Karthigai has always been one of my favourite festival days. It is celebrated on a full moon night, and this year it was on December 13. Sisters light lamps and candles and pray for their brothers, who express their love and thanks with gifts. When my daughters were little, they too lit lamps and candles with me in our tea garden home in North Bengal just as I’d done with my mother and sisters when I was growing up in Delhi.
Most of the goodies offered up with prayers on Karthigai are made with jaggery, which is vellam in Tamil and gur (rhyming with ‘good’) in a number of Indian languages. On Karthigai my mother would make vella dosai, appam (little deep-fried dumplings) and pori undai (puffed rice laddoos in golden vellam syrup) in large quantities.
I remember vellam was always sold in rounds about 10 inches in diameter with slightly raised centres. It has a grainy texture, and is firm but soft enough to be broken up into chunks. We ate small chunks with dosai and adai at home, at ‘tiffin’ time, that traditional South Indian meal eaten between three and five in the evening.
Best meal of the day
Most children who grew up at the same time as I did thought tiffin was the best meal of the day. You got traditional fast food (though we didn’t have that term those days) like dosai and adai, uppuma, pakoras (called bajji ) poori-masala, and idli (not a favourite with most children). These were actually good for you, in addition to being delicious. There are brown and white versions of many traditional Indian eats and the brown ones are all made with vellam . There’s white pongal , which is a savoury, and sakkara pongal , its sweetened brown version. Vellam has health benefits in the hot season. I remember my mother preparing glasses of icy paanaham, gur sharbat flavoured with dried ginger and cardamom, which kept us cool when Delhi’s ‘loo’ wind blew. The taste beat nimbu pani, or any pani for that matter.
Vellam is probably the purest form of cane sugar. It is unrefined and rich in moisture, iron, minerals and ‘heat’. It is high in calories, but these are ‘good calories’, unlike the ones in refined white sugar. Shakkar is another form of golden unrefined sugar, a little lighter in colour and powdery in texture. Fresh stocks of gur and shakkar arrive at grocery shops at the beginning of the cold weather. I found both in Delhi on my visit there last month. Both were excellent. Only small quantities of gur and shakkar make their way to rural areas of eastern India.
A couple of months back, I bought some gur in Assam, which was awful: It was adulterated with caramelised white sugar. Incredibly, the cost of gur has been higher than that of white sugar for some years. It used to be cheap, the poor person’s sweetener and a traditional rustic dessert. In the 1990s my husband and I would take the train to Madras, and when we passed through parts of rural Orissa vendors would serve tea sweetened with gur.
I remember the days of sugar shortage and rationing. That was also the age when readymade garments were costly and you got your clothes made by the tailor, when all our vegetables and fruits were not evenly sized and brightly coloured hybrids, but actually tasted of the earth from which they came.
Open season
The Bengali month of Poush began in late-December, and with it the open season for bingeing on sweets, particularly those made with khejur gur, which is gur made from date palm sap. The sap is sweet and ready for collection at the beginning of the cold weather, and it gets sweeter as the weather gets colder.
I saw and tasted my first khejur gur sweets when I got married and moved to the Dooars, North Bengal. They weren’t all that known outside Bengal in those days. Once I tasted them I was hooked for life. Bengali khejur gur sweets are golden and boozy in flavour, with a mellow richness that can’t be matched.
We used to travel the length of Dooars at least once a week, and my husband managed to hunt out the best eateries and sweetshops in all the little towns. Pretty soon we zeroed in on Nagrakata, Mal Bazar and Bagdogra (in that order) as the places that stocked the best khejur gur er mishti .
Around five years ago, there was a sudden drop in the quality of these sweets. The sweetshops stocked them in quantities, but alas, they no longer tasted the same. It didn’t take long to discover that with no khejur gur to be had anywhere, the sweetshops had switched to caramel. This happened because there were no date palm trees anymore. So there we go.
