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MEXICAN PLANTS & ANIMALS HOME
Excerpt from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
from the May 19, 2007 Newsletter, Issued from Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve Headquarters in Jalpan, Querétaro, MÉXICO
COW OKRA
Another tree at its peak of producing edible pod-fruits right now can be seen below:
Notice how those nine-inch-long pods, instead of dangling from branches, can grow right off the trunks, like cacao fruits. In Belize I learned to call the fruit and the medium-size tree producing them Cow Okra. It's PARMENTIERA ACULEATA, called Chote around here, but Cuajilote in much of the rest of Mexico. It's a member of the Bignonia Family, along with North America's Trumpet Creeper and Catalpas. The leaves are compound 3- or 5-foliate, with a short, stiff spine at the base of each petiole.
In my "Plantas Medicinales de México" I read that in the Yucatan an infusion made from the roots is used to control diabetes. Since I have hypoglycemia, which also is a problem with the blood-sugar level, I thought maybe I could experiment with eating the fruits. Also, elsewhere I learned that the Aztecs used the plant for renal diseases, indigestion, colds, and ear infections. Supposedly each day they drank tea made from 50 grams of leaves in one liter of water. For ear infections they soaked a cotton ball in this mixture and inserted it into the ear.
Tasting some raw fruits Don Gonzalo brought me I found their taste to be not bad, even without the sugar the Don suggested I sprinkle on them. Their rinds are too tough and fibrous to eat but inside they have the texture of cucumbers, and are filled with many small seeds that are easy enough to ignore and swallow. My friend Pancho told me that the best way to prepare the pods was to roast them in an oven, covering them with ashes and embers. As they bake they soften, sweeten, and get juicier. He says that people used to eat Cow Okra all the time but now they don't bother, the taste being good but just not having the pizzazz people expect nowadays.
I baked several in my solar oven, not really expecting to care much about them. However, as soon as the pot's top came off and a rich, molasses aroma poured out I knew I was onto something good. To me the gummy flesh tasted like campfire-baked plantains (those really big bananas), though others who gathered around wanting a taste said it was more like sweet potatoes, and the pods were so sweet and gooey that I was accused of packing them in brown sugar, or piloncillo. They were delicious, but fibrous; I had to pick fibers from my teeth for hours afterwards.
What a marvelous thing this Cow Okra is, and what a treat that I got to introduce it to some young Mexicans who'd never even noticed it growing along their streets and at the ranchos of their country cousins.
Cow Okra is native to Mexico and Guatemala.
from the January 25, 2019 Newsletter issued from Rancho Regenesis in the woods ±4kms west of Ek Balam Ruins; elevation ~40m (~130 ft), N20.876°, W88.170°; north-central Yucatán, MÉXICO
COW OKRA FLOWERING
A cow trail cutting through the woods was littered with fair-sized flowers typical of the Bignonia or Trumpet-Creeper Family, the Bignoniaceae, as shown below:
Features typical of the Bignonia Family include the flowers' bilateral symmetry with the corolla's top formed different from its bottom, the four stamens inserted on the corolla tube, and the corolla marked with colored nectar guides directing visiting pollinators toward the flower's center. Below, a bee's-eye view of a flower's throat is shown:
In that picture purplish nectar guides ornament the ceiling, and the four stamens bend up against the ceiling, twisting their two-celled anthers so that their pollen-releasing slits face downward, so that entering pollinators will get daubed with pollen on their backs. You can see that the stamens' stems, or filaments, are of two different lengths. This condition is so common among certain plant families that a word exists to describe it. The stamens are said to be "didynamous."
The curious thing was that among the network of stems and vines arching over the cow trail I could find no flowers of the kind on the ground. Finally two flower buds of the right size and color turned up on tree branches right above the trail, as shown below:
Also, an enlarging ovary where the corolla already had opened and fallen of was spotted, shown below:
That looks right for the Bignonia Family, because the fruit seems destined to become an elongate capsule splitting along its sides, and the base of the ovary arises from the center of a green, doughnut-like structure, which is the "hypogynous disk" present in flowers of that family.
Most members of the Bignonia Family produce compound leaves that arise opposite one another on a woody stem, and that's what you can see below, on our flower-dropping tree:
Our tree's trunk was attractively blotched, but its branching was irregular, and smaller branches stuck out from the stems like oversized spines, as seen below:
The tree's distinctive 3-foliate leaves reminded me that we've seen this species before, calling it Cow Okra {see above}. Thing is, its fruits had been so interesting and unusually arranged that I'd never paid much attention to the details noted here.
Cow Okra is unusually flexible with its arrangement of flowers. Above we see a single fruit developing on a normal branch extending over the cow path. On our Cow Okra page, however, the fruits cluster together on the main trunk, which is something fairly unusual. On the Internet I find fruits pictured both on slender twigs and on the trunk, so this is just how Cow Okra does things.
I'm astonished that so far I've not noticed the fruits on this tree right beside a trail I often travel, The workers suggest that the cows eat them first, and with a name like that maybe that's the case.