With a range of delicacies that are as diverse as the nation itself, the Indian sweets’ platter truly runneth over with myriad varieties and regional interpretations ready to be savoured. And all this means one thing—it’s always celebration time, no matter what time of the year it is...
By Raul Dias
Cutting a swathe across India’s vast geographical, cultural, and most importantly, culinary landscape, it is the country’s mind-boggling cornucopia of sweets—some well-documented, while others delicious little edible secrets—that references this rich diversity in myriad ways and forms. From the unexpected lusciousness of a creamy palkova from Srivilliputhur in Tamil Nadu and the hitherto unsung wonders of a cloud-like nimish from Varanasi and from the coconut-y brilliance of Goa’s pinag to the sonorous crunch of an Arunachali khapse, we celebrate India’s hidden heroes of the world of sweets.
By no means is this an exhaustive list. Not even close. But what we’ve attempted, is to chronicle the most fascinating of them all. A few with neat little back stories to add to their appeal. And there truly is no better time than the onslaught of the festive season to bring these ‘barometers of celebration’ to the fore. While no wedding, birth announcement or festival is ever complete without a ‘sweet something’, we Indians don’t really need any excuse to partake in a sweet-fueled feast. So, go on. Indulge!
Northern Delights
“Aaj meethe mein kya hai?” or “what’s for afters, today?” is a heavily loaded, almost rhetorical question up in North India. For, there can never be a meal that’s not followed up with some kind of sweet preparation or the other. Offering up a mind-boggling range of sweets, many of which are dairy-centric, from the dominant barfis and pedas to the creamy kheers and shahi tukdas, there’s no dearth of options here.
If there’s one, ultra-finicky seasonal treat, then it would have to be nimish. Also known as makkhan
malai, and mainly found in Varanasi and Lucknow, both in the state Uttar Pradesh (UP), this winter
dessert is a delicate preparation that sees the froth from early morning dew-exposed milk scooped off and sweetened with sugar and flavoured with saffron or cardamom and served atop thickened sweet milk. This edible wonder is also known as daulat ki chaat in Delhi alluding to the expensive, hard-to-procure creamy layer!
One of the Hindu religion’s most sacred towns of Mathura beholds another delicious little treat-the
Mathure ka peda. Believed to be the birthplace of Lord Krishna, this town also in UP has been the
purveyor of these delectable morsels of heaven (pun intended!) for centuries that are made by cooking together fresh mawa (reduced milk solids), milk, sugar and ghee (clarified butter) with cardamom powder.
Resembling a bowl-shaped honeycomb, ghevar is one of Rajasthan’s greatest calling cards. Usually
prepared during the teej or raksha bandhan festival times, the filigreed delicacy is made by deep frying a slurry of oil, flour and sugar syrup and then dunking the whole sweet in more kewra (screw pine) essence-scented sugar syrup and served alongside a bowl of rabdi (reduced, almond and sugar milk).
With a rather curious name like matrimony, this sweet is an Anglo-Indian must have when a wedding in the family is to take place. Made usually by the mother of the bride-to-be, the sweet is a mixture of desiccated coconut, roasted semolina, condensed milk and yes, the very desi—ghee!
No list of North Indian sweets, however inexhaustive, can be complete without a mention of gujjias.
These crimp-edged, crescent-shaped fried dumplings are made by stuffing grated and roasted dry fruits, mawa and coconut powder into a pocket made from a mixture of semolina and wheat flour that are then deep fried and dunked in sugar syrup, but of course.
Southern Comfort
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that a major chunk of the South Indian sweets’ repertoire is in some way or form influenced by the all-pervasive coconut. Take for instance Kerala’s delicious sweets that range from the cake-meets-halwa-meets-pancake, the coconut milk-redolent orappam to the Syrian Christian avalose podi made from a dry powder of roasted rice flour and ground coconut, eaten with a banana.
Carrying on the coconut leitmotif is the tati pandu kudumu from Andhra Pradesh (AP). This thick pancake is made from rice flour, coconut, jaggery and the pulp of the tadgola (palm fruit). Still in AP, the bobbatlu is similar to what is known as meethi roti in the North or puran poli in the West. This iteration is made with refined flour and is stuffed with a mix of gram lentils, jaggery and oodles of ghee.
Speaking of ghee and moving away from the ubiquity of the coconut, Karnataka’s Mysore pak is a
calorific treat where lashings of the clarified butter are introduced to sugar, gram flour, and cardamom powder and combined till a silken, melt-in-the-mouth texture is achieved. The creamy palkova from Srivilliputhur in Tamil Nadu made during the festival of Gokulashtami is a simple yet
luscious preparation made up of just two main ingredients—milk and sugar with a sprinkling of ghee and a dust of cardamom.
Dark, dense and delectable—is the best triple alliteration we could come up with to describe Tamil
Nadu’s Tirunelveli halwa laboriously made by stirring samba wheat and frothy, fermented milk along
with sugar and ghee all night long. It is widely believed that the halwa gets its great taste because it is cooked in the water from the river Thamirabharani.
Best of the West!
While not as ghee-laden as the Northern sweets, but pretty much as coconut-y as the South’s, the West of India has its fair share of sweet treats that are just as scrumptious. Made from colostrum milk, sugar and cardamom the wobbly kharvas is a treat from Maharashtra, as are the spicy dinkache ladoo that are made with dink an edible resin from the axle-wood tree, dried coconut flakes, ghee and dried fruits in their recipe. These strength-giving caloric bombs are specially fed to women who have just delivered a baby.
