Food For the Lord

                              Think Ganapati, think modaks. No other God eats those soft, white, bite-sized pleated domes. Making them is an art: the freshly ground rice flour is kneaded into a dough, the dough is lightly steamed and kneaded again. The stuffing is made with equal amounts of fresh, grated coconut-flesh and jaggery cooked together and flavoured with powdered cardamom and nutmeg. The wealthy add to it crushed almonds or pistachios. A small ball of the dough is moulded inside a ghee-greased palm and after the stuffing is held in place, gently ‘fingered’ into shape. It’s steamed yet again and eaten hot with melted ghee poured over it.

The ‘modak’ shape is now standardized. You can even buy boxes of mass-made modak-shaped pedhas to give as corporate gifts. In some homes, the traditional modaks aren’t steamed but fried (in which case the casing is made of wheat flour).  For some reason, Ganapati eats what he likes in multiples of 21. It’s said he eats 21 modaks in a single gulp. Not too difficult for someone with an elephant’s mouth.

During the period that the Ganapati is worshiped in a house, the inmates cannot eat anything non-vegetarian. Interestingly, onions and garlic aren’t considered ‘pure’ vegetarian fare either. The menu comprises dishes seldom found in restaurants, not repeated for any of the meals.

In our ancestral home, the breakfasts are either idli-sambar or uppeet (upma) made of semolina or dosa-like crepes. No eggs, no wheat flour used. Bananas, custard-apples, papayas, and other local fruit is kept readily available to ‘munch’ on lest one feels hungry, for lunch can happen only after the pooja-aarti is over, and that can take up the entire day if the priest gets delayed somewhere.

Lunch and dinner have similar menus: sprouted green-gram curry, plain-cooked unseasoned daal, two vegetables, a salad of finely chopped cucumbers and its raw cousins, a gravy made with finely ground coconut, puris (deep fried puffed bread), and rice. A sweet kheer is a must. All the items,  including pickles and chutneys are served in a particular way and served on a banana leaf first to Ganapati. Only when the offering is prayed over can lunch be declared ‘open’. In conservative homes, men eat before the women.

Never mind the religious significance. The Ganapati (or Ganesh) Festival is a social one. Family members converge onto the ancestral home. Cousins meet annually, old and young catch up on news, marriages are arranged, gossip about the old and the dead get whispered from ear to ear.

Fish-loving foodies who keep the idol in their homes for eleven days suffer. Suffer? Yes. Goans can’t live without fish, you would know that by now. And so many days of strict no-fish enforced penance is a cruelty of sorts (sob). I’m told that in some homes, a small fire is lit outside a window and a bit of dried fish tossed on it. The smelly smoke encourages hunger and that’s how some die-hard fish-foodies survives. More commonly, the moment the idol is immersed, people race to the market to buy the fish that they craved for through the holy-days of the festival.

Interestingly, the food made for the goddess Gauri has a fixed menu. When she was pregnant with Ganapati, someone told me the myth goes, she didn’t like the taste of salt in her food. In her honour, in our home, the pumpkin is cooked with ginger, green chillies and grated coconut, but without salt. Since none of the food can be tasted until it’s served, all the other dishes have to be made by experienced hands. But this pumpkin dish can be made by the youngest daughter/in-law because the salt has to be added later. Perhaps this was a way to introduce the young girls to the complicated kitchen regulations they would subsequently have to handle.

The best part of the Ganapati food is the prasad. A mixture of roasted coconut-shavings and poppy-seeds mixed with cashews, raisins, sugar-crystals and a dash of honey is my favourite. The halwa made of semolina with mashed banana is another. The slightly sticky fluid made of curd, milk, ghee, honey and sugar is something one gets just a spoonful of.

The heavy downpours are over, light showers reign. Ganapati’s arrival and departure announce the harvesting of one crop and the sowing of another.

              

Diwali Cooking.

          If you live in a pukka Hindu neighbourhood, you’ll discover for the next week or so, that every wisp of smoke coming out from every kitchen window smells the same. In the run-up to India’s best known festival, there are hands moving in unison each afternoon, next to gas-stoves, roasting in shallow kadais fine semolina or gram flour, spooning in blobs of ghee to keep dryness at bay. Once the raw odour gives way to a delicious aroma, the hot utensil is taken off the stove and its contents allowed to cool until everything comfortable to touch. Then carefully measured fine sugar-powder is fingered through it and some crushed cardamom/nutmeg added for flavour before rolling little balls of the dough between the palms to make delicate-to-handle, no-need-to-bite, melt-in-the-mouth ladoos. If you can afford the ‘dry-fruit’ ingredient, then the chips of almonds/pistas/cashews/raisin will break the monotony of the bolus.

          We west-coasters don’t have milk-based sweets (like rasgullas or gulab-jamuns). Our cows/buffaloes provided just enough lactation for the last-born child, the presently pregnant daughter-in-law and the odd guest. Our ancestors therefore preferred the alternative source of edible festive goodness: grated, fresh coconut flesh. That, combined with jaggery or sugar and gently heated, becomes a slightly chewy, highly addictive stuffing for neuros. Those with roots in Maharashtra or Karnataka, make the complicated anarsey, which need pounding of fermented rice dough over four days, then rolling and frying the ‘puri’-like biscuits which are finally dipped into thick syrup and sprinkled over with poppy seeds. Less difficult to make but utterly delicious are the delicate chirotey, the Indian equivalent of strudel.

          If you’re not a ‘sweet’ person, at the other end of the festive goodies are savoury lot. If you have tough gums and teeth to match, try the kadbolees. They’re made of rice flour and butter dough, rolled and curled into small bracelets and fried to a dark brown. Or the spiky, spicy chakalis, my favourite, with talented housewives make and sell all year around these days.

