One Tree, Two Aisles: Murungai Keerai and Drumstick

The moringa tree — murungai maram in Tamil — is one of the few plants that shows up twice in a vegetable shop's layout under two entirely different names, in two entirely different sections, for two entirely different dishes. The leaves, sold as murungai keerai, live with the greens. The long, ridged pods, sold as drumstick, live with the vegetables. A first-time shopper could easily miss that they're related at all.

The pods: drumstick and its place in sambar

Drumstick is best known in Tamil Nadu as a sambar vegetable — the long pods are cut into 2-3 inch batons and simmered until the fibrous exterior softens enough to scrape the pulp out with your teeth at the table. That eating method is exactly why it's sold whole rather than pre-cut: cutting shorter pieces than a few inches makes the pulp harder to extract, and pre-peeling defeats the point of the vegetable entirely. Beyond sambar, drumstick also goes into avial (the mixed-vegetable, coconut-yogurt dish) and into a simple poricha kootu with moong dal.

• Trim the very ends of the pod and cut into 2-3 inch batons — no need to peel.
• Add drumstick to sambar or kootu early, since the pods take longer to soften than most other vegetables in the pot.
• Test doneness by piercing with a knife rather than judging by colour — a soft pod gives easily.
• Serve whole in the gravy; the pulp is eaten by hand, or by biting down and pulling the fibrous shell away at the table.

The leaves: a completely different dish

Murungai keerai is a fine-leafed green that grows on thin stems and needs to be stripped, leaf by tiny leaf, before it goes anywhere near a pan — genuinely one of the more time-consuming prep jobs in a Tamil kitchen, though a practised hand moves through a bunch quickly. Once stripped, it cooks fast into a simple poriyal: a mustard-and-urad-dal tempering, the leaves added last, cooked just until they wilt, and finished with grated coconut. Some households also fold the leaves into a moong dal kootu, similar to how paruppu keerai is treated.

The two ingredients don't substitute for each other in any dish — a sambar recipe that calls for drumstick won't work with the leaves stirred in instead, and a poriyal built for the leaves has no use for the pods. They're worth knowing as a pair mainly so a shopping list makes sense: if a recipe says "murungai" without specifying, it's worth asking (or checking) whether it means the pod or the leaf, because the shopping trip and the cooking time are completely different.

Buying both in one trip

Drumstick keeps noticeably longer than the leaves — a few days in the vegetable drawer is fine, since the tough outer skin protects the pulp inside. Murungai keerai should be treated like any other leafy green: buy it for same-day or next-day cooking, and store it loosely wrapped rather than sealed in a bag, which speeds up wilting. Both are available through the vegetables and keerai categories, with Express delivery in about 60 minutes if a sambar pot is already on the stove and short one ingredient.