(This article appeared in the 21st December 2019 issue of the Mint Lounge newspaper, India on page 14 https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/where-to-find-the-perfect-yuletide-spirit-11576857488372.html)
Showing posts with label PUDUCHERRY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PUDUCHERRY. Show all posts
Saturday, December 21, 2019
Christmas around India!
(This article appeared in the 21st December 2019 issue of the Mint Lounge newspaper, India on page 14 https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/where-to-find-the-perfect-yuletide-spirit-11576857488372.html)
Sunday, May 12, 2019
The Learning Vacation
Travel these days is much more than simply
ticking off those all-important boxes of must-visit sites and must-do
activities. Enter the learning vacation where picking up a new skill or craft
while immersing yourself in the local culture of the place you visit is the
latest buzz word in travel. Raul Dias shows you just how to go about that!
Tips To Keep In Mind
1. Choose an activity that really interests you and don’t just do it because the rest of your family or travel group is enthused by it. Let’s be honest; kite-boarding isn’t for everyone!
2. Don’t feel the pressure to pack in too many learning activities into your vacation. Remember it is a holiday after all, not an offsite skills course.
3. Do ample research before signing up and make sure that the place or the person from whom you are learning from has the right credentials and is truly an expert in their field.
4. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t seem very good at that particular skill or craft. Give yourself some time and practice. It’s worth remembering that clichéd phrase: “Rome wasn’t built in a day!”
By Raul Dias
Not content with merely
sitting around sipping fruity cocktails by the beach on your next summer
holiday? We hear you. For most of us these days, the idea of the vacation has
evolved from the one of the past where sight-seeing and picking up souvenirs
was all we ever wanted out of it. And one the greatest agents of this evolution
is the learning vacation. A popular trend in the west, the learning vacation is
now one of the top ways we Indians travel. More and more of us are choosing
this style of seeing the world, while taking back something less material and
more life enriching.
Today’s holiday is all about getting more bang for one’s buck by partaking in more immersive (and dare-we-say, ‘Insta-friendly’) experiences while we pick up skills and hobbies that will not just be with us forever, but skills that may come in handy later. The learning vacation seeks to be the conduit to all this and much, much more.
Imagine picking up a skill like pottery while embracing Mother Nature in all her glory! You can very much do that. Regarded as India’s pottery capital, the bucolic village of Andretta set against the mighty Himalayas in Himachal Pradesh is where all you pottery enthusiasts should head to. Here, the Andretta Pottery and Craft Society in Kangra is THE place to get an immersive experience by staying at a potter’s collective where you will participate in daily hands-on classes to make your own bowls, jugs and other earthenware under the guidance of an expert (andrettapottery.com).
For those with a sportier inclination why not learn to surf in some of India’s best beaches? Located 10km north of the union territory of Puducherry, near the village of Tandryankupam, Serenity Beach is home to the Kallialay Surf School run by two expat Spanish brothers. Here you can channel your inner (hidden!?) surfer as you learn the watersport’s finer nuances by signing up for their five-day surfing course that teaches you all you need to know about cruising the waves (surfschoolindia.com).
The learning vacation shouldn’t be just limited to your domestic travel. Expand your horizons and do things you’ve never done before. For example, the Northern Thailand region of Lanna is well-known as a place, not just for learning and its amazing culture, but also as a bastion of exquisite food. So, on your next Thailand vacation take some time and head up country to the arts capital of Chiang Mai to include some skill-gathering? Sign up for a four-hours long, hands-on cookery class with Chef Chanrat Karatna who will teach you to whip up from scratch local dishes like the Northern Thailand version of the ubiquitous somtamthai papaya and prawn salad and more, all served with sticky black rice that is a specialty of the Lanna region (airthaikitchen.com).
Fancy something a bit fancier? Simple. Learn all there is to truffle hunting when in Italy! A mere 15 minutes outside the Renaissance-rich city of Florence, the forested hills of Bagno a Ripoli are said to be rich with that magical, perfumed haute cuisine ingredient called black truffles. Sign up for a day foraging for and learning about all there is to know about the delicious fungus with truffle hunting expert Giulio Benuzzi and his specially trained sniffer dog named Eda. You will explore the forest near their home and follow Eda’s keen sense of smell and instincts on the track to truffles. And that’s not all. Once you unearth a few delicious truffles, you will be treated to a lunch made from them (giuliothetrufflehunter.com).
