Kethon Mate Kyaw at Burma Burma.

A couple of years ago, just as the monsoons rolled around, a senior journalist friend of mine mocked, “As soon as it starts raining, newspapers and food writers will look for a way to do a chai-and-pakoda story.” For Mumbaikars, pakodas are the quintessential rainy day snack, full of romantic nostalgia and comfort. But they are also a really boring cliche, as trite as bhutta – which, we must admit, has lost its charm in the last few years, ever since white makkai was replaced everywhere by the characterless and flavourless American yellow sweet corn. Yet we love hot, crisp, fatty, and salty foods when it’s wet and cold outside and damp and stuffy inside. It’s just that they don’t only have to be made of onions and besan. The city has plenty of weird and wonderful options. Here is my chai-and-pakoda story, but with a twist of course – these are seven community-specific monsoon snacks that you won’t find at every second street corner.

1. Kethon Mate Kyaw, Burma Burma (Burmese)
Kothari House, Oak Lane, near Allana Centre, M. G. Road, behind Mumbai University. Fort. Tel: 022 4003 6600.
These Burmese fritters are as ubiquitous in their home country as our street pakodas are here, but they are as far from them in flavour as Kolhapuri kheema is from shepherd’s pie. Made with strips of spring onion, thin slices of tomato, and a batter of rice flour, they are as light and delicate as tempura and make regular pakodas look stodgy. TV chef Luke Nguyen says that the ladies in Burma call them a gossiping snack, but he prefers to think of them as a drinking snack. At Burma Burma, ask for extra of their in-house tamarind dip. And yes, there’s masala chai on the menu. Rs250.

2. Goli Baje, Ram Ashraya (Mangalorean)
Bhandarkar Road, Matunga (East). Tel: 022 2410 2623.
Goli baje or “marble fries” are a no-brainer teatime snack in South Canara. Unlike other fluffy fried batter snacks, these are pleasantly chewy and stretchy, thanks to the gluten in the maida. The batter is loosened with tangy yoghurt and typically scented with coconut, curry leaves, chillies, and ginger, and served alongside coconut chutney. Ram Ashraya’s version is best had with filter kaapi, of course. Rs33.

3. Tomato Vada, Vinay Health Home (Maharashtrian)
Jawar Mansion, Dr. B. A. Jaikar Marg, Fanaswadi Corner, Charni Road. Tel: 022 2208 1211.
To all appearances, this looks like a regular batata vada from the outside. But on the inside, the potatoes mingle with crushed tomato instead of minced garlic, making this a slightly tangier, more moist, differently fragrant version of the street staple. To the best of my knowledge, this is a Vinay invention. Have it with their other speciality, piyush, or even a cup of Bournvita. Rs35; on Fridays only.

4. Potato Tuk Sichuan Pepper, First Floor Bistro (Sindhi + Sichuan)
B, Sitaram Building, D. N. Road, Crawford Market. Tel: 022 2344 2690.
Baby potatoes are fried with their skin on, smashed, and fried again (double frying is de rigueur for Sindhi tuk). But then, seconds before they are served, they are tossed with a tongue-tingling Sichuan pepper, onion, and garlic sauce. “This dish is not spicy at all,” says First Floor Bistro owner Chetan Sethi. “It just makes your mouth go numb.” Sethi, who also co-owns Zaffran, told us the success of their alu tuk chaat inspired this dish. Rs210.

5. Jhula Kachori, Trupti (Gujarati)
Palladium Mall, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel. Tel: 022 2490 2211. Also at 123 V. P. Road, Girgaum. Tel: 022 2385 0022.
Try going to Trupti and not asking about this strange-looking farsan. Strips of kachori pastry dough – made by cutting slits into a thin sheet – are wrapped around a green ball that yields no clue about its contents. We could be fooled into thinking that, like ghugras, these are filled with peas. In fact, they are filled with a sweet-spicy mix of corn (the hue, alas, is from food colouring). Rs22.

6. Kobiraji Cutlet, Kolkata Callin’ (Bengali)
Plot 285, Madhukunj Society, Sher-e-Punjab Society, near Tolani College, Andheri (East). Tel: 022 3348 7767.
Clearly, the lacy egg cutlets of Irani cafes aren’t lacy enough. Here a fine floss of fried egg arrives like a cloud on the plate and, really, it’s so perfectly wispy and floaty, and still rich and flavourful, you don’t mind lingering over it before you get to the meat nestled inside. One theory goes that the name kobiraji is a Bengali version of the word ‘coverage’ or ‘cover-egg’ and that the snack is an adaptation of the cutlet introduced in the Raj era by the British. Balance the richness with aam pora shorbot, soda and lime. Chicken Rs180, mutton Rs210, fish Rs240.

7. Sanna Pakoda, Royal Sindh (Sindhi)
Shop No.2, Ground Floor, opposite Seven Bungalows Police Chowky, Jai Prakash Road, Versova, Andheri (West). Tel: 022 4520 7410.
The menu calls these ‘Pakode – Pyaaz’, but don’t be fooled by the innocuous name. These are more like sanna pakodas, which means ‘thin pakodas’, except that they are double fried. Think of these as the koki of pakodas – the besan batter contains chopped onions, cilantro and chillies, as well as roughly ground pomegranate seeds. After the pakodas are fried once, they are cut into smaller pieces and then fried again for extra crunchiness. These pakodas make you thirsty – punctuate bites with a chaas. Rs110.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and a restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Thali at Odisha Bhawan.

Lately, every lunch meeting I have in South Mumbai happens at one of two places on Pitha Street in the Fort district – Hotel Deluxe or Taste of Kerala – both of which, for those who are unfamiliar with them serve food from the state that likes to call itself God’s Own Country. I’ve been frequenting them for years now, but in the last few months, it’s been more frequent than usual. Asked to pick between the two, I can’t – it’s like eating at two different Mallu friends’s homes. There’s also something about discussing work or life with a colleague or a friend while your fingers are two knuckles deep in ghee-soaked fat red rice and sambar that, if you’re not deft, could drip off the banana leaf and on to your lap.

On one of these nap-inducing lunches, my friend Rachana Nakra told me about how, in her neighbourhood, she has such meals at Kerala House, the state bhawan or guest house where visiting officials from the state are offered accommodation and subsidised meals when they are in Mumbai. She also has them at Meghalaya House – set up for the MPs and MLAs of that state – at Grace restaurant which has been contracted to a Keralite, and is better known for its food than even Kerala House. It’s been listed on restaurant listings websites, has a Facebook page, and has been written about in a few newspapers. I’m embarrassed to admit, I’d not bothered to find out more about it until now.

Thanks to the freeway, it’s now quicker to get to Vashi from Fort than from most parts of Bandra. I spent four afternoons in the state guest houses, and my total daily commute from the southern most part of the city to Vashi every day was about one hour and twenty minutes by road.

Just like in Delhi, Mumbai’s state bhawans are mostly clustered around one neighbourhood. Here they’re just off Vashi Bridge and all walking distance from each other. Rajasthan Bhawan is under construction and looks it will turn out to be the swankiest and most modern of the lot thus far. UP Bhawan has a cafeteria, but you’ve got to stay there to be able to eat its food. Vashi already has a fairly active restaurant scene, and some of the most formidable food courts in its malls, but I decided to try out the four state bhawans that are open to everyone.

Kerala House
Plot 8, Sector 30A, behind Raghuleela Mall, near Vashi Railway Station, Vashi. Tel: 022 2781 0112.
With photographs of mohiniattam dancers and boats along backwaters on its candy pink walls, Kerala House’s restaurant tries to be a little bit more than just a cafetaria. The standard meal comes in two white plastic plates – one regular sized for a heap of Kerala rice, and another quarter plate with a haapla (the South Indian papad), a salted sundried and fried chilli, three vegetables (that are changed daily), as well as completely addictive mango pickle and a ginger-tamarind-jaggery chutney called puli inji.

Fret not – though the portions on the little plate seem like they’re bits of prasadam from a temple, you can ask for as much as your appetite desires. The rice gets topped up endlessly and alternately with a light but saliva-stimulating rasam, a hearty sambar, and a creamy tangy dahi kadhi. There are steel buckets of rice and sambar and a row of those four-bowled food service containers found at all thali places. The servers always have an eye on your plates to see what you might be missing. It’s a sadya (Malayalam for a traditional vegetarian banana leaf thali) alright, just without the complications of a banana leaf.