          The savoury chivdas, made of roasted or deep-fried flakes of puffed rice, come in several flavours. Some are doused in masala powders, others are lightly seasoned with mustard seeds, yet others smell strongly of garlic. Some flakes are ‘nylon’ thin, others are about 2mm thick. All chivdas are generously studded with groundnuts or cashew seeds, slivers of coconut flesh, all fried before being mixed with the base of flakes. The curry-leaves and asafoetida make their not-so-subtle presence felt.

          The sequence of eating depends on the eater. If you’re having tea or some other milky hot beverage whilst spending a Diwali evening with a friend, have the sweets first, and break the taste with a savoury item. If you’re into beer or hard liquor, I’d suggest you dig into the savouries only until you’re done with the glassware, then take the sweets, one at a time.

          If you’re on a diet to lose weight to look good, postpone the programme. If your diet is restricted because of medical reasons, eat with care and under supervision. I know from experience that will-power is severely tested at this time of the year, ‘specially when cruel acquaintances place small bowls of hard to refuse shankar-parras within grasping distance.   

          Neighbours send platefuls of home-made goodies to each others’ homes. The plates contain the same items, more or less. Unusually, each item, made by different hands, tastes different. It’s true, God lies in the details. Family secrets and tricks are kept unshared. Viva la difference, I say, we eaters don’t mind at all.

          If you have space to spare in your stomach after consuming all the Diwali goodies, remember to get yourself invited for a Diwali breakfast or lunch. Traditional stuff that never makes it to restaurant menus includes a variety of recipes that use puffed or flattened rice, and curries made with that day’s catch. Since Diwali stretches over four days, you won’t run out of meals/hosts.

          Every time you feel guilty about the calories consumed, stop yourself from thinking further. Take a deep breath, figure out which window the nicest smell is coming from (this is a difficult exercise, so if you can’t decide, just choose the home closest to you) and walk into that house. It’s Diwali, everyone’s welcome to visit and share and eat what’s made. In return, you have to give friendship. ‘Tis the season to be jolly, Indian-style.

Goans Eat Fish-Food

         One of my great-aunts was sponsored by a dollar-earning nephew to visit several countries that she had on her wish-list. Even today that’s an expensive gift, but before cable television came into our lives, this was a very, very big thing. Silk saris were packed into wheel-less, hard suitcases (yes, that long ago, when mobile phones were still decades away) and foreign currency was tucked away in the various pockets of a custom-made wallet that also held her passport and other documents.

         She returned after the spring and summer months were over in the northern hemisphere. She’d toured museums, attended operas, window-shopped at some of the most expensive outlets of sophisticated brands, sampled not less than ten different kinds of cuisine and made temporary home in New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Hongkong, Sydney.  On return, we found her accent had changed: just a teeny bit, but she no longer called the green notes doallaaars nor the capital of England Lerndern.

         We asked her about her experiences and this is what she told us: “The lobsters in Paris were exemplary. No garlic, no tamarind, they were cooked with milk and cheese, but it was stuff to drool over. The mackerals in Dubai were bigger than the Karwari variety, but as tasty. There were dried Bombay Ducks, too, in the market there. Catfish, if well marinated and cooked into curry, tasted as good as the shevto. The crabs, huge fellows, weren’t as tasty, but so fresh, and so fleshy.” The entire conversation revolved around food, fish dishes in particular.  No mention of music, architecture, clothes.

         Nothing has changed since my childhood. My mother still gets phone calls from her friends in and around Panaji… and some even beyond Goa’s borders… telling her what they ‘got’ in the market that morning and how they’re planning to cook lunch/dinner. Prawns, tiny ones, medium ones, big ones, made with brinjals, into curry or pickled. The small silvery vellyo cooked into sukke and eaten with the bone. Chinese and Thai recipes may have come into our lives, but they are still intruders in our kitchens, to be entertained occasionally.

         When we visit cousins or friends, we are invited to see the size of the surmai or viswon that they bought that morning. Like many Goan men, I had an uncle who would buy certain fish just so that someone else may not, at whatever cost. An ego thing, like whose car overtakes faster, who sees the first show of a film or eats the first mango of the season.  

         With a sigh the previous generation moans the loss of certain kinds of oysters, kalwan which have become extinct. The taste of ‘artificially’ bred marine life just isn’t like the original stuff, they claim.

         Those unaccustomed to coconut oil see visions of hair coming out of their mouth when they are told the crisp fish surrounded by salad in the plate before them was fried in it. A non-coastal friend who wanted to try dried fish took a sniff of the raw stuff, turned his head away instantly and said: “You mean you people eat that?” I took offence. There’s nothing as satisfying as a sukk-bandya-kismor with rice pez and solan kodi on a monsoon afternoon.

         How we’ve evolved. People have started eating tuna, once thrown away from the rapon as a worthless fish. Opposite the Pilerne industrial estate, like several points in Goa, fish-vendors sell fresh-water marine life: hilsa and rohu brought in from Karnataka, glistening attractively, deliciously. Some of the buyers were locals. Times they are a-changing and tastes getting more adventurous.

         Another great-aunt, when asked after a journey whether she’d had a good flight, said disapprovingly: “No fish. They served only chicken.”

         Best of all, I like the vocabulary that has emerged from this love of finny and shelly things. One young man trying to impress upon somebody just how much he loved Goan cuisine excitedly said: “Why to eat vegetables and dal, men? We eat fish-food. It’s good for the health and so-so tasty, no?”

         True, true.