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Rarely has the world seen
so rich a cuisine from so little that was available from the land. While the eastern
region of the state has fertile soil capable of crops of everything from wheat and maize
to millers and corn, for much part the desert’s dry terrain, prone to droughts, was
incapable of producing even basic necessities of survival. Yet, lice and eat they did,
creating an exotic cuisine from the soil that threw up a few pulses, crops of miller,
and trees with beans that were dried and stored for use when, in the summers, nothing
would grow.
Communication and faster
means of transportation have brought in a revolution in the choice of vegetables and
fruits that are now available throughout the state, but this was not always so. Which is
why, for the villager, his diet still remains sparse, and consists of dairy produce,
bread of millets and accompaniments of gram flour and sour buttermilk which, say
dieticians across the world, is a high-protein, low-fat cuisine. Perhaps that is what
gives the people of the desert their erect gait and slender build.
Though the Rajasthani
kitchen was able to create much from little, it had also the cater to different
communities with their own ritual observances. The Rajput warrior, for example, was not
averse to shikar, killing game to put in his pot at night. The Vaishnavs, followers of
Krishna, were vegetarian, and strictly so, as were the Bishnois, a community known for
their passion to conserve both animal and plant life. Even among the Rajputs, there were
enough royal kitchens where nothing other than vegetarian meals were cooked. The
Marwaris, of course, were vegetarian too, but their cuisine, though not too different
from the Rajputs, was richer in its method of preparation. And then there were the Jains
too, who were not only vegetarians, but who would not eat after sundown, and whose food
had to be devoid of garlic and onions which were, otherwise, important ingredients in
the Rajasthani pot.
To begin with the Rajput,
then: as a hunter-warrior, he often bagged his game, which is why the Rajasthani
repertoire has everything from venison and hare to wild boar on its menu. However, since
these are banned by the government for fear of
endangering these wild species, the Rajasthani meal has almost come to imply mutton. The
Rajput is a recent, reluctant convert to chicken, and even though the lakes abound in
fish, it rarely find its way into his kitchen.
An important feature of
non-vegetarian cooking in the Rajput kitchen was that it was rarely cooked on the main
stove in the kitchen, and usually employed the male head of the family as its chef.
Essential ingredients included, besides onions and garlic, a vegetable called kachri,
which is part of the cucumber family, as a marinade. The meat, first basted in a pot
over a wood fire, was turned into gravy and eaten with millet rotis.
Colonel James Tod’s
treatise, Annals and Antiquities of Rajputana, notes that ‘the Rajput… hunts and eat
the boat and deer, and shoots ducks and wild fowl’. But though the Rajput is a
meat-eater, he is by no means a passionate one who has to have mutton on his table for
every meal. Vegetarian food too forms a large part of his diet. Game, in fact, has been
a part of the creed of the warrior: when out camping in the desert, it is what is
available that forms the basis of the next meal. And so too, when the rest of the
country follows strictly rigid vegetarian protocol as during the celebration of Navratri,
the festival of nine nights, the Rajput offers hid Devi a goat as sacrifice, beheading
the beast with one blow of his sword. On all nine days, a similar offering is made, and
the cooked meat eaten as consecrated food. In Rajasthan, most families will arrange for
at least one such sacrifice during the festival, and sometimes goats are specially
reared in family backyards for the ritual offering.
Shikar provided a meal for
the family, or for the village, or else expedition members sheared the spoils to take
their individual portions home. However, if there was more meat than could be consumed,
it was pickled for later consumption. Venison and pork, especially, were cooked in rich
masalas before being preserved in oil and vinegar. Pork fat, called sauth, was kept for
winter days, when it would be chewed as prevention against colds.
Since men often did the
cooking themselves, and since expeditions away from home for reasons of war rarely
allowed the luxury of well-equipped kitchens, a more rudimentary method of barbecuing
created its distinctive style of desert cooking. When small animals were bagged, such as
desert hare, the animal was cleaned, stuffed and allowed to cook in a sand pit with a
bed of live coals covering it, often overnight. With large animals, this was not
possible, so the meat was marinated using kachri to impart its distinctive tang, and
then this was barbecued over a bed of live
coals. This, called sula, is still considered a delicacy, and has a tangy flavour on
account of the sour marinade.
The women, whether the
family was vegetarian or meat eating, had their task cut out for them. They
would dry the meagre sangri and gwarphali beans that are eatable, and store them
for future use. They would also make papads and endless other variations and dry them,
also for storage, later to be turned into curries for the family. Once again, using
onions and garlic, and with mustard, and a handful of other spices, these would be put
on the family pot in the kitchen, with yoghurt for flavouring.