There are three a la carte dishes: fish fry, chicken fry, and a coconut-y fish curry that seemed more Goan than Keralan. All the jugs contain pathimugam – a pink, herbal, and supposedly miraculous drink made by soaking chips from the red hued Japan Wood tree in hot water. If nothing else, it works as a digestive – I’ll vouch for that – and you will need one here, because the food is as tasty as it is at Hotel Deluxe or Taste of Kerala, if not more. Afterwards go check out Kairali, the government crafts shop for carved wooden elephants, beautiful saris and dhotis, and Tuna’s soap which comes in its own handmade shell-shaped soap dish made from betel nut palm.

On Sunday, the variety of vegetables is doubled, a couple of snacks and payasam are added to the menu, and the banana leaf tradition is followed for the Sunday Special Sadya. Rs70 for a weekday meal; Rs120 for the Sunday special sadya.

Odisha Bhawan
Plot No.5, Sector 30A, adjacent to Kerala House, Vashi. Tel: 022 2781 3371.
Of all the state bhawan canteens, Odisha’s is the most modest and so is its food. Almost each one of the 50 diners who eat there every day has the thali which contains in addition to a main dish of vegetable, chicken or fish curry, one leafy vegetable, one dal, rice, a rice crisp, some sweet boondi, chapatis and a little bowl of lime segments, green chillies and onion wedges. Manager Deepak Pradhan says that the dishes are influenced by Bengali food, but are lightly spiced and delicately flavoured in keeping with Odiya cuisine.

On the day I visited there was saaga, a spinach dish that reminded me of Sindhi saibhaji, and a simple dal alongside the rohu macha besor (carp fish cooked in a tomato-based gravy laden with crushed mustard seeds, coriander, green chillies, garlic and coriander) in my fish thali. The besor was the highlight of the plate. I also tried a very greasy mutton kassa, or Odiya-style kosha mangsho – there are better versions of the dish available in the city. I would go back for the traditional Odiya dessert, chenna poda. This translates to burnt cheese, but is really a cheesecake made from sweetened chenna baked in the oven until the top is caramelised. Take it home and pop it into the fridge overnight; it squeaks between your teeth the way rasgullas sometimes do, and it’s pretty delicious cold. I don’t know of any other place in the city that makes them.

The handicrafts shop alongside, in the same building, has painted wooden images of Jagannath, cane paintings, Sambalpuri sarees, spoons made from horn, and quirky gamchas. Veg thali, Rs100; chicken thali, Rs150; fish thali, Rs180.

Assam Bhawan
First Floor, opposite Centre One Mall, Sector 30A, near Vashi Railway Station, Vashi. Tel: 99305 03714.
Behind the reception a couple of buxom tea pickers pose alongside a one-horned rhino in a mural. The TV by the stairs seems to always be on and tuned to a Sunny Deol starrer. The restaurant on the first floor of this bhawan is named Bhogdoi, after a tributary of the Bramhaputra river that flows through Assam. It’s run by a Shetty, but thankfully employs a few Assamese cooks to churn out Asomiya dishes and thalis alongside Bengali ones, as well as some mutton and chicken sukke, and Chindian fare. A popular starter is the lurid chicken fry chilly topped with tons of curry leaves. It tastes as it sounds.

While the poultry was satisfyingly spicy and flavourful, the vegetables in the Asomiya jeera zaluk (cumin and black pepper) chicken thali were standard-issue and slightly overcooked. It’s much better to order a la carte here. Get the katla fish sarson with a kick-in-the-teeth snap of ground mustard seeds and oil, and the rohu fish kaliya in which a thick gravy rich with onion, ginger, garlic, garam masala, and chillies occasionally provides pops of sweetness thanks to the raisins hidden in it. Asomiya thalis from Rs65 to Rs150; Bangla thalis from Rs110 to Rs190.

Meghalaya House
Government Circuit House, Plot No.25, adjacent to Assam Bhawan, Sector 30A, Vashi. Tel: 022 2781 5532.
The folk at the reception may be wearing Meghalayan traditional dress, but at Grace restaurant, don’t expect jadoh, momos, or any pickled bamboo shoot – just a whole variety of very enjoyable non-vegetarian (and some vegetarian) food from Kerala, as well as sadya on Sundays.

Ask manager P. K. Mathew aka Baby what to order. After I went to pay up for a meal of a plate of appams (three pieces) with vegetable Chettinad and rabbit roast, I got a disapproving slow shake of the head from him and a lesson on how to do appams right. Then I was made to sit down and try Malabar parotta and beef curry, handed a small take-away portion of amber-hued, coriander-laced, coconut-y chicken mappas (coconut curry) with instructions to have it with fresh appams from one of the Pitha Street places, and educated on the finer differences between palappam (made with coconut) and kalappam (made with coconut toddy).

The meat on the bunny was tough and gamey, but the roast gravy had all the tingling burn that I expected from it. Grace’s extensive menu also lists Kerala preparations of quail, mussels, clams, squid and karimeen (pearlspot fish). At breakfast they serve dosas and the steamed rice and coconut preparation puttu. From Rs60 for sambar to Rs280 for crab roast masala.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and a restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

A month ago, after the rains arrived, I received a text from a friend asking me where he can get some bhutta. His wife is pregnant, and at that moment, she had a desperate bhutta craving. He was on a hunt.

I had previously suggested the small thelas outside Premsons department store in Breach Candy. When I lived in that neighbourhood they always had some, along with singada (water chestnut), and overpriced imported fruit. A few days later, my friend and I had another conversation.

Dad-to-be: Mrs wants her corn fix. The Breach Candy guy doesn’t seem to sell them any more.
Me: Huh!? Did he say why?
Dad-to-be: I was too dejected to ask. He kept pushing the yellow stuff.
Me: You’ll get some at Prarthana Samaj Market. And maybe at Grant Road Market.
Dad-to-be: Nah, none at Grant Road Market.
Me: Many farmers may have switched to golden corn. Possibly more profitable.
Dad-to-be: Just to mess with my life, surely.

I grew up in a flat on Marine Drive, a vantage spot to enjoy the city’s rains. These were a few of my favourite monsoon memories: being sent home early from school because of torrential rains and inevitable floods; taking a notebook to the lake-like gymkhanas and ripping out pages to make a thousand paper boats; and walking on the promenade with my parents eating bhutta, and enjoying the mist from the surf before it started vomiting trash on to the pavement. My rubber flip-flops would sometimes float away in the streaming water underfoot, because I was paying more attention to the freshly roasted bhutta steaming in a husk, tightly held in my grip, and sparkling with salt and lime, and speckled with red chilli powder.

Then, bhutta meant the white, not-too-sweet, slightly starchy but deeply aromatic makkai, the only corn we knew of in Bombay for decades. So these days, I find it very disconcerting that we have to hunt it down. In the last few years, at bhuttawalas, in markets, and in restaurants, white bhutta has become a novelty. There are a few bhuttawalas in Colaba’s Strand Market and all of them predominantly roast yellow corn, at best stocking only four or five ears of white corn. If I ask them for white corn, they say, “If you want it then I can get it for you, but nobody wants to eat it any more. Everybody only has the yellow ones.” In markets across the city, I hear the same from yellow corn sellers. For me, the sweetness of yellow corn just doesn’t doesn’t work with roasting, lime, salt and chillies.

Last week, I went to Prathana Samaj vegetable market to figure out why this was happening. I met Datta, a man whose entire family helps run a makkai stall on the street. He does most of the sales; his tiny, always-smiling, toothless mother plucks or slices the kernels from the cobs, and his wife joins her in winnowing them until the ground around them is a carpet of soft, fluffy chaff. He was pointed out to me by sellers of yellow corn, as the neighbourhood expert on bhutta. The Dattas’ inventory is more white than yellow.

He told me that the flood of yellow corn in our markets is due to simple economics. When it first became popular in India less than a decade ago, American sweet corn was exotic. We liked its sweeter flesh, its crunchier, larger kernels, its pleasing golden-yellow colour. Demand increased, and farmers, traders, and retailers figured out that it made more sense for them to deal in sweet corn. Yellow corn yields two to four ears per plant, white only one. Yellow corn cobs are larger, so it takes fewer cobs to fill a gunny sackful for sale. A 250 gram plastic bag of yellow corn kernels is about the same size as a 350 gram bag of white corn kernels. Yellow corn grows year round, white corn is seasonal.

Yellow corn, the super-sweet variety we have, travels better, barely converting any sugar to starch, tasting good even ten days after it is harvested. In contrast, white corn becomes unpleasantly starchy in just a couple of days.“People who cook with corn, mostly Gujaratis, use white corn,” said Datta. “And then some people have diabetes, so they don’t eat sweet corn any more.” While white corn is more likely to be found in the Gujarati pockets of the city – Prarthana Samaj, Matunga and occasionally even Breach Candy – I doubt Datta’s second statement would be endorsed by a doctor.

