The 'Sufi' in the Indian Cook

The Biggest takeaway from my food travels is the personalities i meet and the relationships to food that I discover. Like the Maslows theory i have found a common thread in the development of the persona of the Indian Kaarigar. The first being the unsure cribbing stage and the last being the One with Food "Malang" stage. I consider myself lucky to have a met a lot of the sufi "Malang" Kaarigars in my travels. My conversations with them end up being "Uneditable Sermons" as Gaurav Jung the channel programming head smilingly puts it.

It's really amazing how after cooking for 45-50 years one gets a sense of freedom from the world , one can live and work anywhere keep smiling forever and cooking with sheer intuition and non effort.

The last guy that I met who fits this character sketch is Darshan Lal Chaudhry ji who amazed me in 15 minutes of conversation with his composure and his knowledge about Indian sweets.

After leaving his home in Chhota Nangal khurd (Una , Himachal Pradesh) at the age of 16 and working his way to being a halwai at the age of 23 he moved to Jaipur and has been there for 28 years. All his three sons have no interest in the profession, they work in factories and farms. "They will be very rich am sure , but they will never have a smile bigger than me" he says . That Sufi smile is the Gift of food and a sign of a happy relationship with self.

After an hour of conversation, he took me to his "A/C" room which had his bed an Almirah and a "parant" full of dough .This , he said is my past time.

Making 100 kgs of "feeni"(thin seviyaan ) a day. A thre stage process of deft dough pulling that ultimately yields' dough bunches that fry themselves to the thinnest doodh feeni I have seen in my life. When I wake up its puja, shower and then kneading the seviyan dough .

I leave the air conditioning on and visit it every three hours to pull it after twelve hours and three "pullings" he knots up the feeni and hands it over for frying. That ritual has been held up for the last 12 years since his "guru" Shyam Sundar Sharma died. Its my pooja supplent he sya and laughs

In a "Celebrity chef" and a "Foren" obsessed world (and yeah I am a part of that world) where handmade noodles are a craze and oriental chefs who master this art are demi gods (and rightly so, coz noodle making is no childs play) this "sufi" from Una is quietly and smilingly carrying on this ritual in his A/C room. Write to us for his number and try meeting him the next time in Jaipur and please do get a kilo of doodh feeni for me as well.