Photo: Jeevan Jose, Kerala, India, CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)
East Indian Arrowroot
Curcuma angustifolia
Also known as Tikhur, Narkachur, Wild Turmeric Arrowroot
Key benefits
✦Traditional uses
✦Long before it ever reached a spice rack, Curcuma angustifolia was dug from the forest floor of central India each winter for the pale, silky starch hidden in its rhizomes. Village households turned that starch, known as tikhur, into a soft gruel fed to infants, invalids, and anyone whose stomach needed something gentle to hold onto. In Ayurvedic household practice it was prized as a cooling, easily digested food during fevers and hot weather, and to this day it appears in temple offerings during Krishna Janmashtami, stirred into a sweet milk pudding believed to be fit for a newborn god. It is a humble plant with a quiet, steady reputation, the kind of remedy passed from grandmother to grandmother rather than written in any pharmacopeia.
How to grow & use it
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- ✦Ginger
- ✦Fennel
- ✦Cardamom
- ✦Maranta arundinacea (true West Indian arrowroot)
- ✦Tapioca starch
“When a tender stomach calls for something soft, cooling, and easy to hold down.”
Despite sharing the name arrowroot, this plant is a cousin of turmeric and ginger, not of the Maranta arundinacea that gives us the more familiar West Indian arrowroot. In India, its starch is central to Krishna Janmashtami offerings, where it is cooked into a sweet milk pudding meant to be gentle enough for a newborn.
No significant toxicity is documented; its starchy rhizome has long been used safely as a food, even for infants and convalescents.