Spring Feast: How food has been the eternal migrant in regional New Years

It was in 1699 on Baisakhi that Guru Gobind Singh inaugurated the Khalsa. The homage is, therefore, incomplete without the karah prasad — a whole wheat halwa cooked on high heat, with dollops of ghee and teeming with dry fruits. In gurdwaras, as the sewadars or volunteers prepare the prasad, the stirring of the ladles synchronise with the chanting of the five banis, hymns. The delicacy is first offered to the Guru Granth Sahib.

Food historian Colleen Taylor Sen quotes the 19th-century writer Abdul Halim Sharar to say that the halwa arrived in India in the 13th and 14th centuries via the Persians, who brought the confectionery from Arabia. Sharar also notes that in India, the delicacy acquired variations that were distinct to the land. The indigenisation was complete with sweet makers being called halwais.

This exchange between cultures also seems to have left its mark on the sweet rice. Travellers from Persia brought zarda — derived from the Persian word, zard or yellow — a sweet rice laden with nuts. The 16th-century Ain-i-Akbari has references to it and the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan is said to have developed a liking for it. Sugar in the medieval times was a sought-after commodity and people in parts of India had acquired mastery over turning sugarcane into burra, a less-refined version of sugar, and gur or jaggery, using them in rice delicacies such as kheer and meetha chawal. In fact, a version of the origin of the karah prasad ascribes the origins of the offering to the practice of offering gur to guests as a gesture of friendship.

In Indian Food: A Historical Comparison (1994), historian K T Achaya has another version of the sweet pulao. He writes that though both Persians and Arabs invented the terms pallao, pulao and pilav, Sanskrit and Tamil texts written before the arrival of Muslims from West Asia have references to a dish called pallo.
The yellowish hue of the sweet rice also finds its way into the spring festival celebrations in Bengal — in the Basanti pulao on Poila Baisakh. The fragrance here comes not from basmati rice but the small-grained nutty flavoured Gobindo Bhog.

Keeping it Light

Much before climate change left its stamp on weather patterns, Bengal had shorter springs compared to the rest of the country. With the warming southwestern breeze leaving its mark on the temperature, it was difficult to digest heavy food. And thus, the paanta bhat became a staple in the summer. Leftover rice is soaked in water and kept overnight in an earthen pot. Green chillies, a dash of mustard oil, finely chopped onions, at times leftover vegetables, complete the work for the microbes at night. For farmers, who have a hard day’s work ahead of them, this is a filling breakfast.

In Life and Food in Bengal (2005), food writer Chitrita Banerji says that women in the area put the heat to productive use. The third day after the new moon of Baisakh is the appointed day for both Hindus and Muslims to make kasundi — a mustard sauce that has the qualities of a pickle. The Bengali mustard is dark, pungent and has a sharp kick. When combined with tamarind, green mangoes or lemon, a dash of oil and spices, it produces a delectable version of the table mustard. “Making a good kasundi was considered even more difficult than making pickles and women tended to guard their recipes zealously. It’s a lost art now in cities, where commercially bottled kasundi is widely sold, but village women still make it, cleaning themselves up first, as with all things that have to be preserved through the year,” writes Banerji.

In some ways, the preparation of food, whether the paanta bhat, the kasundi or the karah prasad cooked over hours, mirrors the agriculture process where patience and fortitude hold the key. Even the maa ki dal — whole black lentils, cooked together with onions, tomatoes, ginger and, sometimes, cream — is a product of long hours of cooking. It’s now a restaurant fare, but there were times when this rich dal, one of the delights of Baisakhi, was part of communal cooking — prepared in the sanjha chulha or the shared clay oven. It’s said that Guru Nanak encouraged sanjha chulhas to remove caste barriers. For many in Punjab, Baisakhi isn’t complete without a langar in a gurdwara. The langar, writes the eminent Sikh studies scholar, W H Mcleod, “was a deliberate attack on the caste system”. In The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies (edited by Pashaura Singh and Louis Fenech, 2014), religious studies scholar, Michael Hawley, writes that the common kitchen “was a practical means to challenge the social conventions around the caste system and the preparation of and eating of food”.

Slow and Steady

Despite its apparent simplicity, cooking in the tandoor is an art of sophistication. A lot of it comes from practice, a keen eye and the desire to improve. As a saying goes  — that seems to share kinship with the aphorism, fruits of labour are sweet — jo sahej pake vo meetha.

