Tamarind

Tamarind arrived in Indian cooking so early that its sourness structures whole cuisines: puliyodharai in the Sri Vaishnava temples, sambar and rasam in the South, gojju and pulikachal concentrates, and the sweet-sour chutneys of the North. The block of pressed pulp keeps for months; a fistful soaked in hot water and squeezed gives the juice most recipes mean by “tamarind”.

The classical pairing is with jaggery — sour and sweet measured against each other, as in sambar or saunth chutney. In Odia temple cooking the sourness often comes instead from ambula (sun-dried raw mango), a reminder that the souring agent was always regional before it was standardised.