The succulent [literally juicy from the Latin succus] food of the West, rich and full of flavour, is eaten with a closed mouth, while appreciative lips, palate, and tongue relieve the teeth from hard labour.

But the Indian peasant’s dry thick cake of millet or wheaten meal must be steadily chewed, completely milled and masticated before it can be swallowed, and it is only when it is touched with ghi or dipped in stewed vegetables or pulse that the lips close on a morsel with any semblance of gourmandise. 

Beast and Man in India, first published in 1891, 137.

I think it is easy to forget how much chewing had to be done with traditional whole meal dishes and, if they were baked, how dry they were. Most societies have something to help it down, in this case ghee, or to soften it, soup in the case of French peasant breads.  And what Kipling does not mention is that this unpalatability was true of many European breads until pretty shortly before he wrote.  Sheila Hamilton (thanks) sent along this comment about The Long Affray, a history of poaching in Britain by Harry Hopkins.

It includes this note on the diet in Berkshire in 1795 (the information was gathered by a local vicar who was concerned about the poverty of his parishioners):

“Bread and potatoes – ‘tatters and shake’ (ie salt) – was now the basic diet, and in some areas that bread was heavy barley bread, bannocks, baked over the fire. Meat, butter and cheese, which the labourer had enjoyed earlier in the century, before he had been banished from the farmer’s board, had all but disappeared. Even milk could be hard to come by now that farmers were sending it in bulk into the towns. Tea – an extravagance much reprobated by the labourers’ mentors- was all too often boiling water poured on burned bread crusts.”

For a perspective on maize in South Africa here is an extract from White Food by the interesting blogger Tangerine and Cinnamon.  Worth clicking on the link to read the whole thing.

A recent article published by the magnificent Mail and Guardian explores South Africa’s taste for whiter, finer maize meal:

“In the poorest communities a bag of maize meal is often the only way of satisfying a family’s hunger, and the cost factor plays a role too. An 80kg bag of maize meal is about R400: on a 500g portion a person a day, an extended family of 10 people would consume an 80kg bag in about 16 days. The daily total consumption of maize meal in South Africa is about 10 000 tonnes.

But these maize-meal consumers demand a product that is white – stripped of roughage and nutrients – and manufacturers have remodelled their businesses to serve this demand.

South Africa’s best-selling brand of maize meal is White Star, produced by Pioneer Foods. White Star is whiter and finer than other brands. Premier Foods and Tiger Brands, the country’s other two big producers of maize meal, have also invested in technology which produces this whiter maize meal.”

For me the bottom line is this.

Either you assume that those who lived largely on grains were deluded or driven by an irrational desire for status to prefer white.  This seems an act of enormous condescension since neither I nor, I suspect, the readers of this blog have ever lived largely on grains.

Or you assume that they had good reasons.

Edit.  I did not intend to suggest that Tangerine and Cinnamon was being condescending.  Apologies to her for phrasing the last three sentences poorly.   I have now changed the wording.

Reminded me of how in India we used make puffed rice for festivals at home over hot sand. Freshly harvested rice is dried in its husk until completely free of moisture. Then a wide mouthed clay pot half full of sand is heated and when the sand is really hot the un-hulled rice grains are dropped in. With the heat they pop out of their husk and puff up. Before they can burst out of the pot, they are lifted out with a perforated spoon that allows the sand and husk to skip through and neatly separates the puffed rice. Puffed rice looks like small white translucent popcorn. It is light papery and very fragile.

So too is the fact that the puffed grain is invested with significance.

Puffed rice plays a symbolic role in Hindu weddings. The ultimate witness to the union is the sacred fire and one of the main rituals is saptapadi or the seven steps taken by the couple together around the holy fire. As they walk around the fire, the couple pours handfuls of puffed rice into the brightly burning fire as a sacred offering; rice in all its forms is considered holy and is revered.

Then Uma Satyavolu sent these memories of pootarekulu, as these sheets are called.  Not so much on how they are made because that’s a professional job.  More on how they are layered with ghee and powdered sugar for events at the time of weddings and of imminent birth.   Thanks, Uma, for such fascinating background.  I specially love the idea of steel drums full of these paper thin sheets.

Update.  Uma has asked me to post this update.

Rachel:

I’ve made a few small but significant changes! Could you please, please post this instead of the other version?