Maintaining the right amount of heat also holds the key to crafting pithas, the folded and usually steamed pancakes that are among Baisakhi delights in Assam, Bengal, Odisha and parts of Bihar. The word pitha comes from the Sanskrit word pishtak or food made of pounded grain — new rice, sun dried or parboiled. In Assam, the dish is associated with ithaguri, the rice flour that is crushed in a wooden dheki (pestle). Controlling the moisture of the flour is important and care must be given to the thickness of the batter and the texture of the jaggery and coconut filling.

Pitha is, of course, not unique to eastern parts of the country. The Jaunsari community in Garhwal use millets to make this delectable confection. The puran poli of Maharashtra — a sweet flatbread stuffed with a sweet lentil filling made from hulled and split chana dal, jaggery and ground spices — is a relative. And the spongy Konkani godu surnali, sweetened with jaggery or unrefined cane sugar, is another example of the kinship food has across regions and language. Versions of these crepe rolls are found in several parts of Southeast Asia, testifying to the truism that food has been the eternal migrant in human history.

To the bitter end

But, the palate is not just savoury or sweet. In Bengal, for example, summer meals at several households begin with neem baigun — brinjals sauteed with a little salt and mixed with tender neem leaves fried to papery crispness. And then there is shukto, the stew of stir-fried vegetables redolent with the flavours of panchphoron — a mixture of mustard seeds, black cumin, cumin, fenugreek and fennel seeds.

The mango pachdi, that’s a staple new year fare in several parts of south India, is flavoured with neem flowers fried in ghee. Midway between a pickle and a gravy, it’s an exquisite combination of the sweetness of the ghee, the tartness of the sour raw mango, the hotness of chillies and the bitterness of the neem leaves. Nutritionists hold that a medley of flavours is always best for health. Besides, on the new year, the explosion of different flavours is a reminder that life will always be a combination of emotions, the next sowing season could be full of ups and downs and experiences must be embraced. Recipes for pachdis that celebrate Ugadi in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka draw on a similar philosophy — tamarind, raw mango, pepper, jaggery are culinary stand-ins for a variety of life experiences.

In Kerala, too, Vishu — literally “equal” in Sanskrit, a homage to the vernal equinox, when day and night are roughly equal length — celebrations have a special place for veppampoorasam, a bitter neem concoction, and mambazhappulissery, a sour or ripe mango curry. And like in most places, the festival fare — avial, thorans, payasam, the jaggery and banana chips — is a celebration of the state’s agrarian heritage, with its rice, vegetables, spices and fruits. The day begins with the Vishu kanji, made from freshly harvested rice, white beans and finely scraped coconut. It tastes best with chakka puzhukku — steamed jackfruit. The fruit should be adequately ripened to be at its most delectable. A fully ripened jackfruit will not taste the best. For centuries, unripe jackfruit was the main carbohydrate in the area till the Portuguese brought the cassava plant from Brazil. They interpreted chakka as jaca, thus giving the world the name jackfruit.

Said to be the largest tree-borne fruit in the world, jackfruit is also amongst the oldest known food items in the country, with archaeological evidence testifying to its cultivation around 4000 BC.  It’s very versatile — while the gooey unripe version is a delicacy, the raw fruit is elemental to dishes that are held up as mutton substitutes in several parts of the country. Its seeds are nutrient-rich. Achaya believes that its early name phanasa derives from the Munda language.

Whether it’s maa ki daal, pitha, avial, thoran, halwa, payasam or the sweet rice, every family, in fact, every cook, adds their distinct touch. Travellers, merchants, rulers, soldiers, even pilgrims and devotees, brought ingredients and recipes and they acquired local flavours and textures, at times, a result of different kitchen techniques — steaming, roasting, slow cooking, pickling — and the smorgasbord became richer.

The spring harvest is a celebration of this intermingling. Today, in several parts of the country, restaurants organise Poila Baisakh and Baisakhi buffets. The Basanti Pulao, meetha chawal or the avial, even the paantha bhaat, have made their way to gourmet fare. At their core, however, spring celebrations were also about making do with what was at hand — vegetables, grains, sweeteners and spices. It was about preparing for the summers that lay ahead.