A winter’s tail


A winter’s tail

Vasundhara Chauhan heralds the disappearance of winter with an article on the goodies associated with the cold months, like ‘sarson ka saag’ and ‘makkai ki roti’ – and ‘gur’

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As winter disappears, all of a sudden, with no warning, I have this urge to eat all the goodies associated with the cold months: sarson ka saag and makkai ki roti; and gur, shakkar, chikki, rewri and gazzak (also pronounced gajjak). In the warm months gur and shakkar, which are hygroscopic, become dark, damp and lumpy; and makkai ka atta gets infested with invisible creatures that ruin the flavour. I refrigerate all of them, but for the next nine months it’ll be too warm to eat them. After all, we’ve been brought with this concept of taseer, and all these are “heating”. So is til, sesame, the essential flavouring of our desi candy.

Travelling by road in winter in the North you sometimes drive past a local farmer extracting sugarcane juice and processing it into gur and shakkar. The sight of sugar canes being fed into rollers, the buckets of juice being collected, the bubbling cauldrons of ganne ka ras and the stone platform on which the juice is spread to be scraped into shakkar is so rare now that when we do encounter it, we halt, backtrack and buy some.

In U P they add nuts and dried ginger to the gur but I think that does nothing – it’s perfectly fine just plain. Gur and shakkar have a mild malty flavour – as good as – or better than – cocoa. I can visualise my father’s glass of hot milk at breakfast: he stirs in a few spoons of shakkar, the milk turns a pale pinkish brown and becomes thick, the sound of the spoon striking the glass as it stirs changes from a sharp clink to a small dull thud, he takes the first sip, his moustache gets coated with froth, and he pronounces it better than hot chocolate.

But my favourite way to consume shakkar is with butter on the last makkai ki roti at lunch, a hot one, steamily soft at the centre, crisp at the edges. The butter must be unsweetened, soft and white, running all over the roti as it melts. Topped with a little mountain of shakkar dissolving into the butter, the trick is to break off morsels that have everything on them. No French or Viennese dessert is more satisfying.

Gur is of course made into chikki, peanut brittle. I remember a chikki parcel someone brought me from Pakistan: pistachio and chilgoza, pine nuts, with more nuts than gur, which had been used only as a medium to bind the nuts. So each piece was as thin as a cracker, the golden pine nuts and green pista kernels visible through the translucent amber stained glass gur.

The other hot favourites to crunch after lunch in the bright winter sun are gazak and rewri and I once had the opportunity to watch them being made. Extremely complicated and time – consuming – no wonder they’re always bought.

On really cold winter nights when even non-dessert lovers crave something hot and sweet, my mother would go to the kitchen while we were still eating, melt some ghee, fry almonds, walnuts and cashews until they were golden and crisp, then stir in a cup of grated gur which melted, to form a toffee which you ate with your last roti. Another, slightly less rustic winter dessert was gur chawal, served with cream or dahi.

Winter brings another sweet in Bengal: khejur or nolen gur, date palm jaggery. Nimble young men shin up the trunks of date palm trees, attach earthen pots to the trunk and tap the sap. This is cooked to make the liquid or grainy jhola gur and the solid patali gur. One of the finest sweets of Bengal, sandesh, is sometimes sweetened with it and there is a delightful variety which looks like an owl with two raisins for “eyes”, which delivers a surprise when you bite in: a small filling of the honey-like treacle of new gur. Alan Davidson (The Oxford Companion to Food) explains that the name sandesh originally meant “news”, “referring to the custom of sending sweets by messenger to one’s friends and relatives when enquiring for their news, with which the messenger would return.”

When I get the year’s supply of gur and shakkar I can’t use much of it in the traditional ways. So it’s used in baking. Brown sugar, Muscovado, dark brown, golden brown are all Western and I don’t think gur, shakkar or nolen gur are the same. But they suffice to give a richness of colour and malty flavour to cakes and cookies.

gur-walay-chawal GUR CHAWAL

Serves 4
— 1 cup rice
— 11/2 cups grated gur
— 2 tbsp ghee
— 1 tbsp raisins, soaked
— 2 tbsp almonds, blanched and slivered

Wash and soak rice. Dissolve gur in 1 cup water. Heat ghee. Strain rice and add to ghee. Saute for a minute or two (as for pulao), until colour changes slightly. Add 11/2 cups water and bring to a boil. When water is visible only as bubbling little “wells”, reduce heat and cover. When rice seems almost done, stir in hot gur solution. Simmer, covered,until rice is fully done and gur absorbed. Serve hot, garnished with raisins and almonds.

* Whole black peppers and cloves (4-5 of each) can be sauteed in the ghee if you want to add some spiciness.

the-brownieBROWN SUGAR BROWNIES

Makes 20
— 11/2 sifted all-purpose flour
— 1 tsp baking powder
— 1/2 tsp salt
— 1/2 cup soft butter
— 1 cup shakkar, tightly packed
— 1 egg
— 1 tsp vanilla extract
— 1/2 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 180 C (350 F). Lightly grease a 9-by-9-by-13/4 -inch pan. Sift flour with baking powder and salt. Set aside. In large bowl, using a wooden spoon or hand-held electric beater, beat butter, shakkar, egg and vanilla until smooth. Stir in flour mixture.

When it is well blended, stir in nuts. Spread evenly in prepared pan. Bake for 25 or 30 minutes, or until golden brown. The surface should spring back when pressed gently with a fingertip. Cool slightly, but while it is still warm, cut into bars. Prise out brownies and cool on wire rack.

The writer is a food writer based in New Delhi, India.
Email: [email protected]




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