Families in Food: Love is in the Leftover
This Old Delhi shop has been banking on khurchan, a sweet made with milk scrapings, for over a century.
Milk Made: (Clockwise from above) A dish of khurchan; Aman Jain; the shop in Chandni Chowk. (Photos: Surbhi Gupta)
The shutter is lifted at five in the morning of this small shop tucked in the middle of Chandni Chowk’s Kinari Bazar — one of the few sweetmeat shops on a street known for its wedding fare. After the cleaning, the men put up the kadhais (wok) on the stove ready to make the sweet it is famous for. This is Hazari Lal Jain Khurchan Wale, which has been dishing up the specialty for more than a century in the Capital. Before it shifted to its current location in 1962, the sweet used to be doled out from a godown near Marwari Hospital on the same lane by Hazari Lal’s father Gauri Shankar Jain. That is now used as a store room.
Gauri Shankar, from Uttar Pradesh’s Jaswantnagar, learnt how to make the sweet in Khurja, the town known for its khurchan. It literally means “leftover scrapings”. “It is a very labour-intensive process, hence there are hardly any sweetmakers who make khurchan in Delhi these days,” says Sunil Kumar Jain, 56, Hazari Lal’s son and third-generation owner of the shop, who took over the business after his father’s death in 1983. “One needs four people to make khurchan, and nobody wants to work that hard. Only two-three kg of khurchan is made in one hour, whereas one can make 50 kg of barfi in that time,” he says.
“And, it takes seven litres of milk to make one kilogram of khurchan.” The thickness of buffalo milk, sourced from nearby towns like Khurja, Aligarh and Saharanpur in UP, made it a favoured choice when they first started out. Now, they use packaged full-cream milk.
The process is simple: the milk is boiled continuously, malai is skimmed and put on the sides. Sugar isn’t mixed in the milk because then the layers can’t be made, instead bhura (crushed sugar) is sprinkled in between the layers. It’s served as a barfi bar, and is topped with chopped pistachios. A kilo of the milk-sweet used to sell for Rs 20 in the 1960s, it now sells for Rs 600.
Many moons ago, the shop used to supply khurchan to sweet shops all over Delhi, but now they only retail from the Kinari Bazar outlet. Other sweets like ras malai, gulab jamun, rabri, ghia ki barfi, khoya ki barfi and moong dal ki barfi, among others, are equally popular.
In 1999, before former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee boarded the bus to Pakistan to meet his counterpart Nawaz Sharif, he took along with him khurchan from the shop, says Sunil Kumar. His son Aman, 28, says, Sunil Gavaskar was a loyal customer. Whenever he was in town for cricket matches, he would send someone to their shop to get khurchan.
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