PAKORAS
From bheja to
Maggi, Indians can make bhajiyas out of anything but what makes this snack
distinct is the batter. With fake besan hitting shelves, our pakoras may not be
the same
The flight that British writer
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown took out of Kenya in March 1972 was an unhappy one. It was
packed with East African Indians, like her, fleeing politically fuelled
intimidation from native Africans across the region. Many had been robbed of
their possessions, with women stripped of their jewellery even on the way to
the airport.
But, as Alibhai-Brown recalls in
her memoir The Settler’s Cookbook, one old lady seemed unconcerned.
And when safely aloft she revealed why: “From a large, hand-stitched bag
embroidered with the map of India she takes out a tin containing several
battered, fried snacks made of mashed potatoes. She opens one carefully with
bent, brittle fingers. Inside are a couple of diamond rings.” She had 55
diamonds and some gold hidden inside the potato pakoras. “I fried the whole
afternoon,” the old lady said proudly.
This is probably a more literal
example of frying for fortune than Prime Minister Narendra Modi meant when he
recommended making and selling pakoras as reasonable employment. Yet a link
between deep fried foods and doing well has always existed and it has to do
with the nature of frying itself.
Deep-fried
satisfaction
Frying needs fats and these have
always been harder to get than other foods. They require messy and laborious
crushing (for plant oils) or clarifying by heat (for animal fats, like ghee).
It was hard to do at home and, as a result, fat extraction and selling became
the basis of early trading. Entrepreneurial communities like the Jews were
linked with oil extraction and trading. The Bene Israeli Jews of the Konkan
were known as Shaniwar Telis, or Saturday Oil Pressers from their holy day and
trade. PM Modi’s own community of Ghanchis also has roots in oil pressing and
trading, which they extended into grocery selling.
If oil was an expense, then deepfrying,
the most lavish way of using it, was a luxury. So much oil had to be heated and
then, usually just discarded. Deep frying is also associated with cities, those
centres of wealth. When people migrate to cities they seek deep fried food as
an easy luxury. Our brains are wired to love fats (unfortunately) as high
energy storehouses and deep fried foods are a fast and delicious way to get a
high fat hit. City street foods are often deep fried; as with any addiction,
supplying the hit is good business.
It isn’t just craving calories.
Deep frying deliciously transforms food. In On Food and Cooking,
Harold McGee’s magnum opus on cooking science, he notes that deep frying is a
form of boiling “with the essential difference that the oil is heated far above
the boiling point of water, and so will dehydrate the food surface and brown
it.” When a thin slice of potato hits boiling oil the water in it is forced out
and it becomes wafer crisp — and deliciously fatty because some oil takes the
place of the water.
Choose your
fritter
Pakoras are fritters, which
deliver two types of taste satisfaction — crisp browned coating and soft,
steamed interior. Indian cooks boast of being able to make pakoras out of
anything. Apart from the usual onions and potatoes, there are many regional
variations. Some of the most striking are given by Renuka Devi Chaudhurani,
whose collection of classic Bengali recipes is, in its English version,
actually called Pumpkin Flower Fritters. Apart from the title
recipe, it has recipes for pakoras made with Agastya flowers, water hyacinth
flowers, onion flowers, neem leaves, jute leaves and jasmine leaves.
Such traditional recipes have been
joined by modern ones like processed cheese which is ideal for pakoras — it
melts, yet holds together. A friend swears by the pakoras his mother made from
Maggi noodles. He also describes a mega-pakora his brother encountered while
studying in a college in Raigad: “The students were bored with standard
vada-pav, so they got the guy making them to dip the whole vada-pav, bun,
chutney and all, in batter and deep fry that!”
As Indians travelled the world,
they took pakoras with them. The most startling incarnation must be the haggis
pakora where the signature Scottish dish of sheep’s lung, heart and liver
minced and mixed with oats and onions is made into balls and made into pakoras.
Scotland is famously home of the deep fried Mars Bar, so it is no surprise that
haggis pakoras have become popular. In Mauritius the loaves of bread called
baguettes, part of their French heritage, are sliced up when stale and given
the pakora treatment, for a snack called Di Pain Frire, meaning fried bread.
More commonly, reflecting the
humble status of most Indian immigrants, the pakoras are the simplest form of
batter mixed with a few vegetables and dropped into the hot oil. (In India this
might be distinguished as bhajiyas, but the nomenclature is very mixed up). In
South Africa these are called dhaltjes and phulourie in the Caribbean, where a
song in the local Indo-Caribbean style of music called ‘chutney’, asks an
excellent question in its title: Pholourie Bina Chutney Kaise Bani?
What makes all these Indian, as
opposed to other kinds of fritters, is the use of besan. Elsewhere, batters are
made from different types of flour, or breadcrumbs, mixed with eggs, milk, beer
or other liquids. But pakoras usually use besan, sometimes with semolina (sooji
or rawa) for a crunchier effect, or rice flour for a crisper one. But besan,
made from roasted and ground chana dal, is basic, giving pakoras their
enticingly golden colour and savoury taste.
A new
batterfield
Today there’s a new complication.
The besan being sold in India may not be made from chana dal at all. In January
2017 Madhvi Sally, Economic Times’ commodities specialist, reported that across
the country ‘besan’ made from yellow peas, which sold at Rs 35 a kilo
wholesale, was rapidly replacing chana dal besan, which was selling for Rs 100
a kilo wholesale.
This was the result of decades of
poor planning for cultivation and procurement of pulses like chana, resulting
in irregular supplies from Indian farmers. But rather than rectify this,
governments have resorted to importing yellow peas, particularly from Canada,
where it is grown as animal fodder. Late last year the government finally did
put a restriction on this by raising the import tariff to 50%.
But this has been vigorously
contested by Canada, which managed to persuade India to ease import rules on
pulses during the visit of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau. As for our government,
the test of its commitment to pakoras will be in its commitment to real besan,
the essential Indian ingredient behind this most Indian of snacks.
TOI 25FEB18
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