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
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