Round Trips of the Parantha
From the Awadhi
parantha to the thick porota of Kolkata to the cafe versions for millennials,
the flatbread reinvents itself
Hot, crisp, flaky triangles of the Mughlai porota lie
on a platter in front of me at Monkey Bar, Delhi. One of Kolkata’s best-loved
street dishes has just got credibly cafe-ised. I am here not only to taste
porota in environs swisher than the sweaty shops in Esplanade, Kolkata, but to
listen to the many tales of its 77-yearold resident and home cook Iti Misra.
She is collaborating with the restaurant chain to recreate some of Cal’s
classic street food and offer people a chance to bite into them during Pujo
even if they are far from the city’s festive frenzy.
Every dedicated fan of the porota knows that Anadi
Cabin in Esplanade, which has been around from before Independence but its
ageing waiters insist is almost a century old, is the place to seek out the
porota though many other shops do the dish, possibly equally well.
Anadi, where you will see a sweaty man roll out
porota after porota and shallow fry them on a hot iron tawa, is the place where
the Mughlai porota in its present form might have been invented, goes the urban
legend. “Every day that man rolls out 400 porotas from 20 kg of maida,” says
Misra. It’s a shop and a snack she remembers from her college days, when
vegetarians would ask for a porota layered with beaten duck egg while
non-vegetarians tucked into a folded one stuffed with keema. “In Bengal, Hindu
vegetarians ate duck eggs but not hen’s eggs,” she says.
Food historian KT Achaya has written about “some sort
of a taboo that seemed to have prevailed in Hindu India” with regard to eggs.
Poultry farming was developed by the British but chicken, a scavenging bird,
was widely thought to be “unclean”. Achaya says that it is frequently mentioned
in various texts as a food banned for Brahmins. It is perhaps because of such
biases that chicken — and hen eggs — first became popular with the British and
Anglo-Indian communities in Kolkata in the 18th century, where roast fowl was
served on colonial tables as a substitute for beef roast. It was only after
that that chicken and eggs got incorporated even into the cooking of the Muslim
communities of northern India (the South does not seem to have had such a bias
against the fowl) — we see it in the invention of dishes such as egg curry and
nargisi kofte by nawabi cooks around that time.
Duck meat, meanwhile, was savoured by both upperclass
Muslims and Hindus who ate meat, like the Kayasths of the Indo-Gangetic plain
and Bengali Brahmins. Duck eggs, recalls Misra, were almost regarded as
“vegetarian”, and the porota might once have been exclusively coated with them.
Anadi still serves the duck egg variant.
Lucknow to Cal
For something that is at its heart just an egg
parantha, the journey of the Mughlai parantha is full of twists and turns —
from the many-layered parat-wala Awadhi parantha to the quintessential Kolkata
dish stuffed with mince and thick as a pie.
The Kolkata dish bears little resemblance to the dish
I had at home while growing up in a UP Kayasth family. My mother and
grandmother would make a ghee-laden parantha, flaky with parats or layers.
Then, beaten eggs, spiked with onion, green chilli and fresh coriander, would
be poured on to the parantha sizzling in oil on the iron tawa. Once the egg
mixture was poured on the bread, it was flipped to let the egg cook. The
parantha would then be folded and served to us. It was a home dish although
some shops started putting the Mughlai parantha on the menu along with
paranthas stuffed with aloo, gobhi, cheeni. Chef Manu Chandra recalls coming
across the egg-coated Mughlai parantha at a shop near the Buland Darwaza in
Agra. I remember it from Lucknow when the Clarks Avadh, the poshest hotel then,
decided to put up a stall serving these in a corner of its garden.
Delhi, of course, has always had its own late-night
anda-paranthawallahs.
I asked Habib Rehman, the pioneering hotelier who
remains on the board of ITC post his retirement as its supremo. Rehman is
well-known as an epicure, was responsible for conceptualising the Awadhi
restaurant Dum Pukht and his roots in Hyderabadi courtly culture make him a
repository of culinary knowledge about Mughal-based cuisines. As He
remembers the Mughlai parantha of his childhood in Hyderabad as a heavy bread
made from wheat flour with some maida blended in, kneaded with ghee, rolled
into rounds of 6-8-inch diameter, which were then folded and refolded to make
the many layers of the parantha similar to a warqi parantha, which was finally
brushed with beaten eggs and then shallow-fried.