“Wherever you have religious food or traditional recipes, they call for white corn, “ said food blogger and consultant Rushina Munshaw Ghildiyal, who has been concerned about its disappearance for a while. “Like rushi ki bhaji, a mix of corn and leafy greens made on Rushi Panchami.” (Which is the day after Ganesh Charturthi, and the auspicious day from which Ghildiyal gets her name.) She was recently delighted to find a company in Himachal Pradesh that is canning white corn. Gujarati corn khichdi, after all, just doesn’t taste the same with yellow corn.

However, all corn, from the blue-purple and red varieties found in and around Delhi and the North East, to the white monsoon staple of Mumbai, and the hybrid yellow American sweet corn that now dominates our markets, is the same, just with genetic mutations that lead to different characteristics of colour, sweetness and size. Yellow corn for example contains genes that give it more beta carotene and that colour. Most yellow corn comes from companies that supply seeds to farmers. These seeds are what scientists call F1 (or first generation) hybrids, a combination of two previously inbred lines. The hybrid combines the best characteristics of both parents, but is unable to reproduce effectively. (Mules are F1 hybrids of horses and donkeys. Most mules are sterile.)

To keep growing yellow corn, a farmer needs to keep buying seeds, as opposed to planting seeds set aside from the previous crop. This makes the farmer’s work easier because it yields a perfectly crafted crop with high resistance to disease and pests; many desirable characteristics including sweetness and size; consistent quality, and often a ready market. But it also makes the farmer completely dependent on the company that sells him the seeds. Organic veggie suppliers Hari Bhari Tokri use only open varieties of seeds, or seeds that are naturally cross-pollinated or self-pollinated in a field. “Hari Bhari Tokri wants to make our farmers independent and self-sustainable,” said co-founder Ubai Hussein. “We still haven’t found yellow corn seeds that meet this criteria.”

The ratio of yellow to white corn sold at the Agriculture Produce Market Committee market in Vashi, I found out, is 10:1. According to grain trader Vijaykumar Shirke, on average, for every 4,000 sacks of corn sold in a day, about 400-500 are white; the rest are yellow. Shirke said that farmers are no longer interested in white corn because yields are low, it takes more work, and has much lower profit margins. Additionally, yellow corn seeds are more easily available than those of white corn. Indeed, white corn has become much more expensive than yellow corn. Most vendors in Prarthana Samaj are currently selling yellow kernels for Rs20 per pouch, and white for Rs50.

I closed my investigations into corn after chatting with Nameet Modekurti, the co-founder of First Agro, a ‘zero-pesticide’ farm in Karnataka’s Cauvery Valley. Modekurti said that he foresees a future when white corn is no longer sold in our markets. “Yellow corn is a result of manufactured demand, just like mineral water,” he said. “Seed companies have taken away the farmer’s power and given him convenience, but most times the farmer doesn’t even know where the seed comes from. Even worse, our farmers have no idea of seed diversity [and therefore no desire to preserve it].”

He compares the situation to that of rajgira and raagi, both regional staples that fell out of fashion, until people noticed their nutritive value, or got into wheat-free diets, and perhaps even thought about the likely loss of diversity in their food. When rajgira and raagi came back into our cities, they came back in a posher and pricier avatar, in our cereals and processed foods. “Our food choices are being made for us, by retailers, by companies, and they are affecting our food patterns,” said Modekurti.

I’ve been putting together a database of bhuttawalas and bhajiwalas who sell white corn. I have found a few that make it available all year round somehow, drawing from the harvests of both the rabi and kharif farming cycles across the country. And last week, after completing this column, I fixed a dinner of two cobs of roasted white corn, each rubbed with half a lime dipped in red chilli powder and salt. The kernel-less cobs will flavour the stock for a soup soon. There are a few kilos of white corn sitting in my freezer for future meals.

WHERE TO GET WHITE CORN ALL YEAR ROUND
Rajesh Corn Corner
Plot No.196, Road No.3, Jawahar Nagar, Goregaon (West). Tel: 98921 11234/99691 64450. Open daily, from 3pm to 10pm.
Rs20 for roasted white corn, Rs 70 for “cocktail” corn with a variety of sauces and toppings.

Datta
Prarthana Samaj Vegetable Market (Kelkar Market). Tel: 93231 11513/77385 46030 (home delivery available from Backbay Reclamation to Lokhandwala).
1 kilo of white corn kernels, Rs200 for knife-cut and Rs300 for hand-plucked. Delivery charges apply.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and a restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Some of my old favourite bhajiwalas have become favourites because I can walk over to their stalls, gawk at the contents of their baskets, point and say, “What is this?”, and know that they won’t laugh at my ignorance. At least not to my face. They’re stoic, but generous with information. Maybe it’s because they figured out very early in our association that if I don’t recognise something immediately, it’s pretty much guaranteed I will buy it.

Over the last month, while hunting for white corn, I found there’s a lot to gawk at during this time of the year (the end of the monsoon). Last week, I went shopping with two chefs and a fellow food writer, and all of us came back with large bags full of stuff that we did not have on our shopping lists when we started out. Since our bhaji market visit, we’ve been swapping notes on our experiments with bhindi as long as our forearms, cucumbers that are obscenely large (I’d like to say that some fashion models have thighs that are thinner), and limes that you can make sharbat from without adding sugar.

The market is full of weird and wonderful things at the moment, some are here for a few weeks, some for a few months. They’re all at their prime right now, so this is an excellent time to take them home and try something new. Indeed, some are weirder than others, but all of them are truly wonderful.

Ambada
Bhajiwalas pronounce the name of this fruit like ‘Lambada’ but without the L. These green, olive-shaped fruits, also known as Indian hog plum, have very large fibrous pits, a raw mango aroma, a slightly astringent feel on the palate, and a mouth-puckering tartness that barely softens as they ripen. I was introduced to them only three weeks ago in Colombo thanks to my friend and fellow food writer Vidya Balachander, who recommended the kottu roti at Hotel de Pilawoos, a chain offering cheap and quickly-prepared local grub. There, on a poster were photographs of glasses full of wood apple juice, soursop juice, nelli (amla) juice and ambarella juice, among two dozen others. I picked ambarella, which, I later found out, is called ambada in the Konkan. Its juice begs to be put into delicious cocktails; it’s tart and aromatic, but with a pleasing palate-cleansing finish.

Later that night in Colombo, I had The Green Hornet, a drink of ambarella and arrack, at a bar called The Loft Lounge, and it was exactly as refreshing and delicious as I had imagined it would be. That day ambarella became one of the many reasons to come back to Sri Lanka. I heard there that ambarella is used as a souring agent along the Konkan coast, but that it is not as common as it is in Sri Lanka, and not as popular as kokam is in India. I did not expect to find the fruit in Mumbai’s markets, much less a few weeks after I had gotten instantly addicted to it. Our local variety is a close cousin of the Sri Lankan one, very similar in taste, but more fibrous and with a larger seed and not as much flesh.
How to use it: As with most sour, firm fruits, ambada is great for pickling and making chutneys, or tossing into a kadhi for some tartness. The fibrousness can be conquered easily, as in this recipe for gojju, a vegetable dish from Karnataka. (Don’t confuse the ambada fruit with ambada bhaji – the latter is sour sorrel leaves, or khatta bhaji.)
Available until: The third week of September.

Arbi ka patta/Colocasia leaves
The purple-edged, purple-veined and purple-stemmed arbi ka patta or colocasia leaves are available through the year to make Gujarati patra, Parsi patrel, and Konkani patrode  – all variations of a spicy roulade made with the massive leathery leaves that give the elephant’s-ear plant its name. Over the next month, look for the ones which have pale green edges and veins, and just a touch of purple on the stem. These leaves have a suede finish and are much more tender, and more suited for stir fries and stews.
How to use them: This is a good recipe to start with because it also uses raw peanuts – the best, most tender, juicy, and sweet of which are in season right now.
Available until: The third week of September.

Bada bhindi
In 2012, a UAE resident wondered if a bhindi growing in his garden might find a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. It was definitely longer than 13 inches, the size of the record holder at the time. In Mumbai’s markets these days, we get bada bhindi, or the pale green, slightly firmer, and slightly-less mucilaginous variety of bhindi, which can be of similar lengths.
How to use it: Bada bhindi is fantastic for stuffing or pickling.
Available until: The first week of September.

Bada kakdi
These yellow and green giant kadkis aren’t fat, round Madras or Mangalore cucumbers. From the outside, they look like bottle gourds (cucumbers and gourds belong to the same family), but they are denser and have more bite to them, with a more concentrated flavour. They also have fewer but larger seeds.
How to use it: I bought an 18-inch long, three-inch wide cucumber, which was enough to prepare a cucumber salad for a family of four and still have some left to make a cucumber dosa for each of them. Next I plan to make cucumber idlis and steam them in turmeric leaves (see below).
Available until: The first week of September.

