The Unbroken MITHAI
From the Vedic apupa, ancient sesame
laddoo to barfis, sandesh and modak, the
long journey for Indian mithai is part of a
long cultural continuum
By Anoothi Vishal
The Subcontinental mithai is unique but it is not just
“kuch meetha” as the ad line goes. Instead, mithai is
cultural; its deep roots lie in Ayurveda, that treats
ingredients and their combinations as therapeutic,
and in Vedic and Pauranic ritual dating back millennia. The
reason why traditional mithai is always associated very
strongly with provenance — those motichoor laddoos from
Kanpur, ghewar from Alwar, peda from Mathura, makhan
malai or maliyyo from Benares, khaja from Puri — is because
of the deep emotional resonance that most Indians have with
their roots and communities. More so in other parts of the
world, food in India is cultural memory. Mithai shows up this
civilisational resonance most strongly.
From Apupa to vividh mishtan
While constant experimentation has added layers to India’s
mithai cultures and contributed to the development of new
sweets, this has mostly come about in the form of organic
layering upon older constructs, and evolved slowly and continuously. In fact, many of the “original” forms of mithai
from even 2000-1000 years ago are still intact and in culinary
circulation even today.
Among the earliest sweets of the Vedic age are the apupa,
mentioned in the Rig Veda. These were cakes of barley (a
grain mentioned in the Rig Veda as “yava”) boiled or fried and
then dipped in honey. Today’s pua, made for the autumn and
winter festivals, and malpua, made during monsoon festivals
such as Rakshabandhan, are a continuum of this — even
though pua and malpua are now made with wheat, which
replaced rice and barley as north India’s dominant grain
somewhere between the 7th and the 12th centuries. In the
7th century, Vaghabhatt, the Buddhist physician, mentions
rice and barley as leading grains, but by the 12th century
Manasollasa, wheat has replaced these as the dominant cereal
in the north and the west.
Rice pithe of eastern India are also a carrying forward of the
apupa, and a throwback to the ancient shali, as rice was called
in Mauryan times, a rich man’s grain connoting prosperity
and auspiciousness. Rice is ceremonially used as a signifier
of prosperity in Indian rituals and festival even today. That’s
why chawal ki kheer is such a pervasive and popular dessert
too whether you call it payesh or payasam. Kheer, the name,
borrows from ksheer, the Sanskrit word for milk — a prized
complete food in Ayurveda, deemed sweet, heavy and
nurturing and used in rituals of worship.
Autumn varieties of rice was considered the best, where
varieties such as the Mahashali were reserved only for
royalty. Echoes of this seasonality can be found in rituals
where rice kheer is a speciality on Sharad Poornima, when it is cooled under the full moon in
October. The 16th century Bengali
Shakta work Chandimangala mentions
kheer as a prasad.
Sugar, a Mauryan Invention
But mithai would not have evolved
the way it did but for one indigenous
ingredient: crystal cane sugar, an early
Indian invention. Sugarcane is indigenous
to India. By the time Alexander’s army
encountered India, crystal sugar was
already being made by evaporating the
juice. The Greek voyager Nearchos of
Crete mentions “reeds that produce
honey” (a reference to sugarcane) and
“amber coloured rocks” (a reference to
unrefined sugar) in his version of Indica.
There is also a mention in Buddhist
sources of a Chinese delegation visiting
Emperor Harsha’s court around the 7th
century to study sugar refining.
The Chinese-refined sugar would
come back as “chini” to Indian kitchens
in subsequent centuries. But both gud
and shakkara were prized, worshipped as
signifying prosperity or Lakshmi (which
is why so much white mithai and toys
made with sugar are Diwali offerings).
Moulded sugar toys find a medieval
mention as Diwali tradition, we see sugar
dotting the likes of bal mithai in the sacred
sites of Uttarakhand, and misri or bura
sprinkled over makkhan on cold winter mornings.
Chashni or sugar syrup was used to dip the honeycoombed
Ghrtapura (made of wheat and fried in ghee) of Surat
mentioned in medieval Jain literature — a mithai which is
very obviously a predecessor of the modern day ghewar.
Sesame laddoo may be one of the oldest mithai
While mithai connoisseurs of different states and cities
take pride in the provenance of their distinct sweets, a study
of ingredients shows a common strain is what were regarded
as ritualistically auspicious and thus used to craft the mithai.
Sesame laddoo are in fact one of the oldest mithais of India—
mentioned in ancient Sutra literature, as per KT Achaya. As an
oilseed native to the Subcontinent, til or sesame is important
in worship and ritual, including in Gaya, while worshipping
the ancestors. Whether it is the til-gud of central India or the
flaky khaaja of Bihar, Orissa and Bengal, or the soft white til
laddoos of northern winters as also the later day revadi and
gajak of Punjab, sesame is culturally prized.
Chanaka or the humble gram is another prized ingredient
widely used in mithai—in moti choor laddoos, as sweetened
offerings and celebratory foods of the south, and as filling or a
whole host of sweet delicacies, including in Pooran poli. Two
varieties of the chana exist in India—the small black “Bengal
gram” from which besan is made is indigenous to India,
while the other bigger gram arrived via a land route from the
Mediterranean. In every part of the country, this is deemed an auspicious ingredient fashioned into
celebratory delicacies and festive eats.
Ladduka finds a mention in the
epics, according to Achaya, as also in
Ayurvedic literature, Sushrutha Samhita.
Early Tamil Literature meanwhile
mentions a laddoo like sweet called the
moodgam, apparently a laddoo in a rice
flour casing—like a modern modak.
While the laddoo is pretty ancient, barfi
is more modern—its name deriving from
barf or snow, and pointing to the white
coloured milk-based mithai of medieval
or early modern period.
Kaccha vs Pucca khana
Why are so many Indian sweets laced
with ghee? If this has always bothered
you, you are likely not acquainted with
an early division of Indian food into
kachcha and pucca khana. Kachcha khana
was food not cooked in ghee, pucca
khana was “sanctified” by ghee. Ghee
was one of ancient India’s exports to the
Roman world too by the 1st century AD,
where the wealthy used it in worship.
In India, ghee was not just food but a
ritualistic medium of cooking. Kachcha
Khana, where the cooking did not begin
with frying in ghee (such as boiling rice
or making kadhi) required more careful
and ritualistic handling. It was not
stored. Pucca khana, sanctified by ghee,
could be stored, sold outside the temples and fit to travel
with. Most mithai cooked by halwais outside homes was thus
pucca khana. Frying was a way of increasing the shelf life
too. This is perhaps an obscure reason why everything from
gulab jamun, jalebi to halwa are also cooked in ghee in India,
instead of say being baked.
“Good news”
The other complaint people have is about Indian mithai
being so milk and khoa-ingrained! Again this is cultural
memory and practice. Curd is one of the oldest foods
mentioned in the Subcontinent’s literature—set not just
by using a little leftover culture as a starter, but also by
using acidic fruit such as ber. Curd that could not be used
immediately was churned into butter or makhan. From that
stems the makhan-misri delights associated with temple
foods. Cheese making in traditional groups was not prevalent
in the Gangetic plain with the Vedic injunction against
splitting milk. Milk solids and thickened products– rabdi,
khoa and chenna– were obtained without acidification.
These became the building blocks for mithai. Sandesh, a
lighter successor of the peda, began to be attractively made
in “auspicious” shapes like the conch shell, a harbinger of
“good news”, or “sandesh”. It was only with the Portuguese
influence in Bengal in the 17th century that chenna as we
know it today—a less dense product obtained by splitting
milk with acid —was incorporated into mithai-making.
