Kanji Season Is Short — Savor Every Sip
Kanji, which shares a name with the fermented rice dish, dates back to the Indus Valley Civilization between 3300 and 1300 BCE, is a seasonal drink in India, where it appears only for a few weeks each year as spring leans into summer, when the sun is warm enough to coax a ferment but winter vegetables like black carrots and beets haven't yet disappeared from the markets. Made with carrots, beets, crushed mustard seeds, pink salt, and sometimes a whisper of pungent chaat masala, kanji is what you get when a pickle becomes a cooler. Electrolyte-rich and teeming with gut-friendly bacteria, it's as energizing as it is tart. Another way to think of it is like homemade Gatorade, if Gatorade had soul.
When I was growing up in India, kanji was one of those drinks that arrived without ceremony but marked time. It meant spring was giving way to summer; the season of ferments had begun. A cousin would bring a bottle over. An aunt would drop off a batch. In certain neighborhoods, 'kanji aunties' sold their homemade versions in reused glass bottles and jars of all sizes.
I remember my first sip of kanji clearly. I hated it. The mustard hit like a slap. I panicked as my mouth turned an alarming purple while my mother laughed, unfazed. It was not the taste of childhood treats, not mangoes or candy—this was an adult flavor, as unapologetic as raw garlic or blue cheese. Years later, when I tried to explain kombucha to my mother, she shrugged. 'Oh,' she said, 'so it's fancy kanji with tea?'
But unlike kombucha, which requires a SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast), thick and strange like a jellyfish pressed between glass, kanji ferments with what's already there. No starter, no cellulose mat, no mother. Just water, salt, and time. In kombucha, the SCOBY feeds on sugar in the tea, converting it into acids, carbon dioxide, and a trace amount of alcohol through a careful choreography of yeast and lactic acid bacteria. Kanji does this too, in its own unruly way: the sugars from carrots and beets become food for wild microbes, and the crushed, antimicrobial mustard seeds help shape the flavor, keeping the funk clean, not rotten.
In Delhi this March, I drank it by the glassful. The beets painted my lips a gothic red, the mustard warmed the back of my throat, and the drink's brightness spoiled me for soda. After five days fermenting in the sun, kanji comes to life, animated with the memory of heat. I wondered why I'd spent so much money on Kombucha over the years and never tried making kanji instead.
The process is simple. In India, black carrots are traditional, their color a deep, bruised purple, but I used a mix of purple beets and orange carrots since they're easier to find. I peeled and cut them into batons and dropped them into a sterilized, half-gallon Mason glass jar. Next, I crushed two tablespoons of mustard seeds until they bloomed yellow under the pestle, and stirred them into the jar with three tablespoons of pink salt and two teaspoons each of chaat masala and red chile powder. I topped the jar with eight cups of room temperature water, sealed the lid, and left it on the windowsill to catch the spring light. (If you're not sure that the glass container you're using is airtight, secure it with a cheesecloth tied around the rim with a rubber band.)
At first, nothing happened. But then, as the days passed, the jar came alive with bubbles that floated to the lid. It's not like a controlled fermentation with a starter, but a feral one guided more by the right microbial conditions and sunlight. In warmer months, the process can take as little as two days; during the winter, it can take up to a week.
On the fifth day, I heard a pop from another room, the lid buckling from the pressure. I cracked it open slowly, letting the gas escape in short bursts. The drink smelled sharp and earthy and tasted sour rather than just salty, meaning that fermentation had occurred.
Once the kanji is fermented, you can leave the pickled vegetables in the jar, letting them tumble into each glass like a chaser, or strain them out, which is less traditional, but tidier. I save the pickled beets and carrots for sandwiches, grain bowls, anything that could use a slap of brightness.
Served ice-cold, kanji is a revelation. I like to rim the glass with chaat masala and salt (Tajín works in a pinch) and dilute the drink with seltzer and lemon juice. Sometimes, I add a glug of gin or vodka. Other times, I freeze it into ice pops whose color stains tongues and napkins.
But even in its simplest form, kanji is enough. A marvel of sunlight and time. You don't forget your first glass of kanji — and by your second, you're already waiting for spring to come around again.