While we’ve kept this list to a minimum in adherence to brevity, the possibilities for a learning vacation are excitingly limitless. Learn a new language or hone those salsa dancing skills. Remember that the world is your oyster and it’s never too late to add value to your next vacation.
Today’s holiday is all about getting more bang for one’s buck by partaking in more immersive (and dare-we-say, ‘Insta-friendly’) experiences while we pick up skills and hobbies that will not just be with us forever, but skills that may come in handy later. The learning vacation seeks to be the conduit to all this and much, much more.
Imagine picking up a skill like pottery while embracing Mother Nature in all her glory! You can very much do that. Regarded as India’s pottery capital, the bucolic village of Andretta set against the mighty Himalayas in Himachal Pradesh is where all you pottery enthusiasts should head to. Here, the Andretta Pottery and Craft Society in Kangra is THE place to get an immersive experience by staying at a potter’s collective where you will participate in daily hands-on classes to make your own bowls, jugs and other earthenware under the guidance of an expert (andrettapottery.com).
For those with a sportier inclination why not learn to surf in some of India’s best beaches? Located 10km north of the union territory of Puducherry, near the village of Tandryankupam, Serenity Beach is home to the Kallialay Surf School run by two expat Spanish brothers. Here you can channel your inner (hidden!?) surfer as you learn the watersport’s finer nuances by signing up for their five-day surfing course that teaches you all you need to know about cruising the waves (surfschoolindia.com).
The learning vacation shouldn’t be just limited to your domestic travel. Expand your horizons and do things you’ve never done before. For example, the Northern Thailand region of Lanna is well-known as a place, not just for learning and its amazing culture, but also as a bastion of exquisite food. So, on your next Thailand vacation take some time and head up country to the arts capital of Chiang Mai to include some skill-gathering? Sign up for a four-hours long, hands-on cookery class with Chef Chanrat Karatna who will teach you to whip up from scratch local dishes like the Northern Thailand version of the ubiquitous somtamthai papaya and prawn salad and more, all served with sticky black rice that is a specialty of the Lanna region (airthaikitchen.com).
Fancy something a bit fancier? Simple. Learn all there is to truffle hunting when in Italy! A mere 15 minutes outside the Renaissance-rich city of Florence, the forested hills of Bagno a Ripoli are said to be rich with that magical, perfumed haute cuisine ingredient called black truffles. Sign up for a day foraging for and learning about all there is to know about the delicious fungus with truffle hunting expert Giulio Benuzzi and his specially trained sniffer dog named Eda. You will explore the forest near their home and follow Eda’s keen sense of smell and instincts on the track to truffles. And that’s not all. Once you unearth a few delicious truffles, you will be treated to a lunch made from them (giuliothetrufflehunter.com).
While we’ve kept this list to a minimum in adherence to brevity, the possibilities for a learning vacation are excitingly limitless. Learn a new language or hone those salsa dancing skills. Remember that the world is your oyster and it’s never too late to add value to your next vacation.
Tips To Keep In Mind
1. Choose an activity that really interests you and don’t just do it because the rest of your family or travel group is enthused by it. Let’s be honest; kite-boarding isn’t for everyone!
2. Don’t feel the pressure to pack in too many learning activities into your vacation. Remember it is a holiday after all, not an offsite skills course.
3. Do ample research before signing up and make sure that the place or the person from whom you are learning from has the right credentials and is truly an expert in their field.
4. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t seem very good at that particular skill or craft. Give yourself some time and practice. It’s worth remembering that clichéd phrase: “Rome wasn’t built in a day!”
(An edited version of this article first appeared in the April 2019 issue of Purple Hues magazine of Sterling Holidays https://www.sterlingholidays.com/content/dam/sterlingholidays/footer/files/sterlingworld/purple-hues-magazine-apr-2019.pdf)
Sunday, February 5, 2017
A Slice of India!
From the bakeries of Allahabad and Puducherry to homes
in Mumbai and Goa, cakes made with typically Indian ingredients like ghee and petha can be found jostling for space along with the more
ubiquitous varieties, making for interesting confectionary chimeras.
By Raul Dias
Incredible as it may be to believe, but until I was
around 10, I thought that ghee was
the only shortening agent employed in baking a cake! It was only when I began
to get ensnared in the vice-like grip of a multitude of cookery shows—thanks to
the satellite television invasion of the early 90s—did I discover butter as
being the de facto, world’s favourite cake fat. All this, much to the chagrin
of my Anglo-Indian grandmother who resolutely refused to make the switch,
insisting that her spiced fruit cake could only be made with lashings of shudh desi ghee.
