The Taste of Partition: How this family’s story of the bread halwa began in a refugee camp

Made only by my aunt in the family, this bread halwa didn’t find a place in my mother’s kitchen. But my Bua talks about how the recipe was inherited, passed down from her mother-in-law. Her family made it for the first time in a refugee camp in 1947, shortly after they had crossed the border from Pakistan’s Dera Ismail Khan into modern-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, to finally settle in the newly-formed, divided Punjab.

Its origin is layered with tales of hardship, strewn across the heartland in almost every family that resides in the land of the five rivers. When one talks of Punjab today, the wounds that the state and its people have been through are masked by the vibrancy that is portrayed in modern-day popular culture. Yet, the thing about wounds is that they never truly heal — the scars and bruises of the bygone era live through the multiple band-aids of a happy-go-lucky culture that we’ve come to see today.

In refugee camps, groceries for each family were carefully rationed. Bread, incidentally, was a fundamental component. Most families had their cattle with them as they crossed the border and milk, at the time, which was more valuable than gold, was used to make ghee and curd.

For the making of the halwa, Bua’s mother-in-law used sugar, bread and fresh milk. As Bua says, it was important to celebrate even in a crisis Perhaps, it was because of all the chaos that celebrating a Diwali or a Gurupurab was so crucial.

Cut to the present. Even as Bua began stirring in the bread in milk and sugar, in a peetal kadhai, akin to what her mother-in-law had carried with her, ghee was added with a few cardamoms. Chopped dry fruits were her improvisation to the recipe. The silken texture of the halwa felt like a blanket over time, when the light was bleak at the end of the long drawn, freedom struggle tunnel.

As a third generation descendant, on hearing the genesis of the bread halwa, I somehow felt closer to that reality of the Partition and pain. While efforts, both in the public and private domain, continue to document the impact of the Partition on the first generation, its trickle-down impact follows the next generations, too. For me, the bread halwa, in a single second, transformed the Partition — an event in history, to an emotion in the present day.

Three years ago, I was invited to Chennai for an art and culture festival, where I delivered a talk on the impact of the Partition on the cuisines of Punjab. After I served the halwa to my audience, I remember an elderly gentleman saying that for the first time in history, he could taste the story of the Partition for himself.

This, perhaps, is one of the sweetest memories of this dessert for me — a reminder that taking your first bite of the humble bread halwa was like waltzing into the bittersweet. Yet, it never felt like a setback — rather, a reminder of Punjab’s emblematic strength and willpower and the resilience of our communities.

Bread halwa recipe

Ingredients

・ 1 cup ghee

・ ½ pack of bread (brown or white)

・ 1 cup coarse sugar

・ ½ cup milk – to mash the bread

・ 1 tsp cardamom powder

・ Almonds to garnish

Method

・ Mash the bread with milk, and make a crumble out of it

・ In a hot kadhai, add ghee

・ When it is sizzling hot, add the crumbled bread mix

・ To this, add the coarse sugar and cardamom powder

・ Cook on low flame till it all comes together

・ At this stage, the ghee should begin to ooze out separately on the pan

・ Take out the cooked halwa on to a bowl

・ Garnish with almonds

Vernika Awal is a Delhi-based food and lifestyle journalist