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Los Angeles Times
21-07-2025
- Los Angeles Times
LACMA's great Buddhist art collection, pulled out of storage, is an irresistible force
'Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia' is a large and engaging presentation that includes some of the most splendid sculptures and paintings in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It's great to see these works again. Most of the art was packed up around eight years ago in preparation for the demolition of the museum's original campus and construction of a new permanent collection building. The current offering of around 180 objects, installed in the temporary exhibition spaces of the Resnick Pavilion, is a version of what was then sent on tour, presented in 2018 at Mexico City's incomparable National Museum of Anthropology. (LACMA Deputy Director Diana Magaloni was former director there.) Subsequent planned travel to art museums in Texas and the Pacific Northwest were derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, so the work went back into storage. It has been unavailable for hometown public viewing for a very long time. Siddhartha Gautama is accepted by most scholars as the historical figure Shakyamuni Buddha, or sage of the Shakya clan, who was born in Nepal and lived in India around the 5th century BCE. Representations of the religious teacher started out as nearly abstract symbols a few thousand years ago — a starburst shape inside a spiraling whorl, for example, which configures an emanation of light within an eternal flow. A Bodhi tree might signal the sacred place where Buddha's deep insight into enlightenment occurred, or a drawn or carved footprint would be suggestive of following a path. But no biographical texts emerged for several hundred years after his death. Legend and religious doctrine intertwined over centuries, splintering and reconfiguring and taking on new dimensions as they encountered scores of established cultures across South and Southeast Asia and beyond — Daoist philosophy in China, say, or Shinto religion in Japan. Eventually, figurative representations took shape. Needless to say, as they proliferated in what are modern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Korea and more, Buddha took on a variety of forms. LACMA has scores of fine examples, large and as in an exquisite 8th century brass and silver cast from Kashmir, just 16 inches tall, he is seated with legs crossed and fingers entwined, counting earthly elements like fire and water being absorbed into the mind. In Tang Dynasty China he sits isolated in regal splendor, like an emperor carved in timeless white stone atop an elegantly draped cushion. In the next room, a sturdy Burmese Buddha wearing a transparent garment of reddish lacquered wood raises an oversize right hand in a jumbo gesture of peace, extending an open left hand that seems caught in mid-motion. (There are scores of symbolic Buddhist hand gestures, called mudras.) A life-size columnar figure carved from sober gray schist, familiar from the Gandhara region of Pakistan, likewise raises a peace mudra, but here the cascading folds of his tunic's drapery signal a military history of Greco-Roman interactions dating to the expansionist conquests of Alexander the Great. Any religion that's thousands of years old and practiced in innumerable places will be beyond complicated in doctrine and nuance, and Buddhism is no exception. Deciphering them here is a scholar's task. The names of individual artists are also mostly lost to us. However, what all these different iterations share stylistically, regardless of whatever embellishments surround the Buddha, is a sense of stable, enduring calm at the core. At all times idealized in his physical features, he's the living embodiment of the irresistible force paradox — an immovable power and an unstoppable object all at once. Also on view are ritual tools, like a jewel-encrusted crown, ceremonial knives and a lovely offering cabinet adorned with paintings of fierce, glowering demons that caution anyone who might dare to disturb whatever the cupboard holds. Back off! Sculptures and paintings of poets, lamas, deities and especially bodhisattvas — earthly helpers who have postponed their own entry into nirvana, where suffering disappears, in order to help others find their way — are nearly as numerous and varied as Buddha Shakyamuni himself. Some are wildly extravagant, proliferating heads and arms into delirious phantasms of multiple personality and manifold astounding 15th century painting on cotton cloth is a fiery image of sexual coupling between deities, a crimson female figure with both legs wrapped around an ashy blue man. He stands on one straight leg with the other athletically bent, forming a robust stance designed to stabilize an ecstatic act of energetic intercourse. Like fluttering wings, his 12 elegantly splayed arms wield an array of esoteric symbols around her excited body, while her single arm raises what appears to be a ritual blade high overhead. His flaming-eyed face is frontal, hers is overlaid in perfect profile. The shrewd composition abuts their lips, so that they are just about to touch in a kiss. Chakrasamvara, the blue-man emblem of compassion, is being embraced by his consort, Vajravarahi, bright red symbol of wisdom, in a spectacularly explosive display whose arrested design seems intended as a spur to deep meditation. They are on the brink, and so, it is to be hoped, are we. The installation of 'Realms of the Dharma' is pretty straightforward. The first section introduces Siddhartha Gautama. A few wall texts outline basic Buddhist principles and the religion's two major forms — Theravada (or monastic) and Mahayana (sort of 'Buddhism for all'). From there, most objects are clustered by simple chronology and the region where they were made. That organizational scheme for such varied works of art is standard for permanent museum collections. It's rather unusual at LACMA, though, given the timing. Earlier this month, previews were held of the empty new building for the permanent collection, the David Geffen Galleries, explicitly designed to replace chronology and geography with art clustered by theme. Press materials for 'Dharma' suggest it's a thematic package, with the exhibition as a means to learn about Buddhism. That reduces art to illustration, but happily the installation doesn't come across that way. Art museums are great places to learn about