Bhople ka phool/Pumpkin flowers
I put up a picture of a bunch of these on Instagram and Facebook and I got messages from friends from sundry communities. An Italian expat banker suggested that I stuff them with mozzarella and anchovies and batter fry them, a few Bengalis said that they fry them after coating them in a pakoda batter containing nigella seeds, and someone else sent me a photo on Instagram of their blossom fritters flecked with sesame seeds. The flowers taste slightly sweet and smell of pumpkin and pumpkin seeds.
How to use them: A fresh bunch could be tossed into a salad, or made into a thoran.
Available until: Whenever it stops raining.

Haldi ka patta/Turmeric leaves
Long, dark green and sturdy, turmeric leaves smell and taste fantastic. They’re spicy, astringent, fragrant, slightly bitter and anything wrapped in them absorbs their aroma.
How to use them: You could steam or bake fish in them. They’re also used to make patoello, a traditional sweet made in Goan homes for the feast of Our Lady of Assumption, which was on August 15. See recipes here and like here.
Available until: January.

Kantola
A staple for some, and an oddity for others, kantola is known as kankoda in Gujarati, phagali in Konkani, kakrol in Bengali. A spiny gourd, it has a slight, entirely pleasant bitterness that’s milder than that of karela.
How to use it: While it can be cooked in every way that karela is, my favourite kantola dish is a version of this rava-coated fried snack.
Available until: The end of September.

Sharbati limbu
While looking (in vain) for the scientific name for this thick, rough-skinned citrus fruit, I came across a couple of old documents on the internet. One of them was an inventory of plants received by the United States Department of Agriculture in 1953. It says that sharbati limbu was received from Ganeshkhind Fruit Experiment Station in Bombay State on February 3, 1954. Sharbati limbu is described as coming from a “small medium-sized spreading tree, thorny, with small loose-skinned sour fruits”. Indeed, compared to the tight, glossy skin of our yellow limes, the skin of sharbati limbu could be described as ‘loose’. At the market, I asked the bhajiwala to cut one open. I bit into it, tipped the juice into my mouth and ate part of the flesh. This limbu has a much softer acidity than that of yellow limes, and has a natural sweetness. It’s like drinking concentrated limeade, but straight from a lime, no sugar necessary. The flesh and juice are much darker in colour, more cool orange than light lemon. Michael Snyder, another friend and fellow food writer who was shopping with me that day, ate one as well and said that they remind him of Mexican limes, and that they would make very good margaritas.
How to use it: I’m planning to put segments of the fruit in a salad, make a syrup from the zest for dessert, use the limes for pickles and pie, and sprinkle the juice on kachumber, and in green chutney.
Available until: The end of September.

A thali at Murali’s.

There aren’t many exciting reasons to go to Andheri East. It’s not the hippest of neighbourhoods, and few parts of it are easy on the eye. Unless they live or work there, most people don’t look forward to a day in the neighbourhood. It’s always crowded, noisy, and dusty and negotiating it is always slow. But after spending some time there last week, I can’t wait to go back. In fact, I am going to go back this week, and again this weekend, and I think you should too.

One conversation changed my mind about the area, and a few meals made the commute worth the effort and inconvenience. I was standing at the cash counter of a tiny restaurant, paying for an excellent meal of chicken pepper fry, egg roast, and parotta, when I asked the cashier, “Why Marol?” He said that Saki Naka and its surrounding neighbourhoods, Marol, Chakala, and the western fringe of Powai, have the highest density of restaurants serving the cuisine of Kerala in the city. Like most townies who have grown to love them, I turn to Taste of Kerala or Hotel Deluxe in Fort for my fix of sadya, or karimeen pollichattu with appam, kappa with meen curry, puttu with kadala curry, and more. I started looking farther afield a few weeks ago, when my friend Megha Mahindru and her husband Mohan Kumar, who is from Thrissur, told me about the meals they have been having in the area, and recommended a couple of places. I kept looking around and found half a dozen more.

As I ate my way, appam by appam, parotta by parotta, through the neighbourhood, I heard about even more places. “Lots of these places are good only for bachelors,” said one cashier. “They are not good for high families, they are mess-type places.” Another owner told me that 50 years ago, Malayalis made up most of the population of Saki Naka, “almost 90 per cent”. The area wasn’t as crowded then, and rents were low. The rest is the classic story of migration to metropolises in search of opportunity. A few people moved from the state, loved it, told their friends and families about it and then facilitated their move.

According to one manager, the nearby SevenHills Hospital on Marol Maroshi Road and the Holy Spirit Hospital on Mahakali Caves Road employ a sizeable number of Keralite staff members. Similarly, the Larsen & Toubro and the Indian Institute of Technology campuses, both in Powai, respectively have a large number of employees and students from the state. This not only means that the restaurants have a ready market, but also that they need to keep their meals home-style and affordably priced. Not all of them are great, especially the ones that have multi-cuisine menus, but all of them are worth at least one visit because they each have a few dishes they do well. Onam is on Sunday, September 7. I know which part of town I’m hitting this year for onasadya.

Benzy’s
Hotel Benzy Palace, Vijay Nagar, Marol Maroshi Road, Andheri (East). Tel: 93226 79465/022 3260 6382. Open daily, from 8am to midnight.
Benzy’s is in a hotel, has four dining rooms, seats up to 180 people at a time, and has a multi-cuisine menu that runs for pages. Last Onam, they served 1,200 onasadya, parcels included, and every day they feed over 100 people. The food is tweaked to please the masses, and for speed and convenience. So our karimeen pollichattu, while pretty tasty, seemed to have been cooked and then wrapped in a banana leaf for effect (instead of being seared after wrapping). The peppery kakka ularthiyathu (sauteed clam), a dish served at most toddy shops, was made better by a squirt of lime. Chef Thomas Zacharias, a Syrian Christian from Kerala, accompanied me through some of the meals. He rated the duck roast as the best dish, even if the meat had been chopped somewhat messily. It was slightly sweet from onions, warm and thick from the fried spices and fun to eat with both appam and parotta. Among their bestsellers is Kerala biryani, sweet with raisins, cashews, onions and pineapple. Prices range from Rs15 for a parotta to Rs290 for duck roast; seafood priced as per size.

Just Kerala
Hotel Samraj, First Floor, Chakala Road, Andheri (East). Tel: 87679 03005. Open daily, from 11am to 3pm and 7pm to midnight.
At Just Kerala, the beef dishes are available off the menu, because they don’t want to offend some guests, but regulars who love them make sure they sell well. The veg thali of rice, a large bowl of sambar, rasam, bottle gourd pachadi, vermicelli payasam, stew, carrot and bean poriyal, pickle and papadum made a pleasant enough lunch. The curry of the kappa meen curry was delicious. Prices range from Rs20 for a plate of appams to Rs400 for duck roast; seafood priced as per size.

Murali’s
First Floor, above Tunga bus stop, between DTDC Centre and Fast Food & Chinese, near L&T Gate No.7, Saki Vihar Road, Powai. Tel: 99307 83012/99875 19741. Open daily, from 9am to 9pm.
The landmark is a bus top. It’s hard to find, unless someone takes you there or you call the owner and he sends his little pig-tailed daughter downstairs to look out for you. When you make your way up via a precarious narrow metal stairway, more like a glorified ladder, you enter Sudha and Muralidharan Velayudhan’s crowded, almost shanty-like, one-room and kitchen home. Murali takes orders and serves, Sudha cooks in her tiny kitchen where she prepares 12 to 15 items a day. The daily changing menu is decided by the both of them, depending on what’s available in the market and what they feel like making. Among bags of veggies hanging from hooks on the walls, a desk with a school bag, a small shrine, and other personal effects, is a framed certificate from restaurant listings website Burrp! that says Murali’s is “a humble place with a large heart for serving food”. For Rs150, I had two pieces of delicious chicken nadan curry, two near-perfect appams, kanava (squid) thoran, a slightly chewy and gamey beef ularthiyathu, fried chicken, fried surmai steak, perfectly cooked fat-grained red rice, sambar, rasam, moru kachiyathu (chilled sour yoghurt curry), bean and shallot mezhkkuvaratti (stir fry), and a drumstick and potato curry. There was a stream of customers through my meal, and they were clearly all regulars. Murali said he feeds about 20 people on an average day. For Onam, he has planned a menu of 22 items. Prices range from Rs50 for a rice plate to Rs160 for a fish thali.