The East Indian community of Mumbai are legendary for their Christmas sweets particularly the thali
sweet that’s made from a whopping one kilogram of butter and half that quantity of semolina and sugar. Not for the faint hearted this one!
One of Gujarat’s most beloved sweets is the ghari from Surat. Stuffed with mawa and nuts, these deep-fried wheat flour puffs are mostly prepared during festivals like Chandani Padva or Diwali. Harnessing the goodness of whole milk, the Gujarati doodhpak is a rich pudding made with rice, milk, saffron and dry fruits and enjoyed at any old time one feels like it.
With its curious blend of colonial Portuguese and Indian influences, Goa’s sweets are a bite apart. A
version of the barfi, kokad made with desiccated coconut cooked with toasted semolina and sugar syrup is also found in Portugal’s other erstwhile colonies like Brazil. Similarly, pinag (also called pinaca) is a dense, dry, cocktail sausage-shaped confection that’s not overtly sweet made from coarsely ground rice flour, dried coconut and jaggery.
But the queen of all Goan sweets has got to be the seven layered bibinca. The egg yolk-butter-sugar-nutmeg-coconut milk concoction came about when a group of inventive 16th century Franciscan nuns in Goa used the leftover yolks—once the egg whites were used to stiffen their wimples—to make this sweet that’s baked with seven successive layers representing the seven hillocks that they had to ascend and descend every day in order to reach the church from their hilltop convent in Old Goa.
Feast from the East
While it is the milky, soft-textured Bengali sweets like sondesh, rasmalai and kheer kodom that dominate this Eastern ‘sweetscape’ with their legendary popularity, there are others that deserves a mention.
Criminally simple to made, but very more-ish are the narikolor naru from Assam that are rolled balls
made with just grated coconut and sugar. The nutty taste and mouth feel of the chakhao kheer from
Manipur made with black rice may be acquired sensations, but the taste of this creamy preparation is worth it. Served during the Losar festival in February-March each year, the crunchy khapse from Arunachal Pradesh is made from dried and roasted bundangmo (amaranth) flour that’s mixed with hot water and the resulting batter deep fried into crisp fritters. Speaking of fried, Odisha’s banana malpuas are worth every calorie. A batter made from milk, wheat flour, semolina and mashed bananas is deep fried into disks that then get coated in a sugar syrup and are always served at breakfast time.
Perhaps one of the healthiest sweets we can find in India is the chhangban leh kurtai from the state of Mizoram. This one sees rice flour mixed with jaggery and water to a paste that’s steamed after being enclosed within turmeric leaves that perfume and flavour the sweet. Very similar to this one is Tripura’s awan bangwi. Only here, ghee, cashews, raisins and ginger are added to the rice flour mix for heft and all this is steamed in cone-shaped lairu (turmeric) leaves.
Into the Drink
Why limit yourself to merely munching on something sweet? India’s wide repertoire of drinkable treats is no less legendary. Here’s a glimpse at four such examples:
* Piyush-this summer cooler popular both in Maharashtra and neighbouring Gujarat is a creamy treat that sees shrikhand (sweetened strained yogurt) churned into a frothy concoction along with buttermilk and spiced up with saffron strands, sugar and cardamom and nutmeg powder.
* Vonn-is a traditional Goan drinkable porridge made with coconut milk, jaggery and chana dal (gram lentils) along with bibbe (raw cashewnuts) all boiled together till thick and creamy.
* Thandai-also known as sardai this drink is made from sweetened milk and a paste of almonds, fennel seeds, watermelon seeds, rose petals, pepper, khus (vetiver) seeds, cardamom and saffron. It is super popular in the north of India and is generally served during the festivals of Holi and Maha Shivratri.
* Jigarthanda-literally translated into English as “heart cooling”, this drink originates in the South Indian city of Madurai in Tamil Nadu and is made up of a rather curious mix of sweetened reduced milk, badam pisin (gum tragacanth) and nannari (sarsaparilla) syrup. All this is topped up with a scoop of ice-cream.
The Savoury Quest
For those craving a bit of a savoury crunch after all that sweet talk, we have just the specimens for you!
* Kuzhalappam-these deep-fried tubular snacks from Kerala are made from bits of rice flour dough to which finely chopped onions and whole cumin are added.
* Saria-generally served as an accompaniment to the Parsi wedding feast these long, white wafers are made with sago flour and are simply irresistible!
* Til Nimki-these traditional Bengali snacks are made from wheat flour, sesame seeds and crushed
peppercorns and rolled into long, rectangular pieces before being deep fried.
* Drann-usually prepared on Maha Shivratri as bhog (offering) and served along with kehwa tea, these fried snacks from Kashmir are made from rice flour, boiled walnuts, red chilli powder and aromatic spices like cumin seeds, carom seeds and asafoetida water.
* Sel Roti-though Nepalese in origin, these fried, bangle-sized circular snacks are also made in Sikkim during the festival of Tihar and are a yummy preparation made from rice flour, salt and ghee. The sweet version eschews salt in favour of sugar and cardamom.
(An edited version of this article first appeared in the November 2017 issue of Jetwings International in-flight magazine of Jet Airways https://www.jetairways.com/EN/DE/JetExperience/magazines.aspx)
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