art — about how it's made, by whom and why — but not so great for religious education. 'Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia' and its handsome scholarly catalog, written by LACMA curator Stephen Little and former associate curator Tushara Bindu Gude, are good at that. But would an American art museum ever do a show on the theme of, say, 'Transubstantiation: Catholic Art Across Europe and the United States,' in order to teach the diverse subtleties and dynastic refinements of a belief in the conversion of bread and wine into flesh and blood? Probably not. Aside from trying to wedge such wildly disparate Catholic artists as Fra Bartolomeo, Paul Cézanne, Tsuguharu Foujita and Andy Warhol into a single coherent exhibition, reducing art to illustration just undermines it. The temptation to frame Buddhist art that way is surely a function of the religion's unfamiliarity, its 'exoticism,' except in shallow pop culture terms. Of the roughly half-billion Buddhists worldwide, less than 1% of Americans identify with it. According to a fascinating March study from the Pew Research Center, Buddhism is today second only to Christianity in experiencing especially large losses in adherents globally, with former followers switching to other faiths or, more often, now expressing no religious affiliation at all. The majority live in California, a primary entry point for Asian immigration to the United States, but barely 100,000 Buddhists are estimated to practice in Los Angeles. Also useful for museum audiences for a permanent collection show would be some acknowledgment of complex issues around the history of this sacred art's ownership. More than one LACMA work has been contested as stolen, including an impressive 15th century painting from Nepal of an important Buddhist spiritual master named Vanaratna. LACMA bought the painting in 1977, when collecting standards were very different than they are now. The wall label, without making a definitive declaration, would be an ideal place to introduce the important subject of case-by-case provenance research, but the subject is ignored. 'Realms of the Dharma' will remain on view for a year, closing in July 2026. That means LACMA's Buddhist masterworks won't be in the Geffen building when it debuts in April next year, or anytime soon after that. (Architect Peter Zumthor is testing paint glazes for some of the Geffen's all-concrete walls, although a final decision on whether to add color has not been made.) The show is sensitively installed in Resnick. Given the art's nearly decade-long hiatus from L.A., it's worth visiting more than once during the next several months, before it disappears again.
Hamilton Spectator
13-06-2025
- Hamilton Spectator
From flints to NHL players — permanent museum exhibit shows the evolution of Grimsby
Flint tools and projectiles dating back to 900 BCE, a cannon ball from the War of 1812 and an NHL jersey worn by a Grimsby native are among about a hundred artifacts that make up a new exhibit at Grimsby Museum . Sofia Beraldo, the museum's exhibition and design co-ordinator, said the 'Grimsby: Our Story' display is the first permanent exhibit at the facility that opened in 1984. She said through surveys it became evident the community wanted a permanent place for its 'diverse history.' Beraldo did much of the research for the exhibit that opened at the Murray Street museum on May 29. There are four sections: Ancestral Lands and Peoples, Forming Grimsby, Transforming Grimsby, Made in Grimsby. Ancestral Lands and Peoples focuses on the area's first inhabitants. Beraldo said with input from Indigenous experts to ensure accuracy, it 'shines a light on the Neutral Nation grave excavation which happened here in Grimsby around 1976 to '77.' Forming Grimsby looks at some of the first European settlers . 'After The American Revolution in around 1787, there was an influx of American loyalists (who supported the British Crown),' Beraldo said. The section includes displays about settler women, enslaved people and freedom seekers, and Grimsby Beach. 'The different phases that Grimsby Beach has gone through,' Beraldo said, '(there was) cottaging, then it was an amusement park and it's still a really vibrant part of Grimsby's history.' Transforming Grimsby focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries. 'We have a (War of 1812) cannon ball there that was discovered on one of the Nelles (family) properties,' Beraldo said. There are also displays about historical sites and buildings and the Farmerettes who played an important role during the First and Second World Wars. 'Young girls and women could actually skip their final exams in high school and work on farms when the men were overseas fighting and contribute to the war effort through feeding people locally and the troops,' Beraldo said. Made in Grimsby includes displays about fruit farming, businesses and Grimsby Peach Kings Hockey Club, and includes some notable Grimsby folk including former NHLer Kevin Bieksa and musician Kevin Hearn of Barenaked Ladies. Beraldo said the exhibit features an interactive component whereby people can ask questions about Grimsby's history using a posted QR code. 'I'm hoping (visitors) take away that Grimsby's history is a lot more diverse and unique, I think, than a lot of people realize,' said Beraldo. She said some of the artifacts will be switched out annually with some of the thousands of other materials the museum has in storage. She said the exhibit is also supported by artifacts from Sustainable Archaeology McMaster (University), Royal Ontario Museum and Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center in Niagara Falls, N.Y. 'This has been in the works since 2022,' said museum manger and curator Janet Oakes, adding the exhibit is supported by $135,000 over three years from Town of Grimsby and $88,000 from the federal government. Oakes said the town, Nelles Manor Museum and Grimsby Historical Society also contributed to the exhibit. 'We wouldn't have been able to accomplish this without the support of the community,' Oakes said. See (click on the Parks, Recreation and Culture link to get to the museum) for more information. Meanwhile, the museum is hosting Coffee with the Curator on Thursday, June 19, 5:30-7 p.m. On this special evening Beraldo will take visitors on a guided tour of 'Grimsby: Our Story' and answer questions about the exhibit. This is an admission by donation event and requires a ticket. Go to for ticket information.