Santosh Cafe
Laxmi Chawl, Gokhale Nagar, opposite IIT Main Gate, Powai. Tel: 98335 76875/98332 40503. Open daily, from 7am to 11am.
For 30 years, Satish Narayan’s dad Narayan Rauni ran a “mess-type” place near Kanjurmarg. Then father and son moved to Powai because it’s a “posh area”. It’s been 25 years since and the place, even though it’s tiny and basic, is popular. Santosh Cafe is known for its biryani counter, from which it serves Mumbai-ised Kerala biryani, which is less sweet and more spicy. Through the day, people stop by for snacks such as sweet bonda, sugiyan (a batter-fried tea time snack with a coconut, jaggery and mung bean filling), parripu vada (dal vada) and pazham pori (banana fritters). Breakfast starts at 11am with appam, idli, dosa, vada, puttu, idiyappam, kadala curry, and stew. Lunch is a simple sadya with two veggies, rasam, moru kachiyathu, sambar, rice, pickle and papadum. Biryani is only served after 5pm. Satish said their bestsellers are all sorts of fish and beef fry. For Onam, they’re offering a menu of 20 items. Prices range from Rs50 for a rice plate to Rs100 for a fish thali.

Spice of Kerala
Shop No.3, Marol Maroshi Road, near Uttam da Dhaba, at the junction of Military Road, Marol, Andheri (East). Tel: 022 6526 2172/98334 54006. Open daily, from 11am to 10.30pm.
Call ahead before you go to Spice of Kerala. Our first choice of dishes was not available at the time we visited. For example, kappa meen (roughly mashed tapioca with fish) curry is available only after lunch hours, from 3pm. The place may not look like much either, just another tiny spot open to the street, with less than a dozen seats, and poorly-taken photographs of dishes on the walls. It’s not surprising that a good part of the business at this three-year-old eatery is takeaways and deliveries. But we still enjoyed the flavourful chicken pepper fry, egg roast and flaky, soft parottas. The manager said that their most popular dishes are fish fry and fish curry, and that their Onam menu will feature 21 dishes. Prices range from Rs10 for a plate of idiyappams or appams to Rs160 for a fish biryani; seafood priced as per size.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and a restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

The BMC is worried about us getting headaches and cancers.

They want to be sure, that if we do get them, it at least won’t be because they didn’t manage our consumption of monosodium glutamate or MSG, which is better known in India by Ajinomoto, the name of a brand that sells it here. Two weeks ago they announced that by Monday, September 15, they plan to decide whether to ban MSG in our food, to regulate it, or not interfere with it at all.

There hasn’t been a study, and no data is available yet, but experts still feel qualified to say that there could be as much as 5,000 milligrams of MSG in a plate of chicken Manchurian made at a street food stall. If they do decide to regulate it, “there will be routine inspections to find out whether the guidelines are being flouted”.

The same news report states that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considers MSG safe as per the Food Safety Standards Act 2006, and quotes joint commissioner Suresh Annapure, who says there is no restriction to its consumption under the Act and that they “cannot take any action against food vendors who use it”.

Glutamate is the salt of glutamic acid, which in turn is a naturally occurring amino acid and a building block of protein. Monosodium glutamate or MSG is a glutamate stabilised with ordinary salt and water. The proportion of sodium in MSG, 12 per cent, is far less than the proportion of sodium in common table salt, 39 per cent. At first, the idea of 5,000 milligrams of monosodium glutamate in a single dish – the amount of MSG the unnamed experts claim is in a plate of chicken Manchurian – sounds horrifying. But it doesn’t when you realise that 5,000 milligrams is only 5 grams, which is an eighth of the 40 grams or 40,000 milligrams of glutamate that our body produces on average every day.

It is also naturally present in most foods such as tomato, cheese, meat, mushrooms, peas, and milk, and is responsible for the rich, savoury flavour many of us love and some of us know as umami. One cup of tomato juice contains about one gram of glutamate. Human breast milk contains ten times more glutamate than cow’s milk. Most of us consume a lot more MSG in our everyday food, up to 15 grams, than we do as an additive.

All MSG is naturally derived. Professor Kikunae Ikeda, who invented it in 1908, extracted it from kombu after realising that the seaweed’s naturally occurring glutamic acid was the secret to umami-rich deliciousness in a broth made by his wife. Today it is made by the fermentation of carbohydrate-rich vegetables (corn, beets, wheat), using a method that is not very different from the production of vinegar or yoghurt.

Professor Lloyd Jackson Filer Jr, a doctor and researcher, stated in his paper ‘A Report of the Proceedings of an MSG Workshop Held August 1991’, that the body cannot distinguish between glutamates that come from 100 per cent tomato paste, for example, or from a sprinkle of Ajinomoto in our stir fry. It processes both in the same way. Glutamic acid is present in every tissue in our body. It exists in our brain and plays an important role in memory and learning. What has not yet been definitively proved is that monosodium glutamate is harmful for us. According to this report in the The Smithsonian magazine, the United Nations, the American FDA, and governments of various countries, including those of Australia, Britain and Japan, have deemed it safe.

None of the claims made about MSG being unsafe are scientifically supported. One study found MSG to cause some temporary unpleasant effects (headaches, flushing, numbness and tingling) in a few sensitive people if they consumed large quantities of it on an empty stomach. In recent years, chefs, food scientists, and food writers have defended MSG. Food science writer Harold McGee has debunked the myth of the Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. American chef David Chang says that MSG’s vilification is based on myth and not fact. In his book It Must’ve Been Something I Ate, venerated food writer Jeffrey Steingarten asks, “If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn’t everyone in China have a headache?” The New York Times has also tried to provide some clarity.

One thing is certain: MSG makes food much more delicious, so it may make people want to eat more. Which is why it is used in many processed and packaged foods in India. It’s in our packets of soup, sauces, stock cubes, cured meats, and chips. The websites of Hindustan Unilever Limited and Nestle India have pages explaining that MSG has not been proven to be harmful to humans. On packaged food, it’s usually listed by other names: flavour enhancer, E621, hydrolysed vegetable protein and soy protein isolate. Unsurprisingly though, the BMC is not as concerned about multinational food brands as it is about local restaurants.

“I don’t think they will be able to implement the ban,” says Aniruddha Bandekar, head chef at Tilt All Day. “It’s a widely used product. The ban will take years. Chain restaurants use it, fine dining restaurants use it. You can use it for Indian food as well, because it enhances the taste of anything. Soya sauce is equally harmful because of the high sodium content. People have a mental block against, it’s a mindset.”

Most of the Chinese food we get in India is very high in salt, oil and cornstarch – an excess of any of these would make any of us uncomfortable. Indeed, some people are sensitive to MSG, but that percentage has been found to be minuscule. There is no proof that MSG hurts us or causes loss of life, unlike many other things that deserve attention from the BMC including our pot-holed roads, shrinking open spaces, and poor garbage and sewage disposal. Banning MSG would be another misdirected move, much like the hygiene regulations of the Food Safety and Standards Act about which there is still no clarity.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and a restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

A few months ago, we had coffee from an estate called Kalledevarapura delivered to our home, ground just a couple of days before specifically for our brewing method of choice, the French press. The website of Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters promised us a medium dark roast with a nutty chocolate finish, cranberry overtones and an aroma that would make us feel like we had walked into a baker’s shop.

On Saturday, during TheIndianBean.com‘s coffee tasting pop-up at Bombay Shirt Company in Kala Ghoda we compared nutty, sweet, caramel-like coffee from a farm in Coorg to another one with refreshing acidity and fruity notes from the Biligirirangan hills 200 kilometres away. Before an evening show of Finding Fanny last week, I checked out a menu featuring coffees from estates in Columbia, Costa Rica, and from the Kathlekhan Estate in Chikkamagaluru, Karnataka at Cafe Coffee Day’s The Square outlet at CR2 mall in Nariman Point.

How did we, a predominantly chai-drinking nation that exports about 70 per cent of our coffee production, and consumes mostly blended coffee or the more convenient instant coffee from the stuff that stays here, suddenly start talking so much about single estate coffee, often using romantic words that are generally reserved to describe wine?

In the last couple of years, coffee drinkers in Mumbai seeking out beans from specific plantations and regions (as opposed to generic blended, bulk coffee) have had at least three independent purveyors and two chains to pick from. These are purveyors who visit farms, meet farmers, seek out award-winning beans, and are keenly interested and sometimes even involved in how the beans are produced. On their websites, each single estate coffee is described in a paragraph or two, with details about the bean, the estate, the region, and the characteristics of the cup it yields. It also makes business sense, as seen by the growth of coffee chains and coffee consumption, which has overtaken tea consumption in India.

