, Rakhigarhi has now been identified in Hisar District in the state of Haryana in India. At its height, it extended from modern-day northeast Afghanistan to Pakistan and northwest India. Before the excavation of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, scholars thought that Indian civilization had begun in the Ganges valley as Aryan immigrants from Persia and central Asia populated the region around 1250 BCE. The discovery of ancient Harappan cities unsettled that conception and moved the timeline back another 1500 years, situating the Indus Valley Civilization in an entirely different environmental context.

In 2010 excavations of the Harappan settlement of Farmana in the Ghaggar valley near modern-day Delhi, identified potsherds with traces of food still on them. Archaeologists Arunima Kashyap and Steve Webber of Vancouver's Washington State University used the method of starch analysis and identified mangoes, bananas, dates and gourds as well as cooked sugar and salt. The most interesting specimen held traces of aubergine, turmeric, ginger and salt — the first proto-curry. No chillies or tomatoes, as it would be another 3500 years before these were introduced from the New World, though green mango would have sufficed for some acidity and body, as it dies in some Indian dishes even today. Dried cane juice or honey would have been available for sweetness and even cumin could have been common at the time.

As a result, it’s possible to re-construct a brinjal (aubergine) curry that could have been consumed at the time, but which is still palatable today. This was originally cooked in an earthenware pot. If you have a traditional tagine, I suggest that you use that to re-create this dish.

This curry, then is an attempt at reconstructing a 4000 year old recipe, which makes it one of the most ancient of dishes that we still potentially have access to.

Ingredients:

6-7 small aubergines, washed and slit
1-inch piece of ginger, ground
1 fresh turmeric, ground, or ¼ tsp turmeric powder
Sea salt, to taste
1 tbsp raw mango, diced
2-3 tbsp sesame oil
¼ tsp cumin seeds
Dehydrated sugarcane juice (or honey) to taste

Method:

Grind the cumin seeds to a powder in a mortar; then add the ginger and turmeric and first pound them then work them to a paste.
Wet grind the ginger, turmeric and cumin seeds. Heat sesame oil, add the paste and cook for a couple of minutes. Tip in the aubergines, add some salt and give it a good stir. Cover and cook until the aubergines are nearly cooked through; add some water, if need be. Now, stir in the mango and dehydrated cane juice. Simmer for a few minutes or until the mango is cooked. Check seasoning and serve with bajra roti (pearl millet flatbread).

There was no rice at the time, but millets were grown so it’s not a stretch that the meal might have been served with the fore-runner of jawar bhakri, pearl millet rotis.

So, there you have it, a reconstructed recipe for the great grand-daddy of all curries.
And if you want it to compare this to a modern brinjal (baby aubergine) curry, here is a link to my recipe for Badanekaayi Gojju.