A history of Kayasth cuisine brings back memories of winter afternoons

Memories of childhood, like seasons, frequently involve food. We know winter is arriving in North India when we begin to crave adrak waali chai (ginger tea), daal made with spinach, or cauliflower-stuffed paranthas.

For food writer and historian Anoothi Vishal, changing seasons evoke memories of visits from Lucknow to her grandparents’ house in Ghaziabad. The person who decided the menu, and defined Vishal’s palate for years, was her grandmother, whom she called “Barima” (Mrs LC to outsiders).

In Mrs LC’s Table: Stories About Kayasth Food And Culture, Vishal delves deep into those memories, as well as the techniques, ingredients and history associated with the food heritage of her community, the Kayasths.

“The book started as an academic exercise,” Vishal said. “I wanted to talk about the historicity of food, not recipes. The fact that it got written as a personal narrative came later – as a conscious way in which to engage people with the story of a lifestyle that is no longer available to most.”

The Kayasths are members of the Hindu caste that was not a part of the Brahminical varna system of Vedic society, which divides Hindus into four distinct classes – Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras. The Kayasths emerged around the time of the early Mughals as record-keepers. The winter menu, in Vishal’s food memoir, describes the rich and sumptuous aspects of Kayasth food: winter greens with meaty stews, pickles made of red chillies, lentil dumplings dried and baked in the winter sun.

Warming foods

By November, most dining tables are replete with winter produce – leafy vegetables like spinach and fenugreek (methi) replace the water-filled gourds of summer, while guavas and oranges replace mangoes.

Vishal also has fond memories of her Barima making boxes of gajar ka halwa, neatly cut into squares, for her children and grandchildren. “This was the recipe that she narrated as a bedtime story to me, when I was two and went to live with her,” she said.

The family would spend afternoons in the sun, eating guavas with rock salt and biting into the crumbly and brittle sesame seed dessert called gazak specially brought from Meerut, (the name was pronounced with an emphasis on “z”, as per the Urdu pronunciation, because calling it “gajak” as it is sometimes known, was considered unsophisticated).

“Cooking was very seasonal,” said Vishal. “Vegetables were bought according to season. Summer meant meals of parval (pointed gourd), torai (ridge gourd), karela (bitter gourd) and arhar dal (split red gram) with raw mangoes in it. Winter had a completely distinct repertoire – heavier meat curries like pasande, made with warming ingredients like almonds, winter greens like bathua, which was my grandmother’s favourite, another one called satpaita (dal made with greens), and cauliflowers with green peas. The last two are not traditional vegetables but colonial ones.”

“I remember one winter afternoon when my grandmother sat on the terrace, the mild sun cast a glow on her face, and she showed me how to make the perfect mangori. She took little bits of ground moong dal in pinches between her thumb and ring finger and dropped the little pearls on clean newspaper sheets, in neat rows. The mangori had to be tiny and of even size if they were to win the approval of the stern, perfection-seeking matriarchs from whom Barima had learnt this art.”

Kayasth cuisine focuses a great deal on meat – in fact, most vegetables in the Kayasth menu are prepared the same way as meat. Slow cooked with spices, they are turned into “faux non-vegetarian” dishes, meant to keep the women, most of whom are vegetarian, happy. Other warming delicacies include breakfasts with moong dal chillas (flat pancakes made from soaked green mung bean batter), gajar ka halwa for dessert, and shabdeg, a preparation in which turnips and meat are stewed overnight on a slow fire, as the main course for dinner.

Kayasth cuisine revisited

Vishal echoes her Barima’s lack of enthusiasm for the North Indian winter favourite, a mixed pickle of carrots, turnips and cauliflower as a “Punjabi staple”. They prefer the Kayasth red chilli pickle, slathered on a mathri (fried discs made from flour).

“Uttar Pradesh’s Kayasths like red chillies stuffed with fennel and amchoor, and pickled in mustard oil,” she writes. “The famous pickle from Benaras is modelled on these lines.”

The vivid descriptions of handmade, delicate shami kebabs stuffed with mint and onions, yakhni pulao in which each Basmati grain is infused with flavour, and the fragrant and dark spices used in meat curries, might appear difficult to replicate, but at the book’s launch at Bombay Canteen in Mumbai (a restaurant known for its focus on traditional recipes) put some of Barima’s expert recipes on the menu, albeit in a form closer to finger-food.

Chef Thomas Zacharias made Barima’s melt-in-the-mouth moong shami (a cutlet made with lentils), khade masala ghosht (a meat curry made with whole spices), a quail egg nargisi dish that could give a scotch egg a run for its money, and kulle chaat, a tangy, sweet, spicy fruit mixture served in a hollowed out cucumber bowl. At the Delhi launch, where a slight chill in the air was already apparent, a slightly heavier bedmi puri, a deep fried Indian bread stuffed with lentils was served with a tangy karonda berry chutney.

Zacharias said the menu was carefully picked out based on the book, and Vishal’s recommendations.

“We worked closely with Anoothi Vishal and depended heavily on her palate and memory to get the flavours right,” he said.

But even though the Bombay Canteen team followed Vishal’s recipes to the last detail, there were a few minor tweaks – mostly because there was no Barima to rap them on the knuckles for tampering with her recipes.

Whether it is the peppery rasam made in South India, or the heavy use of garlic that characterised Barima’s cooking, Indian cuisines often share seasonal ingredients across topography.

“More of warming spices, like black pepper, cinnamon, and garlic are used in dishes because that is what Ayurveda, the basis of much of cooking across India, mandates,” said Vishal. “There were only a few common vegetables available this season, across broad regions, even if they were cooked in different ways.”

According to Vishal, Barima would have been highly amused by the idea of a book based on her cooking talents.

“I did not connect with my Kayasth identity at all while she was alive,” she said. “Even now, I am both the insider and outsider, and that irony would have amused her.”