YOU may keep your sugarcane jaggery in the North and West, the people of the South, especially the Mangaloreans, will not see beyond palm jaggery when it comes to adding this sweet flavouring agent to their cuisine.

Although much like gur, its cousin made out of sugarcane juice, palm jaggery is darker and richer in colour, it is somewhat salty in content, and it is certainly the healthier of the two. It is an extract of the palm tree, a juice, just as toddy is the palm tree�s sap.

The Southern influence of palm jaggery has spread down the East to West Bengal, and there is also great use of it in cities of Bihar, where like m8ost other things, commercial production of the jaggery is corrupted by the addition of lime to it to create larger volumes.

In the South, there is no fear of such adulteration taking place, because most families with palm plantations make their palm jaggery at home. It is the first extract of the palm juice. The juice is boiled, a little salt is added to it to act as a preservative, and so that the jaggery does not taste too sweet. And then it is cooled and poured into a long cone made of palm leaves.

The cone is then wrapped in rice straws and preserved. At the time of use, the cone is finely sliced, so that the jaggery is cut into a disc with a palm ribbon around the edge. Some families dry the palm juice on mats. Others on lime floors called kobas. The drying process over, the jaggery is stored in an air-tight container which preserves it easily for up to a year.

In South Indian families of Mangalore and the Keralites of the Malabar coast, palm jaggery�s big role is in delicacies like payasams and neyyai appams. It is also distributed with a banana, or a bit of coconut, in temples as prasadam. While in Calcutta, palm jaggery is an important ingredient in sweets like nalan gurer sandesh, nalan gurer moa and payeesh.

The Mangalorean gourmet is a discerning eater, even when he travels to a cosmopolitan city, he expects the basic ingredients of his cuisine to be available to him. That is why Mangalore Stores have mushroomed all over the country. And all of them sell the hard little discs of palm jaggery. �Without it, the bowl of payasam at home just doesn�t taste special,� they all swear.