Also, I’ve often wondered about the similarity between Ethiopean/Eritrean injera and appam/attu/dosa: fermented batter cooked on a griddle and eaten with stew/sauce. So the Eritrean rice-pastry connection is interesting. But the odd thing is that pootarekulu are fairly specific as a culinary and culturalphenomenon; they are not even that well-known in the next district over. Or if they are, they are only so as an idiosyncratic taste.  It would have to be a fairly isolated trade-route for such a selective and isolated transfer of technology.

Regards,

Uma

My parents were both from the Godavari districts (East and West). So although I grew up in Hyderabad (the Big City which is in the Telangana region of the state), and always considered myself not very Andhra,  it’s been one of those things that is quintessentially “Home.”

Pootarekulu are literally, “smeared sheets” because they are made by smearing rice paste on hot surfaces (as the video you posted shows) and are bought as rice sheets and assembled at home.

They are popular throughout the Godavari region, but most prized in “Konaseema”-the Corner island part of East Godavari. When my mother used to call in the vendor who cried ‘pootarekulu” in the outskirts of Hyderabad, it was always a treat.

I remember the time my mother said, “Oh, please, we are from the Godavari (region),” (meaning, you shouldn’t try to quote high prices, as we know what they usually cost). The man selling the sheets from the woven basket (about 3 feet in circumference) which he transported on the back of a bicycle said: “Of course, you’re from the Godavari; if you weren’t, you’d be asking me if they were sheets/leaves to hang from the doorways!”

You buy the sheets from people who make them-they are, as far as I know, never made at home in normal households–by the hundred. They look like translucent foolscap paper sheets, and the women of the household assemble them for special occasions. This is especially true of the bride’s going away after the wedding, and for seemantam (baby shower-like ceremonies usually held in the seventh month of pregnancy).

Pootarekulu (along with chalimidi, ariselu, and sunni-undalu) are traditional sweets that are sent with the bride to the in-laws when she leaves her home after the wedding.  Huge amounts (big steel-drums full of them) arrive at the new in-laws’ home. They then  send the sweets round to friends, neighbours, and relatives to announce that their new daughter-in-law has arrived.  Pootarekulu are usually eaten as a tiffin/tiffen (snack)-with afternoon coffee or tea.

I used the phyllo dough analogy because, essentially, it is assembled like baklava: lay down a sheet, dampen with a clean, slightly wet cloth, brush liberally with molten ghee (clarified butter), and sprinkle liberally and evenly with powdered sugar. Then lay another sheet on top, and repeat. The process is tricky for a beginner, because if the towel is too wet, the sheet turns to starch and sticks to the towel.

Unlike baklava, after six or seven layers, it is folded into a neat packet using more ghee and wet-cloth application to keep it all moist and compact. The ghee then solidifies with the powdered sugar, and gives it a very disticntive taste and mouth-feel.

Its flavour is entirely dependent upon the quality (and, to be fair, quantity) of ghee. Without enough ghee, it can be papery and flaky, and that’s one thing good pootarekulu cannot be.

I’ve lived away from India for twenty years now, and the last time I went to Andhra Pradesh, it was being sold in sweets shops and even some supermarkets, which was not the case when I left, so that’s a good thing, I think.
I could go on on about it because it is bound up with my nostalgia  for the Godavari country, which is very fertile, and green with paddy fields and coconut trees and canals and temples. So I will refrain.

Thanks for the pleasure of thinking about pootarekulu: I miss them more as time passes. Sadly my American-born, non-Andhra, non-Indian husband did not take to the pootarekulu as well as he did to most other things Andhra, including Gongura, a relative of the hemp-leaf, and also an iconically Andhra food.

More food for thought. Another round up soon.  And many thanks, Uma.

My long-time friend and fine scholar and anthropologist, E.N. Anderson, told this story in The Food of China (1988).

“Wok is a Cantonese word; the Mandarin is kuo. The wok appears to be a rather recent acquisition as Chinese kitchen furniture goes; it has been around for only two thousand years. The first woks I know of are little pottery models on the pottery stove modes in Han Dynasty [that is about 200 BC to 200 AD] tombs. . . . The wok is virtually indispensable for stir-frying, and thus I infer that this cooking technique was a Han invention.”