Thanks to the forced WWII frugality thrust upon her in the form of grocery rationing, as a young homemaker, she came up with several recipes substituting the expensive and tough-to-procure butter with the easy-to-prepare homemade clarified butter. Recipes, along with a larder of rather strange ingredients, that would remain intrinsic parts of her baking repertoire, forever.
Speaking of strange, long before it became fashionable to add a bit of puréed pumpkin (and grated zucchini, too!) to impart a rich, moistly dense crumb to a fruit cake, my Nan would chop up bits of her favourite sweet—Agra ka petha, or sugar candy pumpkin—in lieu of the more ‘kosher’ candied peel and tutti-frutti. Along with ghee and a sprinkling of spices like sonth (dried ginger powder) and javitri (mace), she’d lovingly make her legendary fruit cake that both my mum and I have tried to replicate rather unsuccessfully over the years since Nan’s passing.
But on a recent trip to Allahabad, I came across a version of a spiced rich fruit cake that could easily step in as a worthy doppelganger to the one I’ll sadly never savour again. Once a stronghold of thousands of Anglo-Indian ‘railway’ families, Allahabad today has barely a dozen or so left. But what they’ve left behind is an edible legacy of sorts in the form of the Allahabad Cake, which is what I discovered at Bushy’s on Kanpur Road. This modest, 54-year-old little bakery still makes a scrumptious, Indianised version of a traditional fruit cake using nutmeg, saunf (fennel seeds), cinnamon, caraway seeds, ghee and a marmalade that the person at the counter told me is sourced from Loknath ki Galli—Allahabad’s foodie haven.
The mava cupcake is another Indianised cake treat most of us grew up eating here in India. Dried whole milk or mava is the chief ingredient of the moist, eggless cake that’s flecked with cardamom seeds that go pop in the mouth when bitten into! This classic tea time delicacy has been made famous by the Irani and Parsi bakeries of Mumbai and Pune—particularly Merwan’s that has several branches in both cities and by Mumbai’s iconic Sassanian bakery at Marine Lines.
Made with copious quantities of salted butter, eggs, semolina and the main star ingredient—desiccated coconut powder—the bhaat cake is Goa’s pride and joy (see recipe). A vestige of Goa’s Portuguese colonialists, this dense, intensely coconut-y calorific treat has its underpinnings in Middle Eastern confectionary, given its remarkable similarity to the basbousa semolina-orange blossom water cake of Egypt, that is understandably bereft of the very coastal Indian ingredient—the coconut.
Another close colonial cousin of bhaat is the East Indian thali sweet that uses an additional ingredient in the form of almonds ground in rose water. And alluding to its name, this festive treat is both baked and served in an inch-high steel thali. Once ready, diamond shaped slices are cut and eaten more like an Indian mithai than a cake.
On a year-long work assignment in Chennai a few years ago, my weekends were mostly spent driving down to Puducherry, both, for bar essentials restocking, and to partake in the wonder that is the vivikum cake. Also known as the Pondicherry cake, this more-ish treat is prepared by Puducherry’s Franco-Indian Christians for Christmas, though one can find it all year round at bakeries such as La Boulangerie and Baker Street. Made with ghee (there we go again!), eggs, semolina, nuts, brandy-macerated raisins and zesty lemon peel, the alcohol in the cake helps lengthen the vivikum cake’s shelf life. Not that longevity matters in this cake… err, case!
Thanks to the forced WWII frugality thrust upon her in the form of grocery rationing, as a young homemaker, she came up with several recipes substituting the expensive and tough-to-procure butter with the easy-to-prepare homemade clarified butter. Recipes, along with a larder of rather strange ingredients, that would remain intrinsic parts of her baking repertoire, forever.
Speaking of strange, long before it became fashionable to add a bit of puréed pumpkin (and grated zucchini, too!) to impart a rich, moistly dense crumb to a fruit cake, my Nan would chop up bits of her favourite sweet—Agra ka petha, or sugar candy pumpkin—in lieu of the more ‘kosher’ candied peel and tutti-frutti. Along with ghee and a sprinkling of spices like sonth (dried ginger powder) and javitri (mace), she’d lovingly make her legendary fruit cake that both my mum and I have tried to replicate rather unsuccessfully over the years since Nan’s passing.