Coffee made its way into India when traveler and Sufi saint Baba Budan smuggled in seven green coffee beans strung around his waist around 1670. He carried them from Yemen to Mysore while on pilgrimage, and planted them on what are now known as Bababudangiri hills (giri means hill) in Karnataka. According to the Coffee Board of India, it remained a “garden curiosity” But coffee really only arrived when the British set up commercial plantations in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1942, the Coffee Board of India was set up and managed by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and it took charge of coffee promotion, marketing and trade in India, buying from farmers in bulk, with a focus on exports.

Coffee became a commodity, a way to build our forex reserves. Most Indian coffee exports were and are still used by MNCs to make instant coffee and blended coffee (two or more varieties mixed together from the same region, or several different regions). And so it continued until the liberalisation of the economy. In 1995, the Board’s marketing functions were deregulated and eventually privatised, and companies and farmers could start treating and marketing their beans as a more specialised product. If single estate coffee is catching on today, it’s because of a process that started over 20 years ago.

Single estate coffee is exactly that – coffee from a single plantation. Single origin coffee is a slightly wider term, and may or may not be from one estate, but is from one location. Almost 70 per cent of the coffee produced in India is the lower quality robusta variety, a hardier, more resilient plant that can grow at lower altitudes and higher temperatures. Arabica, which is a better quality variety, but a more delicate plant that needs high altitudes and lower temperatures, makes up most of single origin/single estate coffee in India.

The single origin coffee movement around the world is driven by both romantic and sensible considerations. The romantic aspect of it is flavour and traceability. Like with wine, chocolate and cheese, the flavour of a coffee is also derived from its terroir – it has distinct identifying flavours and aromas. Ethiopian coffee is known for its syrupy floral aromas, Brazilian coffee is known for its lingering peanutty taste, Indonesian coffee is often smoky, toasty, and savoury. Flavours therefore, also vary from estate to estate, depending on how the farmer feeds the soil and tends the plant, what the weather is like, the fermentation or processing of the beans at the farm, the grade of the beans, and even sometimes which plants grow alongside the estate. (There are also other factors that influence the flavour after it leaves the farmer – the roast, the grind, the water, the brewing method, and so on.)

“Single estate coffee has traceability,” says Matt Chitharanjan , founder of Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters. “It has a connection with the farmer. You can see all of the supply chain. Not all growers take as much care of their coffee as they should. By identifying growers who do care for their coffee you are allowing the bean to shine. It’s farm-to-table for coffee.” For aficionados, the distinctive characteristics of these different coffees are a source of pleasure and knowledge. To draw a comparison with wine, it’s like drinking a blended, unlabeled table wine versus a wine whose vintage, grape, region and vinification you’re familiar with. The single estate coffee’s flavours are best identified in a pure unadulterated brew, without milk or sugar.

“Wine has about 350 flavour notes, coffee has over 1,200 taste notes,” says Kunal Ross, founder of The IndianBean.com. “An untrained palate will get at least three or four notes in a cup – say, grapefruit, honey, caramel, and nuts. A trained palate will get about 20 to 30 notes. The whole thing is about exploration. Indian coffee has a very distinct taste. Most of our coffee is shade grown, we have different harvesting styles, a different climate, sometimes there are spices like pepper growing alongside. It is a complex and distinct product, and people are seeking it out.”

The sensible considerations include integrity of product – consumers know that the coffee is 100 per cent Arabica from a particular estate. We know exactly what is in our bag of beans, and therefore in our cup, so we can be assured of a certain level of purity and quality. More transparency also means that we can be aware of how ethically or sustainably produced the beans are, and understand the processes taken by the farmer to ensure the quality of the crop.

But of course, none of this means that single estate coffee is always better than blended coffee. Single estate coffee from a bad crop, or a badly treated crop, (or even a poorly roasted or brewed bean) will yield a bad cup, while a blend of excellent coffees from various estates and regions can be better than a merely good single estate. Single estate coffee is also often, but not always more expensive than blended, bulk, or instant coffee – it depends on the estate, supply and demand, production methods, quality, and other costs, such as transport.

Well-travelled coffee lovers with evolved palates may be developing a taste for single estate coffee, but it is still very much a niche product, barely making a dent in the market occupied by instant coffees and blended brews, which have mass appeal because of convenience, accessibility and our taste for sweet, milky caffeine. “Internationally and in South India, brewing is part of the ritual,” says Ross. “In Bombay, at home, typically someone brews it for us [or in the case of instant coffee] mixes it for us. Everybody finds freshly brewed coffee better, but people like convenience. For us it is about promoting Indian coffee, improving the quality of our coffee.”

WHERE TO BUY
Blue Tokai
Bluetokaicoffee.com

Coffeewala Roasters
Coffeewalaroasters.com

Indian Bean Co
Theindianbean.com

The Square – Cafe Coffee Day
Cafecoffeeday.com/thesquare/

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and a restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

Puja Bajaj’s hastily jotted recipe for gur papdi acquired from a friend.

When my Badi Mummy (dad’s mom) was alive, on Maha Shivratri, we’d make thandai like this: grind elaichi, jeera, saunf, khus seeds, kala mirchi, and badaam in a stone mortar and pestle that was big enough for me to sit on (until I was about two I could actually fit in it). The paste was put into a long and wide muslin cloth. Family members would take turns, two at a time (one holding each end of the cloth), to pour raw milk on the paste, rub it and press it into muslin, until the mix yielded its flavour to the milk which dripped into a large vessel below. I remember being six years old and helping out because I wanted to feel grown up. We’d make ten to 15 litres; it would take hours of labour.

When it was ready, the paste left in the muslin was so leeched, it would taste like mere fragrant sawdust. Into the deeply-infused milk would go a few pellets of bhaang from the Shiv mandir, powdered sugar, and chunks of ice. We’d have enough creamy, sweet, spicy, thandai to last us until sundown or until we passed out, whichever came first.

On Maha Shivratri, my mother makes thandai like this: she soaks spices and khus in one vessel, almonds in another, overnight. The next morning she grinds the spices in a food processor, and puts them into a muslin potli. She then dips the pouch into a vessel containing two litres of cold pasteurised milk from a plastic packet, kneads and squeezes. She peels the almonds, grind them in the processor to a creamy paste, and adds it to the milk. Sugar is added to taste, and the thandai is topped with ice.

On Maha Shivratri (and on any other day I feel like it), this is how I make thandai: Add some of my Ma’s excellent thandai concentrate to a glassful of cold milk from a carton, add ice, and drink up. Even though I have the recipe for all three styles (Badi Mummy’s plus Ma’s own regular and concentrate versions) from her, I like to get thandai sherbet from my mother’s place. It’s part of tradition, and it feels like a treat.

In the evolution of food preparation across three generations of my Shikarpuri Sindhi family, thanks to my mom, thandai makes a fitting trope. If it tastes great and makes us happy, then the technique works.

She may not know it yet, but my mother, Puja Bajaj, has taught me how to have a healthy and respectful disregard for the idea of authenticity. A recipe (and its outcome) is a flighty thing, one that changes with time and place. Being rigid about our idea of what is authentic leads to huffy closed-mindedness and worse, boring self-righteousness. (For example, Sindhi kadhi, sai bhaji, and alu tuk, each always taste different in different households.)

From right: Prakash, Puja, and Roshni Bajaj.

Instead, Ma has given me an appreciation for flavour, for tradition, and for nostalgia. Food must first taste delicious, and then to those of us familiar with the dish, its flavours must be recognisable, it must remind us of other versions we’ve had. My cooking and my interest in food is a distillation of my mom’s experience and knowledge. Her cooking was informed by two strong Sindhi women, both excellent cooks and generous hostesses – my Nani, Eshwari Ahuja from Quetta and Shikarpur, and my Badi Mummy, Savitri Bajaj from Karachi and Shikarpur. Both ran very different households.

Badi Mummy loved mutton and offal, and had a fondness for rich, fried and sweet foods. Around the time that my dad was born, she hired a migrant worker, a teenager from Andhra Pradesh, and taught him how to make everyday tomato- and onion-based vegetable dishes for a very large Sindhi family, as well as delicacies such as malai malpuas, bheja fry, kapora-gurda-kaleji (lamb testicles, kidney, and liver), dahi bhallas, winter khoya (a mithai made from thickened and dried whole milk) with dates and khus seeds, guchhi (Kashmiri morels), aani (fish roe), and Sindhi favourite palla fish (or what the Bengalis call ilish).