It was Anderson’s best guess when he wrote. But now we are thirty years on and we’ve learned a lot about more about the history of food in China.  Those pottery models are not woks, if by woks we mean an iron cooking vessel. And if the wok is necessary for stir frying, which is not clear, then this technique does not go back to the Han either.

And it turns out that making cast iron woks was a tricky business.  Don Wagner, the expert on the history of Chinese metallurgy, explains this here.  Do follow the link because he also reproduces a wonderful series of nineteenth-century Chinese gouaches of wok making.  In a letter, he commented that he believed a Japanese scholar had dated the wok to the Song (that is mid 10th to mid 13th century).

That still leaves open the question of whether the wok was an independent Chinese invention or whether it was borrowed from elsewhere.   Anderson suspected the latter.

“Since the same sort of pan is universal in India and Southeast Asia, were it is known as a kuali in several languages, I strongly suspect borrowing (probably from India via Central Asia)–kuo must have evolved from some word close to kuali.”

Ammini Ramachandran who hails from Kerala has been interested in Indian-Chinese connections. For her article on this, follow the link, go to articles, and scroll down to “Woks, Fishing Nets, and Ceramic Jars” an article she first published in Flavor and Fortune in 2004. (Do read other parts of her web site too.  It is full of interesting material).

Trade between the two regions was evident in her family kitchen.

“Other remnants of ancient Chinese trade still visible on these shores are Chinese woks and Chinese ceramic jars. In the local language these cooking utensils are still called Cheena chatti and Cheena bharani. These words literally translate to Chinese pot and Chinese ceramic jar. Today they might be manufactured in India or elsewhere, but still, they are known by their old names.

The traditional Cheena chatti is made with iron. It is in the exact shape of a Chinese wok. It is an indispensable cooking utensil in every home in Kerala; used to sauté, stir fry, and deep fry foods. Chinese ceramic jars are used, too, and preferred for storing homemade pickles and milk products such as yogurt and butter milk.”

Here is her photo of the Cheena chatti.

On a recent trip to Turkey, she saw this tava made of bronze in the famous Topakapi kitchens.

Tava, as she points out, is one word for a similar wok-shaped vessel in Indian.  Kadai is another.

Which all goes to show that anyone who knows metallurgy, cooking, and a number of languages has a great research project ahead of them.  And that there is a huge amount to be traced out about the origins, construction of, and use of these metal vessels made or bronze or iron.

Last night I was lucky to attend a reception with Patricia Quintana prior to the mole festival here in Guanajuato. Not surprisingly in her eloquent history of mole, she affirmed that the basic techniques were  indigenous with some Islamic ingredients added later. No chance, of course, in the crowd, to pursue this further.

Just a couple of days ago, though I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of the second issue of a new Mexican culinary magazine, Sabor (highly recommended by the way). The banner headline on the title page was mole and curry, backed by photos of the kinds of spices used in these dishes. The culinary editor, Marina Skipsey, had been to India and come back with wonderful photos. These preceded analysis of ingredients common to mole and curry and those that were unique to each, and then photos of the making of a mole amarillo and a rogan josh. One of the references cited was the book Mulli by the eminent Mexican culinary entreprener, Patricia Quintana.  The other, I was delighted to see, was my article on the Mexican Kitchen’s Islamic Connection. An honor for me.

I don’t think this happens in other major culinary traditions such as Indian, Chinese, Persian, etc. Or am I wrong? Any thoughts greatly appreciated.

First, let’s be clear about cheese. If you define cheese as the aged cheeses typical of Europe, then you are talking about a pretty odd culinary foodstuff in world terms. Basically the only places make these cheeses are European countries and their overseas colonies or former colonies, usually in the temperate zones where cattle flourish. Ripened cheese seems so prominent now because of European expansion. But fresh cheeses are much, much commoner in most times and places.

Second, like Adam Balic, I’m inclined to discount the lactose intolerance theory, plausible as it seems at first sight. Partly for the same reasons, namely that most people can tolerate fermented milk products. (The consumption of fresh milk is a very odd Western habit and even in the West it’s really only become common in the last hundred years since pasteurization made it safer).

Partly because many populations of the lactose intolerant (a) happily consumed milk products in the past. And (b) are increasingly consuming them today, even in the form of milk, thanks to the spread of those odd western ideas about consuming fresh milk. China had lots of dairy foods in the Middle Ages. And the Chinese now have some of the biggest dairies in the world.