But on a recent trip to Allahabad, I came across a version of a spiced rich fruit cake that could easily step in as a worthy doppelganger to the one I’ll sadly never savour again. Once a stronghold of thousands of Anglo-Indian ‘railway’ families, Allahabad today has barely a dozen or so left. But what they’ve left behind is an edible legacy of sorts in the form of the Allahabad Cake, which is what I discovered at Bushy’s on Kanpur Road. This modest, 54-year-old little bakery still makes a scrumptious, Indianised version of a traditional fruit cake using nutmeg, saunf (fennel seeds), cinnamon, caraway seeds, ghee and a marmalade that the person at the counter told me is sourced from Loknath ki Galli—Allahabad’s foodie haven.
The mava cupcake is another Indianised cake treat most of us grew up eating here in India. Dried whole milk or mava is the chief ingredient of the moist, eggless cake that’s flecked with cardamom seeds that go pop in the mouth when bitten into! This classic tea time delicacy has been made famous by the Irani and Parsi bakeries of Mumbai and Pune—particularly Merwan’s that has several branches in both cities and by Mumbai’s iconic Sassanian bakery at Marine Lines.
Made with copious quantities of salted butter, eggs, semolina and the main star ingredient—desiccated coconut powder—the bhaat cake is Goa’s pride and joy (see recipe). A vestige of Goa’s Portuguese colonialists, this dense, intensely coconut-y calorific treat has its underpinnings in Middle Eastern confectionary, given its remarkable similarity to the basbousa semolina-orange blossom water cake of Egypt, that is understandably bereft of the very coastal Indian ingredient—the coconut.
Another close colonial cousin of bhaat is the East Indian thali sweet that uses an additional ingredient in the form of almonds ground in rose water. And alluding to its name, this festive treat is both baked and served in an inch-high steel thali. Once ready, diamond shaped slices are cut and eaten more like an Indian mithai than a cake.
On a year-long work assignment in Chennai a few years ago, my weekends were mostly spent driving down to Puducherry, both, for bar essentials restocking, and to partake in the wonder that is the vivikum cake. Also known as the Pondicherry cake, this more-ish treat is prepared by Puducherry’s Franco-Indian Christians for Christmas, though one can find it all year round at bakeries such as La Boulangerie and Baker Street. Made with ghee (there we go again!), eggs, semolina, nuts, brandy-macerated raisins and zesty lemon peel, the alcohol in the cake helps lengthen the vivikum cake’s shelf life. Not that longevity matters in this cake… err, case!
Bhaat
Cake
Recipe
Ingredients
500 gm granulated sugar
250 gm salted butter
250 gm semolina
250 gm desiccated coconut powder
1 tbsp rose essence
1 tsp baking powder
6 whole eggs
200 ml water (room temperature)
25 ml water (heated)
Procedure
* Put 200 ml water and sugar in a thick bottom pan and allow to melt over a medium flame.
* When melted, add butter and allow to combine.
* Now add desiccated coconut powder and semolina and cook for five minutes. Allow to cool to room temperature in pan itself.
* Add baking powder to heated water and pour into the cooled batter.
* Add rose essence to batter and keep aside.
* Beat the six whole eggs till frothy and add to batter combining well.
* Line a 1kg-bearing cake tin with butter paper and bake in a pre-heated oven for 45 minutes at 180˚C.
* When cooled cut and serve on its own.
500 gm granulated sugar
250 gm salted butter
250 gm semolina
250 gm desiccated coconut powder
1 tbsp rose essence
1 tsp baking powder
6 whole eggs
200 ml water (room temperature)
25 ml water (heated)
Procedure
* Put 200 ml water and sugar in a thick bottom pan and allow to melt over a medium flame.
* When melted, add butter and allow to combine.
* Now add desiccated coconut powder and semolina and cook for five minutes. Allow to cool to room temperature in pan itself.
* Add baking powder to heated water and pour into the cooled batter.
* Add rose essence to batter and keep aside.
* Beat the six whole eggs till frothy and add to batter combining well.
* Line a 1kg-bearing cake tin with butter paper and bake in a pre-heated oven for 45 minutes at 180˚C.
* When cooled cut and serve on its own.
--Recipe
courtesy Ann Dias
(An edited version of this article first appeared in the 5th February 2017 issue of The Hindu newspaper, India http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/food/Cake%E2%80%99s-colonial-cousins/article17193172.ece)
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