As a result, during my childhood, every evening tea would be accompanied by fresh, deep-fried snacks – potato salli, okra rings, whole bitter gourd – topped with salt, amchur and red chilli powder. Once a week we’d have kheema-stuffed patti samosas, heart-shaped potato pattice, and khari or nankhatai from a travelling salesman who would drop them off at our door from a large aluminum chest he carried on his head. On Sundays there would be dal pakwan with imli ki chutney, or a delicious in-house invention Badi Mummy called “chicken essence”, inspired by a recipe from a relative in Salem. This was a stew made with bone-in chicken and lots and lots of pepper and dark, warm, roasted spices and coconut (We had it with idli. I suspect it was a variation of pepper fry masala). The cook stayed on for almost 50 years, feeding us such Sindhi specialties that reminded us of Badi Mummy, even after she had passed.

My Nani, with whom I spent every summer in Bangalore – my mother whisked us away to her mother’s place as soon as school was out and brought us back only just in time for the first day of class – was a devout vegetarian, a follower of Radha Soami. She cooked for her relatively small family, employing little to no help in the kitchen. Her pickles were the stuff of fermentation fantasy. Once, tucked away far back in the kitchen, I saw a glass jar filled with very black, very soft, jujube candy-like balls, their coat of crystals sparkling. They were limes pickled in sea salt, 30 years old. Nani had carried them across several cities and homes. I tried one – it yielded on touch, a paste that delivered an implosion of concentrated citrus on the tongue.

I can eat pickles instead of bhaji in a meal, and I think it’s because of an early taste I developed for them during those summers. Saibhaji, vadi alu baingan, dhare ki kadhi, phool batasha sabzi, tidali dal (three dals mixed together and cooked), steaming ghee-lined phulkas given a quick crush before they reached the table – Nani made vegetables, grains and lentils sing. In her home, it was acceptable to wipe clean the remnants of gravy on the plate with licked fingers, and we all did. On the way back home, in the coupé my Ma and I shared on the Udyan Express, we’d have Nani-made kokis.

Puja Bajaj’s winter pickle.

If Ma’s pickles, mithais, and sherbets are in demand today, if she gets orders for them from friends of friends, it’s because of everything she’s absorbed from my Nani. Ma also excels at cooking meat and fish even though she doesn’t eat it, and she’s great at cooking meals for large groups of people with diverse tastes – this is because of the years she spent with Badi Mummy, as her eldest and closest daughter-in-law.

I became a food writer, and I went to culinary school, but when Ma tastes my food, I get a bit nervous – she is undoubtedly a far superior cook, having cooked frequently for my father’s large joint family for 35 years. She makes almost everything her mother and my Papa’s mother made with a sense of casual ease that I am years away from.

For all our family’s Sindhi-ness, Mom has also always been a keen and adventurous collector of recipes and recipe books, exchanging notes with friends when she likes something she tried at their home and vice versa. There are recipes for soda bread and Gujarati gur papdi from over 20 years ago. She has a set of hardbound Tarla Dalal books that are older than I am. She used to make Indonesian gado gado at home at a time when Waldorf salad was considered posh in Mumbai’s hotels. Every time the world’s largest floating library MV Doulos docked in Mumbai, Papa, Ma and I would pick up a few Time Life and other cookbooks that were otherwise hard to come by in Bombay then.

She would invent nutritious school lunches that tasted great even cold, such as sweet-savoury-spicy ragi parathas stuffed with a mix of crushed nuts, dried fruits, and masalas. My class lunch circle was a group of eight friends; I’d pass my dabba to one and it would almost always come back empty. My classmates would beg me to sit on the back bench with them so that they could get dibs on my dabba, before lunch break, by ducking under the table for bites.

I have a long-standing plan to get my mom to write all her recipes down for me. I suspect, if she does about five a day, it might take a year. I have several hundred food books, a collecting habit I got from my Ma, but not one of them will come close to this in context, relevance, or nostalgia.

Even before I knew I wanted to become a food writer, when I was in school and college, and then in advertising, I knew I was going to spend a lot of time preparing food and making sense of the world through it. Before I became a teen, I had tried making souffle in a microwave; I had struggled with rolling chapatis while Badi Mummy’s cook sneered and then laughed out loud at my attempts that looked like maps of continents; I had a “salsa-making party” with a building friend; and I had tried to impress my dad with a strawberry daiquiri. (I have no idea where I found a recipe – it looked like a biology lab culture, with lumps of mushy red fruit and gobs of sugar.)

I have two mortars at home – a wooden one and a steel one – and I use them almost every day. I think a swathe of muslin is as vital as a tawa. When I taught my first cooking class at Studio Fifteen, I chose to demonstrate recipes the way my grandmas made them – loaded with what they considered a high-energy superfood, ghee. When I am in the kitchen, I keep my phone close by. My Ma is on speed dial mainly to talk about food. (Don’t tell her that.) Through her, in a way, so are Badi Mummy and Nani.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and a restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.

SEE ALSO
• A Fugia Fortune: How An East Indian Matriarch Bequeathed Her Family Riches In Recipes
• A Tale Of Thaals: The Mohameds Are Upholding Bohri Traditions On A Platter
• The Bhonu Bond: Why Life Is Sweet For The Messmans Of Theobroma
• The Coast Guards: The Raos’s ‘Amchi’ Culinary Heritage
• Under The Undhiyu: The Anandwalas Recreate Gujarat On A Plate

The Mohameds at their Iftar party last year. From right: Tasneem Hatimbhai, Khozema Mohamed, Hatim Mohamed, Kehkashan Merchant, Yusuf Merchant.

Every Ramadan, Khozema Mohamed’s Muslim and non-Muslim friends and family save their appetites in anticipation of an invitation. The Mohamed family has an iftaar feast that makes guests cancel vacations or skip out early from their own family events. The folks who can’t make it must let salt be rubbed into their wounds – for days after, photos of the thaals served will flood their Facebook timelines and their Instagram feeds. They will see the kebabs they lost out on, the raan they could have scooped up with naan, and the kesar-pista ice cream on mithai that would have been theirs if they had massaged their schedule a bit.

The Mohameds are excellent hosts, but that is not the main reason why their iftaar is so special. Its success comes mainly from the undeniable truth that the family is committed to eating well. They make sure that their guests eat well too. I had an iftaar meal at their home a few months ago. We had jaggery-sweetened water with basil seeds, galouti kebabs, kheema samosas, biryani and lots more while we spoke about how the more meals change, the more they stay the same.

Hatim Mohamed at his home.

THEN
Nafisa Mohamed, Khozema’s mother, wasn’t allowed to enter the kitchen when she was growing up because the family’s cooking staff was all male. But she’s always been surrounded by food. Recipes were passed on to her orally as they had been to the other women in the family. She vividly recounts how Mohamedbhai, the family cook, would grind chutney on a flat patthar, how kheema was always hand churned, and how ghee was extracted on a Primus chulha. She said that when they lived on Saifee Jubilee Street in Bohri Mohalla in a large joint family – Khozema’s grandfather owned the building and the family had moved in before Independence –during Eid, ten litres of milk would be set aside for shir kurma. Preparations would start at 4am and it would be portioned off for distribution in the neighbourhood. This is a mohalla and Bohri community tradition: shir kurma is meant to be shared among relatives and friends, and still is, logistics permitting.

For a special snack, beef mince was tenderised with raw papaya and spiked with adrak-marcha (ginger and chilli paste) and masalas, patted flat, rolled in egg first and then bread, and deep fried in ghee. These were called ‘cream tikkas’, not because they contained any cream, but because they were tenderised to the point of creaminess. Almost every meal the family ate was served in a thaal, food was cooked in tapelas so large that you could not put your arms around them, and guests were always welcomed with Rooh Afza.

Nafisa Mohamed’s provisions journal.

The Bohris are a community of Muslims from Gujarat – they speak a version of Gujarati called Daawat ni Zubaan – and they have a range of recipes that are found only within the community. “Thri-conh samosa (triangular, thin filo-like pastry) stuffed with kheema and the labour- and time-intensive malida – made with wheat flour, ghee, sugar, gondh (edible gum) and charoli,” says Nafisa Mohamed. “I haven’t seen any other community make them the way we do.” Her idea of food has been informed both by her own mother and her husband Hatim’s mother. The sense of tradition and an understanding of traditional food – kheer, khichda, dal chawal palida – she got from her childhood home. The art of running a kitchen, she picked up from her mother-in-law, from whom she inherited a weekly stock-taking diary that she keeps to this day. It’s a decades-old record of the family’s history and tastes through lists of fruits, grains, dry fruits, nuts, vegetables and spices.

NOW
Seven years ago, Khozema’s birthday coincided with Ramadan and the coincidence created a new tradition that continues to preserve and expand on the old. That year, the family decided to host an iftaar party to mark the occasion. It has turned out to be the most significant decision in passing down the family’s long-established way of eating.  In the first year, they invited less than 20 friends and served three thaals. In the years that followed, the numbers grew to 40 then 60 people. This past Ramadan, the caterer Dilawar (whose services the family has used for over 50 years) served 15 thaals to 120 guests. “We didn’t realise non-Muslims enjoyed the food as much,” says Khozema.

