Tracing the journey of humble poori sabzi

Shyam Sweets is located at Barshahbula Chowk in Delhi. That is how the junction of Nai-Sadak and Chawri-Bazar is known. The shop was not always at its present location, but it was close by and it has been serving roughly the same fare to its customers for more than a century.

The founders opened the doors of their establishment in the first decade of the 20th Century. This is around the time when Calcutta was still the colonial capital and the decision to bring the capital back to Delhi was still a few years in the future.

Shyam Sweets is best known for its bedmi-poori and its halwa-nagori, though the matar ki kachori they serve and their sweets are also favourites with many of their regulars. One needs to make a distinction between a regular poori and the bedmi poori, the former is made from wheat flour while the latter has a whole range of spices including crushed coriander seeds, red-chili powder and a paste of white lentil mixed with the wheat flour for making the dough.

Both are deep fried and served with a potato-based curry that may or may not be garnished with a range of things that can include, a chutni made from fenugreek seed, pickled kachalu (kachalu is a kind of yam) and thick strips of carrot and cucumber preserved in vinegar.

Shyam Sweets does not serve the plain poori, and there are other shops, some as old as Shyam Sweets and some even older, that specialise in the plain poori. The two kinds of poori and the potato curry that goes with them are considered standard fare for breakfast in Delhi and you will be told that this is the traditional Delhi breakfast.

The other traditional Delhi breakfast is nahari roti. The story of the Nahari needs a detailed treatment and we save it for some other occasion.

We need, however, to remember that these two dishes that are presented as the traditional breakfasts of the Dilliwallah are not unique to Delhi and other cities too have an old tradition of consuming these preparations at breakfast times, two places that come to mind immediately as far as pooris and bedmis are concerned are the Chimanlal Poori shop in Agra and a nondescript temporary shop that used to be set-up and dismantled every morning at Madargate in Mathura, and both have a band of die-hard fans.

Towns spread across western UP and eastern parts of Rajasthan seem to have a weakness for the deep fried poori aur bedmi and it is possible that it is from these regions that the two travelled to Delhi while these regions got introduced to Nahari that seemed to have developed in Delhi.

The interesting thing about both these traditional preparations is that they cannot be made without chillies and chillies are not Indian. In fact, there were hardly any chillies in Delhi before the 18th Century. All chillies are from South America and before the Europeans stumbled upon the New World in their search for a shorter route to India, perhaps no one out of the Americas knew about chillies.

According to one tradition, it is the Portuguese who introduced the chillies to India while according to another it is the Spanish who controlled Mexico and also controlled the Philippines who brought it from Mexico to their Asian colony and it is from there that it spread all over Asia.

The fact remains that there were no chillies in India before the latter half of the 16th Century. The runny curry that we consume with the poori has two basic ingredients: Potatoes and tomatoes. The heart-breaking bit of the story is that neither the potatoes nor the tomatoes were known to Indians before the 16th or 17th centuries and they too were introduced to South Asia through the agency of the Spanish and the Portuguse.

This entire narrative has been put together to underscore one simple fact and that is the constantly changing nature of the food that we consume. If food was really as unique as it is made out to be, if recipes and ingredients and spices had remained fixed in time, if proportions, cooking techniques, cooking vessels and the techniques of building a fire had remained today as they were 5,000, 500 or 50 years ago, one would not need specialist chefs; everyone would know every standard recipe in their region and every one would be a chef. The constantly changing nature of food creates the possibilities of innovations and that is why you need chefs and recipe books.

The author is a historian