From samosas to asli Dilliwala: Food, memory and a changing Delhi

Commending the book, Jalil started the conversation on a personal note.

She talked about how Pant came to Delhi in 1965 while he was in his teens, and she arrived two years later in 1967, when she was four.

Pant and Jalil in conversation about his last book, From The King’s Table to Street Food: A Food History of Delhi, published in 2024. (Credit: CMYK)

“Many things that you narrate here (in the book) are things that I remember very well from my childhood, which were parents who believed in eating out, and who were not squeamish about street food. And moreover, I have seen Delhi change: the flyovers, the Commonwealth Games, the Asian Games, the changing demographics, the changing food patterns… For me personally, this was a lovely walk down memory lane in every sense of the word,” she said.

Food is no longer seasonal

The samosas served to the attendees before the event had been the topic of conversation between Pant and Jalil, so naturally, it was the subject of the first question.

“Just now, you and I were saying there is no need for mattar (peas) in samosas because they are not in season right now. So this concept of taasir (the inherent property/effect of food) of food — it’s not just how it tickles your tongue or what it does to your palate, but what it does to your system. So, has this concept of taasir gone away from our kitchens, from our palates, from our lives? And are we poorer for it?” asked Jalil.

“You are absolutely right. It has gone out of our lives, and it is not just the new generation that is responsible for it,” Pant said, pointing to the three young attendees sitting on the front chairs.

Climate change, he said, is partly to blame — and so is the expanding city itself.

Inside CMYK bookstore. (Credit: CMYK)

He recalled bhutta (corn) arriving with the rains and being sold for 10 to 15 paise, and at most four annas, nothing like the “steamed American sweet giant corn” sold as chaat today and available all year round.

Even kulfi flavours have lost their calendar. “Kuremal’s in Old Delhi now serves mango, pomegranate and orange kulfi out of season, because jo dikhta hai voh bikta hai (what is visible sells),” he said.

When food came with stories

On political correctness now being associated with food, Pant spoke about Habshi Halwa.

He recalled a friend from an old Delhi Mathur family whose father used to travel to Old Delhi every season just to buy it, telling his son a colourful backstory along the way — that “500 habshis are put in a cage” to make it.

As a child, Pant said, his friend genuinely believed this.

That innocence doesn’t survive to the next generation. When Pant mentioned the sweet by name at home, his 19-year-old granddaughter pulled him up for it: “You are using the N-word, don’t do that.”

Pant explained the actual etymology: “Do you know that Habshi Halwa has nothing to do with black (people)?” The name, he said, traces back to an Abyssinian slave credited with bringing the dish to India.

The real Delhiite

One of the major questions Pant’s book deals with is “Who is an ‘asli dilliwala (real Delhiite)’?”

When Jalil referred to it, he recalled a heated exchange at the India International Centre between former bureaucrat S Y Quraishi and an older Old Delhi resident, Om Prakash Jain, who bristled when Quraishi spoke of his own Delhi childhood.

“Do you think Delhi is yours? We settled in Delhi before you. Delhi is ours too.”

Quraishi’s reply, as Pant remembered it, was that his own memories went back to the early seventies, built around St Stephen’s and Delhi College. “Now you are older than me, your memories will be older. But the trouble is, who is a Delhiite?”

Pant spoke of a half-remembered line from a Hindi poem loosely translated to: “past a certain age, no city really belongs to you except the one where your childhood, adolescence and youth actually happened.”

Delhi, Pant said, is a city made almost entirely of refugees, generation after generation.

Lajpat Nagar was his clearest example: settled originally by Partition refugees from Punjab, the market today is home to a newer wave of Afghan refugees running restaurants named for the shrine at Mazar-e-Sharif, serving Chelo kebab and a sweet, almost boiled-style pulao.

Even here, the earlier wave has left its mark on the newer one. “The Punjabi refugees’ paneer,” Pant noted, “has crept in there too,” with the Afghan kitchens keeping a paneer option on hand for vegetarian customers.

It’s exactly this kind of layering, he argued, that makes the question of an “asli dilliwala” beside the point — the city has never stopped absorbing whoever arrives next, and feeding them back its own habits in return.