Some things, of course, are done differently now. Guests get diet cola instead of Rooh Afza. Instead of bhains (buffalo) ka doodh, family members prefer the kind that comes from a carton. Desi eggs have been replaced by milder-tasting ‘English’ ones. Kheema is bought ready-made even though there is an electronic machine to grind it somewhere at home. For a relatively smaller family of eight, a large cup of dry fruits and nuts suffices for shir kurma. The Mohameds now live in an apartment in Cuffe Parade, they eat at the dining table and the thaal, once an aspect of daily life, is typically brought out only two days in the year – Ramadan and Moharram’s Pehli Raat. The most elaborate meal of the year is Pehli Raat, when the thaal can have as many as 52 sweet and savoury dishes including tikka, kebab, samosa, cutlet, gajar ka halwa, caramel custard, milk pudding and cakes and chocolate.

While pizzas and tacos have also featured on their dinner menu in recent years, when Khozema and his sister Tasneem Hatimbhai think about home food, they think about simple chicken or mutton dishes cooked in a thick stew of tomato, onion and dry masalas, kaari chawal, biryani, and dal chawal palida (a rice and lentil pulao served with a stew of dal and veggies). Bohri masalas continue to be bought from Hakimi Stores in Crawford Market as they have been for decades. Khozema’s wife Kehkashan Merchant says she was fascinated when she learned about the stock-keeping diary, and has taken over the book.

From right: Joeri Aulman, Khozema Mohamed, Hussain Aulman, and Abbas Merchant.

Nafisa says that she is now “retired from the kitchen”, but continues to be a big dessert person, making sweets on festive occasions – dates stuffed with pistachios and mawa and sev kurma using a traditional technique. She also makes sure that every cook who has worked in their home knows the family’s traditional recipes.

When Tasneem lived in the Netherlands with her Dutch husband Joeri Aulman for a few years, she found herself returning to her mother’s cooking traditions, attempting the family’s favourite dishes – harira (a chickpea soup), kheer, samosas, halwa – to give her a sense of home. She carried her mother’s recipes with her. Tasneem has since moved back to Mumbai and is looking for a good patthar because she feels that there is a special quality to spices ground on it, and she suspects that the older, simpler things – ghee, fresh milk – might be better than processed vegetable oil and packaged milk. Her children Hussain, aged ten, and Sarrah, aged eight, have fasted every year since they were four or five years old. During our iftaar meal together, they were the most enthusiastic diners at the table.

SEE ALSO
• A Fugia Fortune: How An East Indian Matriarch Bequeathed Her Family Riches In Recipes
• A Thandai Tradition: How My Mum’s Sindhi Cooking Shaped Me As A Food Writer
• The Bhonu Bond: Why Life Is Sweet For The Messmans Of Theobroma
• The Coast Guards: The Raos’s ‘Amchi’ Culinary Heritage
• Under The Undhiyu: The Anandwalas Recreate Gujarat On A Plate

Mayur Bakery.

This past weekend, I spent eight hours in Alibag and ate four meals, each of which I would go back for.

BREAKFAST
One of the best (as well as cleanest and most professionally-run) bakeries I have been to in India is in Alibag. Mayur Bakery, founded by Vidya Vasant Patil in 1977, offers khari, chakli, karanji and a dozen other treats that I would happily take the ferry across to eat. I found out about the place four years ago through my friend Anjuli Pandit. Vidya Vasant Patil is her aunt, for whom Alibag village became home after marriage.

After completing a two-year confectionery course in Pune, she opened Mayur with two bakers and a couple of wood-fired ovens. Today there are over 40 employees at Mayur, each of whom are local Konkanis, and many of whom are women.

After you alight the ferry, make your way to the heart of Alibag town and to Mayur. Get a kokum sherbet or an aam panna (or carry your own thermos of tea), find a spot at the table and get one of the smiling, flour-dusted staff to give you a selection of snacks. Carry home a bagful of khari, a fluffy sponge cake, chaklis, some bread, and some sev, then gawp at the bill. I bought five things and paid less than Rs150.

Mayur Bakery, Tilak Road, opposite SBI, Alibag. Tel: 021 4122 4189.

Veg thali at Sanman.

LUNCH
If you show your appreciation for the food at Sanman, one of the older waiters is likely to come around and give you a quick look through their photo album. The album is always at the cash counter, and it features Bollywood actors, Marathi film stars, and politicians, either smiling over Sanman’s fried fish, posing with the owner, or being snapped mid-meal.

Sanman has been around for 40 years, when there were scant eating options in Alibag. It serves Gomantak food, spicy coconut-y gravies, fried fish and shellfish including crabs, clams and mussels, rice plates and special thalis, biryani, and sol kadi. To end the meal, there’s firm-as-cheese, lightly-sweet kharwas, and individual packs of a locally manufactured, chilled, gelatin-free coconut water jelly with cubes of tender coconut flesh. During these dog days, you might want to bring back a case home to Mumbai.

We had a special mutton rice plate (Rs190) with chunks of bone-in mutton in the sort of gravy that makes you slowly break into a sweat; bhakris as fluffy as muslin; sol kadi, rice and a vati of mutton gravy. The special veg thali (Rs100) had coconut-laced dal, and four very delicious sabzis, each vastly different from the other – buttery potato mash, slightly sweet capsicum, black-eyed beans, and green peas and potatoes. On the next table, a contingent of cops were eating a late lunch with such an air of familiarity, you’d think it was their dinner table at home.

Sanman, Ganesh Krupa Building, Israel Lane, Alibag. Tel: 021 4122 2314.

Happy Tummy food truck.

EVENING SNACK
A walk along Alibag Beach at sundown typically involves snacking on bhel, pani puri, sev puri, bhutta, gola, ‘Mewad’ ice cream, and popcorn. There are two to four options for each of these, at the start of the beach – it’s a bit like how Chowpatty beach used to be 30 years ago. The competition ensures that everyone stays on their toes in both prices and flavour.

“Alibag locals who work in Mumbai take the morning ferry to the city and the evening ferry from Gateway of India,” says resident Sameer Bhagat. “When more Mumbai tourists started coming here [15 to 20 years ago], our locals got inspired by the street food offerings at Gateway and decided to set up similar stalls here.”

Bhagat and his partner Praful Naik run Happy Tummy, Alibag’s only food truck, which opened in February. They were colleagues in a company when they came up with the idea. They got all the necessary licences for a restaurant, and requested local politicians to encourage this new restaurant format as a way to figure out laws for more food trucks.

The plan is to franchise the model, which is why, optimistically, the side of the truck says, “India’s Fastest Growing Food Startup”. Only sandwiches and burgers are made on board the truck, by a slightly diffident-looking fellow. Everything else is prepared at a small kitchen a few metres away as ovens are not allowed on the truck yet. The food is in the genre of Haji Ali Juice Centre’s, unsophisticated but satisfying. On average, Happy Tummy feeds 200 customers a day. Prices range from Rs20 for a sandwich to Rs130 for a chicken kheema pizza.

Happy Tummy, Alibag Beach, Alibag. Tel: 0 77190 52233.

DINNER
Anjuli told me that the best food to be found in Alibag is not in its restaurants. Employees at Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilizers’ Alibag unit and other locals who commute to Mumbai have, for decades, relied on food from other people’s homes. Among the best home cooks is Nitin Burande, who makes “gharelu” Malvani, Goan and Gomantak food from his seaside cottage. He started the catering service 20 years ago when he was asked to leave his job. His son was one and a half months old, and he had to find a way to support his family. A friend in nearby Nagaon Beach, who had a small catering business, helped Burande in setting up a home kitchen that sells food to order.

Burande’s first order came from a group of 150 Reliance employees who were walking along Akshi beach asking people for a a place to eat. His friend brought his family over, and together they prepared thalis, snacks, and chai for the group. Even though he charged them only Rs60 per head, he made a very encouraging profit of about 50 per cent. He could support his family again.

To try Nitin Burande’s food, call him as soon as you get off the ferry and decide on a pick-up point and time. We picked Akshi Bus Stop. At 5pm, just before we headed back to Mandwa Jetty, his nephews arrived on a moped with a bagful of dishes. We got semi-dry chicken masala with onions and red chillies, fried fish steaks, coconut-rich, spicy fish curry, rice, chapatis and a bottle of sol kadi, all for Rs500. It was, as he said, “gharelu” and delicious. The sol kadi was the best we’ve had. I plan to order ten litres the next time I visit Alibag.

Nitin Burande. Tel: 98812 13094.

Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and a restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.