All these accounts make the origin of the parantha
somewhat clearer. As eggs entered the kitchens of various Indian communities
once British power spread in the late 18th to early 19th century, a new dish
emerged from the traditional parantha popular in Awadh and other courtly
cultures: a rich and multi-layered, egg-coated parantha. The other change that
happened was that upper-class homes started using maida or a combination of
maida and wheat to make a finer parantha.
If eggs became popular with the colonialists, so did
maida. The heavy milling required to produce this flour came with the British.
In Europe, different types of fine flours were milled and used for baking. In
India, maida was thought of as an exclusive and “fine” ingredient for the upper
classes and aristocracy which began to replace the ordinary whole wheat flour
with this new ingredient. Atta, by contrast, was used by ordinary people and in
villages.
In Lucknow, where the aristocracy abandoned all
interest in political affairs and relinquished more and more power to the
British after the Battle of Buxar, nawabi kitchens were turning out exquisite
delicacies as the culture became more inward-looking and food became a way to
entertain fellow aristocrats as well as British officials. Lachila parantha was
an invention of such a culture.
Made in upper-class Muslim homes, this was a maida
parantha, rich with ghee, which derived its name from its suppleness (lachila
in Urdu means supple or flexible). Awadhi food is all about specific
combinations. Not only are individual dishes important but how and with what
they are eaten, too, are. Lachila parantha was had with ghutwa kebab — finely cut
keema made into a mash (ghutwa in Urdu means mash). In Lucknow, I hear about
this from Mir Jaffer, who claims to be a descendent of Wajid Ali Shah, though
many decry it.
Nevertheless, Jaffer and wife still make lachila
parantha and ghutwa kebab. The combo otherwise has long disappeared from
Lucknowi dining tables, surviving only in fables of nawabi lifestyle.
The universal truth about food is that dishes never
die, they merely take on another form — thesomewhere else.
Biryani, dum aloo, even pooris and kachoris of Awadh
and Banaras took on other forms in Calcutta. As Wajid Ali Shah, the last nawab
of Awadh, was exiled to Calcutta, there was a migration of cooks and culinary
culture. The potatoenriched biryani of Calcutta may not have been the only dish
to come about as a result of this travel. Culinary ideas and skills around the
Mughlai parantha, maida-laced supple breads (luchi and lachila parantha are
cousins, after all) and ghutwa kebab all seem to have moved along the Ganga,
evolving into a dish that we know today: the Mughlai porota, made with maida,
coated with egg, stuffed with mince.
In Other Shores
The story of the Mughlai parantha does not quite end
here. Malaysia, Indonesia and even Brunei have a street snack remarkably
similar to the Kolkata dish. The murtabak or mutabak (in Arabic, mutabak means
to fold) is an egglined crepe filled with mince and other ingredients, fried
and eaten with different condiments, including soy sauce and chillies, in
Southeast Asia.
In Malaysia, where it was initially sold in shops run
by Tamil Muslims, it is made with roti canai (some contend the name comes from
roti “Chennai” ), a flatbread similar to warqi or parat-wala parantha. How did
the Mughlai parantha cross the sea and become a common fixture in Southeast
Asia?
There are many stories about the murtabak, which is
sometimes thought to be an Arabic invention. Yet, if we examine how it is
cooked and served, we could believe the alternative account that it is an
Indian invention, carried by migrants.
In Malaysia, not only is the murtabak identical to
Kolkata’s porota, it is even eaten similarly — with a gravy (kaari) of potatoes
as a side dish. The biggest migration of Indians to Malaysia was during
colonial times, when indentured labourers were sent from southern India to work
in the Malay plantations.
Colonial history also reveals that Penang was part of
Calcutta presidency. It is easy to conjecture that the snack became popular as
an easy-to-eat, cheap food for the migrants, who gave it another name. Trade
between Malay and other parts of the world spread this dish further. The Monkey
Bar avatar is yet another twist in the tale. A street dish is now cafe-ised to
go with buzzing cocktails. The Mughlai porota may just see a millennial
rediscovery now.
Anoothi Vishal
The writer looks at restaurants,
food trends and culinary concepts
ETM30SEP18
No comments:
Post a Comment