Third, one factor that seems to be important in India is religion. The historical data are not entirely clear (well that’s one huge understatement). But just two examples.

K. T. Achaya, the great expert on the history of Indian food, suggests Indian traditions going back to the Rig Vedas that found cutting milk with acids (presumably as opposed to allowing natural bacterial fermentation to make yogurt-like curd) was unacceptable for theological reasons.  I think the idea was that milk was such a holy and precious substance that it should not be treated this roughly.

What does seem to be the case is that paneer and chhana, the two fresh cheeses that crop up in India, were introduced by the Portuguese who arrived in India in the 16th century. They “cut” milk with citrus juice and, it is said, Indians in the north east of the country picked up the habit. This says Achaya “lifted the Aryan taboo on deliberate milk curdling.” He cites an article by Arindam Nag that I have not seen: “A Milk Curdling Tale,” Society (Bombay, February 1989), 33.

Indian Buddhists, too, hallowed milk products. They took their methods of making curd or yogurt and probably ghee too to China and from there to Japan between say 200 AD and 800 AD. I’d take a bet that Koreans also ate them at that stage (to respond to other comments in the discussion). Then for various reasons China and Japan (and if I’m right Korea too) backed away from milk products.

I’ll leave other factors affecting the distribution of cheese for another post.

Newly arrived in New Delhi, Mrs Keenan sallied forth to hire servants. She found an Indian couple, Hari and Meena. Hari was to be the cook, his wife Meena was to do the cleaning.

Mrs Keenan thought that some Indian food would be nice. Small problem. Hari only knew how to cook Korean chicken.

(An aside here.  The assumption that servants in a foreign country know how to cook the middle class foods of that country is mistaken.  Their repertoire is usually very small and restricted to the few things they can afford, or that they have learned from former employers).

So Mrs Keenan whipped out her copy of Madhur Jaffrey’s Invitation to Indian Cooking. Why didn’t Hari use it to learn to cook Indian food? Why not start with“the Moghlai Chicken Braised with Almonds and Raisins on page 39.”

(Another aside.  This dish with expensive chicken, almonds and raisins was part of court cookery, a world away from Hari’s experience).

Now to see the irony, you have to know a bit about Madhur Jaffrey’s background. And I did, just a little, having worked my way through the  Invitation to Indian Cooking in the 1970s and 80s. So I checked my stained and battered copy and, yes, I was right.

“Food—good food—just appeared miraculously from somewhere at the back of our house in Delhi . . . A bearer, turbaned, sashed, and barefooted would announce the meal and soon we would all be sitting around the dinner table, a family of six,” says Madhur Jaffrey.

When Madhur Jaffrey arrived in England to study drama at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she naturally had not the faintest clue about cooking. She wrote home and the letters she got back about the classic Mughal dishes prepared by their cooks are the basis of the Invitation to Indian Cooking.

Madhur Jaffrey has had a second career as a cookbook writer even more distinguished than her career on the stage.

Mrs Keenan and her husband have moved on to Khazakstan where perhaps another cook is learning to prepare Moghlai Chicken.

Hari is doubtless preparing authentic Indian Moghlai Chicken for another diplomatic family. His wife Meena perhaps prepares it for their own family, at least on special occasions.

So Indian court cookery reinterpreted in well-to-do Indian family, sent to daughter studying in England, written up in her cookbook, taken back to India by diplomatic wife, taught to Indian servant, maybe now entering into his family’s repertoire.

Not, perhaps, the sexiest of subjects. But intriguing nonetheless. So I latched on to an article in the Economist (week of 6th of October).

In 1990 India was home to 200 million cattle and between 20 and 40 million vultures. Or roughly for every seven cattle, there was one vulture. Those vultures , their bad name notwithstanding, did a terrific job. When cattle died, farmers left them where they lay. The vultures stripped the carcass of every dead bovine within the day, preventing goodness knows what horrid diseases.

Then in the 1980s, diclotenac, previously used for kidney disease in humans was given to cattle. The carrion killed vultures. Today instead of 10 or 20 million there are a mere 10,000 vultures.

It’s an ill wind. Feral dogs and rats are having a heyday feasting on cattle carcasses. In hindsight vultures look a lot better than dogs and rats.

The Bombay Natural History Society has set up a breeding facility. But it’s working with only a little over a hundred vultures.

First in the fascinating series of the back end of eating.