Eater
12-06-2025
- Eater
Kanji Season Is Short — Savor Every Sip
If you're the kind of person who finishes a jar of pickles and finds yourself tipping it to sip the last of the juice, kanji is the drink you didn't know you were waiting for. Popular throughout India, it's like a brine you can drink by the glassful: fiery, sour, and the same deep purple as Barney the Dinosaur or the name of a legendary rock band. Kanji, which shares a name with the fermented rice dish, dates back to the Indus Valley Civilization between 3300 and 1300 BCE, is a seasonal drink in India, where it appears only for a few weeks each year as spring leans into summer, when the sun is warm enough to coax a ferment but winter vegetables like black carrots and beets haven't yet disappeared from the markets. Made with carrots, beets, crushed mustard seeds, pink salt, and sometimes a whisper of pungent chaat masala, kanji is what you get when a pickle becomes a cooler. Electrolyte-rich and teeming with gut-friendly bacteria, it's as energizing as it is tart. Another way to think of it is like homemade Gatorade, if Gatorade had soul. When I was growing up in India, kanji was one of those drinks that arrived without ceremony but marked time. It meant spring was giving way to summer; the season of ferments had begun. A cousin would bring a bottle over. An aunt would drop off a batch. In certain neighborhoods, 'kanji aunties' sold their homemade versions in reused glass bottles and jars of all sizes. I remember my first sip of kanji clearly. I hated it. The mustard hit like a slap. I panicked as my mouth turned an alarming purple while my mother laughed, unfazed. It was not the taste of childhood treats, not mangoes or candy—this was an adult flavor, as unapologetic as raw garlic or blue cheese. Years later, when I tried to explain kombucha to my mother, she shrugged. 'Oh,' she said, 'so it's fancy kanji with tea?' But unlike kombucha, which requires a SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast), thick and strange like a jellyfish pressed between glass, kanji ferments with what's already there. No starter, no cellulose mat, no mother. Just water, salt, and time. In kombucha, the SCOBY feeds on sugar in the tea, converting it into acids, carbon dioxide, and a trace amount of alcohol through a careful choreography of yeast and lactic acid bacteria. Kanji does this too, in its own unruly way: the sugars from carrots and beets become food for wild microbes, and the crushed, antimicrobial mustard seeds help shape the flavor, keeping the funk clean, not rotten. In Delhi this March, I drank it by the glassful. The beets painted my lips a gothic red, the mustard warmed the back of my throat, and the drink's brightness spoiled me for soda. After five days fermenting in the sun, kanji comes to life, animated with the memory of heat. I wondered why I'd spent so much money on Kombucha over the years and never tried making kanji instead. The process is simple. In India, black carrots are traditional, their color a deep, bruised purple, but I used a mix of purple beets and orange carrots since they're easier to find. I peeled and cut them into batons and dropped them into a sterilized, half-gallon Mason glass jar. Next, I crushed two tablespoons of mustard seeds until they bloomed yellow under the pestle, and stirred them into the jar with three tablespoons of pink salt and two teaspoons each of chaat masala and red chile powder. I topped the jar with eight cups of room temperature water, sealed the lid, and left it on the windowsill to catch the spring light. (If you're not sure that the glass container you're using is airtight, secure it with a cheesecloth tied around the rim with a rubber band.) At first, nothing happened. But then, as the days passed, the jar came alive with bubbles that floated to the lid. It's not like a controlled fermentation with a starter, but a feral one guided more by the right microbial conditions and sunlight. In warmer months, the process can take as little as two days; during the winter, it can take up to a week. On the fifth day, I heard a pop from another room, the lid buckling from the pressure. I cracked it open slowly, letting the gas escape in short bursts. The drink smelled sharp and earthy and tasted sour rather than just salty, meaning that fermentation had occurred. Once the kanji is fermented, you can leave the pickled vegetables in the jar, letting them tumble into each glass like a chaser, or strain them out, which is less traditional, but tidier. I save the pickled beets and carrots for sandwiches, grain bowls, anything that could use a slap of brightness. Served ice-cold, kanji is a revelation. I like to rim the glass with chaat masala and salt (Tajín works in a pinch) and dilute the drink with seltzer and lemon juice. Sometimes, I add a glug of gin or vodka. Other times, I freeze it into ice pops whose color stains tongues and napkins. But even in its simplest form, kanji is enough. A marvel of sunlight and time. You don't forget your first glass of kanji — and by your second, you're already waiting for spring to come around again.