Accompaniments rarely
changed over the region. Karhi, more popularly known as khatta, formed – as it
continues today – a part of the staple diet. Made with buttermilk (thin form of
yogurt), it is mixed with chickpea flour and allowed to cook with mustard seeds and
crushed garlic cloves. The longer it stays on the fire, the better its taste. Usual
vegetables are sangri and gwarphali, beans stored for the length of the year after
drying, and cooked in yogurt and masalas. Papads, eaten roasted elsewhere in India, are
also gravied in Rajasthan, as is bhujiya, a
popular noth-lentil snack. Chickpea flour can be freshly rolled out as dumplings to make
gatte-ka-saag, while sun-dried month-lentil dumplings
are also cooked as badi-ka-saag.
These are all eaten with
either bread consisting of bajra rotis, unleavened millet
bread, cooked over wood fires, or a porridge made using millet grains and moth lentils
cooked together with water, a little spice and some ghee, to make khichra, a more
filling, more potent version of what elsewhere in India is called khichri (though this
uses rice as its base). Khichra, the night mainstay of the state’s farming
communities, is eaten with ghee, and accompanied by either jaggery or karhi. The day’s
meal for the working class consists of bajra rotis eaten with moth-daal, or with a fiery
red-chilli-and-garlic chutney and washed down with raabori, millet flour cooked in
buttermilk, believed to be extremely cooling in the summer heat of the state.
Desserts were, by and
large, rare, though exotic concoctions from vegetables were sometimes served. For most,
for festive occasions, these would consist of seera, a halwa made of cooked wheat flour
in ghee, or laapsi, a porridge made with desiccated grains of wheat. Rice, a delicacy in
Rajasthan, was served as a sweet with the addition of sugar, saffron and dried nuts and
raisins.
Many more vegetables are
now available in Rajasthan, with even little towns made colourful with the produce of
vegetable vendors. Most of these vegetables are cooked in the same way as its chickpea
and lentil-based curries, and there are usually no distinctive recipes that allow the
taste of one vegetable to differ from another.
The Marwaris, however,
were considerably more lavish with the inputs in their kitchen. A typical meal for them
could consist of pishta-lonj served with a glass of milk laced with cream. Then, puris
fried in hot oil, made with both wheat flour as well as with matar added to turn them a
lovely green. With it, tamatar-ke-sabji, a tomato curry, at once sweet and sour
and hot, gatte-ka-saag with shavings of cashew added, and sangri-ker-ka-saag
with the oil oozing out, and dahi-bhallas, of course. This would be followed by
sooji-ka-halwa, a pudding that’s easy to make but still a daily favourite, and perhaps
a glass of lassi at the end of the meal.
Marwari food uses the same
basic ingredients of the state’s Rajputs, but is a richer version, with more spices
and herbs being added to the masala, and cooked in more fat. The Marwaris eat two meals,
in the morning and at sundown. Both consist of a great variety of rotis and puris puffed
in piping hot oil. There are a large number of accompaniments by way of chutneys, some
sweet, others sour. Gatta, sangri and a tomato vegetable curry are favourites, all of
them cooked in a good deal of clarified butter, the sour taste of the flavouring
ingredients cutting through the fat to create its own distinctive taste. Ker, a hard
desert berry, is often added to pickles, or sangri, or cooked on its own. The amount of
chillies used is somewhat more curtailed,
and mango powder (amchur) and rai (mustard seeds) dominate. The Marwaris also prefer
heeng or asafoetida over the Rajput reference for garlic.
The Marwari sweet tooth is
legendary, and since they were traders, they had greater access to the markets not only
of India but also South-east Asia. They were, therefore, able to store dry fruits such
as almonds, pistachios, cashews, and together with poppy seeds (khus)were able to use
them in their puddings. Halwas, barfis and ladoos are part of the Marwari repertoire,
along with til, sesame, which was used for both sweets as well as main courses.
Dairy has played an
important role in the economy of the desert,
especially since agriculture could never be taken for granted. The consumption of milk,
and of buttermilk and yoghurt formed a part of the main diet, but with the exception of
those regions with access to rice-growing areas, the rice –porridge, kheer , never
became popular in Rajasthan. But milk based sweets, barfis, did, so much so that to
date, sweet sellers all over the country refer to themselves as Bikaneri sweet
specialists. Contrarily, the otherwise popular Indian dessert is the principal offering
during the Muslim Urs and Eid festivals at Ajmer when cauldrons of it are prepared at
the Dargah of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti. The cauldrons are up to three metres in diametre.
Once the rice,
milk, sugar, clarified butter, nuts, spices, dry fruits are blended and cooked,
attendants at the shrine jump into its scalding centre, to serve it as a holy offering
to the pilgrims, the contents dramatically diminishing as the waiting crowds consume it
as prasad. This, of course, is an occasional offering. Most days, the large tureens
serve a mixture of rice, meat and lentils – a meal in one go.
Foreign influences on Rajasthani
food
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