Jute Mallow

Jute mallow is a fast-growing annual herb one to two meters tall, with slender stems, toothed, pointed oval leaves and small yellow five-petaled flowers. The leaves are mucilaginous when cooked, giving soups a silky, slightly slimy texture like okra.

The fruit is a slender, ribbed pod five to eight centimeters long that splits to release many tiny seeds. The seeds are small, angular, dark gray-brown to nearly black, and only a couple of millimeters long.

Seeds are sold for planting vegetable gardens and fiber crops, and the product most people encounter is the fresh, dried or frozen leaf, sold as molokhia or ewedu in Middle Eastern, African and Asian shops.

Corchorus olitorius is thought to have originated in Africa or the Indian subcontinent, and it has long been cultivated across tropical Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia. Its fiber, called tossa jute, was developed in India and Bangladesh as one of the world's major bast fibers.

The genus name Corchorus comes from an ancient Greek name for a plant, and olitorius is Latin for belonging to kitchen gardens, a reference to its use as a vegetable. The word molokhia is Arabic, while ewedu comes from Yoruba, ayoyo from Ghanaian languages, and saluyot from Philippine languages, showing how widely the plant is known.

The leaves of jute mallow have been eaten for a very long time in the Nile Valley, and the dish molokhia is closely linked with Egyptian cuisine. The soup remains a national dish in Egypt, usually made with garlic, coriander and chicken or rabbit broth.

Across West Africa, the leaves are cooked into slippery soups like ewedu in Nigeria and ayoyo in Ghana, and in East Africa and the Philippines the leaves are used in stews. In South Asia the plant was grown mainly for fiber, and in Bengal jute became a leading cash crop and industry.

The seeds have a separate history. They are used for propagation, and they contain cardiac glycosides such as olitoriside and corchoroside, which are poisonous and have been studied in pharmacology. Traditional medicine has used seed preparations in some places, but the leaves are the safe part of the plant for food, and the seeds are not an accepted food.

Gardeners sow the seeds directly into warm soil to produce leaves within a few weeks. The young leaves and tender shoots are chopped and simmered into soups and stews, often with garlic, onion, meat or fish, or dried and stored for later use.

The mature stems provide jute fiber, which is made into sacking, rope and cloth, and the plant is cultivated for this purpose in large parts of South Asia.

Leaves are also used in teas and as a thickener, and they are an important traditional green in the hungry season. Seeds are kept mostly for sowing.

The leaves are a good source of vitamin C, beta-carotene, folate, calcium and iron, and they contain mucilage and polyphenols. Studies on leaf extracts suggest antioxidant and other activities, but most come from the laboratory. Seeds are a different matter: they contain cardiac glycosides that act on the heart, so they are not part of a healthy diet and have no established role as food or supplement.