Cooking for a city’s citizenship

It was after round one of Project Puran Poli that I threw in the (ego-stained) towel and called my mother. It was a bit after one am, and despite her exhaustion, she rallied. “I don’t understand why you decided to do this,” she said, after 20 minutes of instruction on how to scrape the burnt flour off the pan. “This is a bit beyond your skill set, beta.”

It was the night after Ganesh Chaturthi, and the air outside was thick with distant music and the acrid smell of burnt firecrackers. Cooking had always seemed to me an efficient — and tasty — way of usurping another culture’s traditions. Whether it was Hanukkah with its deep-fried goodies, Christmas with a roasted leg of turkey and mashed potatoes, or Japanese food with miso soup and sushi. I had tried my way around the global dining table with varied success.

It was a week before Ganesh Chaturthi that I realised that one of the ‘foreign’ traditions that remained completely alien to me, were those surrounding this festival. After two years spent in this city, it remained more or less a time of even more torturous traffic than usual, noisy streets, and most importantly, delicious food like puran poli and rabdi, that I would partake of from friends and colleagues. Cooking this food, I felt, would serve as a sort of initiation into being a more authentic ‘Mumbaikar’.

Puran poli didn’t even have the decency to appear simple, so that I would be able to blame the debacles on my over-confidence. It requires the cooking of the sweetened chana dal mixture, which is then rolled into a flour encasing. Cooking the chana (gram) dal was simple enough — once the mixture, supplemented with sugar, nutmeg and cardamom powder, was thickened, it was kept aside. The dough, which constitutes the outer covering, is made of wheat flour, flour and oil added to water.

The recipe called for the chana dal mixture to be rolled into ping-pong-sized balls and placed neatly within a larger ball of the dough mixture. But this concoction was not one to be tamed by the rolling pin. The chana dal spilled messily out of its encasing. Determined to carry on, I attempted to bake this anyway, which resulted in the sticky, obstinate mess that eventually led to a call to my mother.

She advised me to rework the chana dal mixture, this time letting it thicken some more, and not to over-stuff the flour ball. The second attempt led to an unknown mistake — that completely mystified my mother, leading her to tell me bluntly that she needed to sleep, and good luck with the rest — that culminated in the puran poli crumbling apart like a disturbed thousand-year-old fossil. At this point, my annoyance — and sleepiness — was winning over my stubbornness. After half an hour of sulking and throwing the rejected sampled into a now-overflowing dustbin, I tried again.

This time, I rejected some of the recipe’s suggestions. I let the chana dal thicken for much longer than instructed, and made the flour balls more resilient by adding more flour. In what can only be described as a miracle, and had me doing a muted victory dance around the kitchen, the puran poli sizzled and browned obediently on the stove. Though the edges remained a tad undercooked, I declared it a victory — as any cooking experiment would be at 4am — and moved on to the rabdi.

I would advise anyone attempting the same jump into the deep end of the culinary pool to start with rabdi, which was bafflingly simple to make after the puran poli. Milk and condensed milk is mixed together and then heated till it reduces to one fourth of the original amount. Add 10-15 strands of saffron (difficult to procure, but worth it), three drops of rose essence, and around a dozen chopped pistachios. Stick it in the fridge, and eat in its entirety (only leaving a small amount for colleagues) after an hour to reward yourself for working so hard.

I don’t know if I feel like a part of this city any more than I did before I cooked and felt sleepy for the rest of the day. I also spent the rest of the day being annoyed at traffic, sitting briefly at Nariman Point with a friend, and catching a movie at Regal. So I guess for the time being, I’ll let myself qualify as a Mumbaikar.