How petha became a part of Indian Christmas

In The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, one of Agatha Christie’s most charming crime stories, an old lady recalls an ideal British Christmas feast: “the oyster soup and the turkey – two turkeys, one boiled and one roast – and the plum pudding… all the old desserts, the Elvas plums and Carlsbad plums and almonds and raisins and crystallised fruit and ginger. Dear me, I sound like a catalogue from Fortnum and Mason!”

Elvas plums are from a region in Portugal bordering Spain. They are candied by being lightly cooked and then steeped in sugar for weeks. Carlsbad plums are a variety from a Czech town now called Karlovy Vary, candied the same way. Crystallised fruit were other types of candied fruit, like melons, oranges and figs, and were made in many places, though Sicily was particularly famous for them.

Europe got candied ginger from Asia for centuries. It came in grades called Colombine, Valadine and Maikine. Andrew Dalby, in Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices, explains that Maikine came from Mecca, a major trading centre for spices, including East African ginger. “Colombine was named after Quilon or Kollam on the west Coast of India. The word Valadine meant originally ‘local’ – local to the city of Calicut on the same coast.”

But Dalby also notes the Portuguese botanist Garcia da Orta’s comments that the best-preserved ginger came from Bengal because that was where the best sugar was found.

Since the plum pudding listed in Christie’s story would also have contained candied fruit (as would Christmas cake), one gets a sense how foundational they were for the festive season.

Sugarplums were originally candied fruit like Elvas or Carlsbad plums, but became a general term for sugar-covered sweets and often feature in Christmas narratives. “The children were nestled all snug in their bed/ While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads,” writes Clement Clark Moore in his classic Christmas poem A Visit from St. Nicholas. The Sugar Plum Fairy presides over the classic Christmas ballet The Nutcracker.

Plum cake is the common Indian term for Christmas cake, made with lots of dried and preserved fruits, usually soaked in alcohol. A bakery in Kerala markets itself as the maker of “arguably India’s first recorded cake i.e. the plum cake” since 1880, but some doubt might be cast over that claim by sources like The Indian Cookery Book also published in 1880. Written under the pseudonym “a Thirty-Five Years Resident”, the book gives the recipe for “A Two-pound or One-seer Plum Cake”, which it notes is “the favourite for Christmas, weddings, birthdays and christenings in India”.

The recipe has two of the three elements distinctive to many Christmas cakes made in India. The first is the use of semolina (rava or sooji) along with regular flour, which helps give it a crumblier texture, and the second is the use of “preserved pumpkin”. (The third is the use of ghee, rather than butter). Later recipes specify the candied pumpkin, actually ash gourd, called petha, which is associated with Agra. “Petha, chopped into tiny cubes, added just the right shot of cloying sweetness and the tiny cubes of translucent whiteness held their own in the brown batter,” writes Priti David in her essay on cake in the anthology Indian Christmas.

Petha’s inclusion is not always welcomed. In the same collection, Jaya Bhattacharji Rose says, “I absolutely detest” petha in cakes. When her paternal grandmother did away with rum to please “morally correct palates” and increased petha, it resulted in just an ordinary tasting fruit cake. In her essay Madhulika Liddle sees petha as an Indian twist to the global Christmas cake template, though elsewhere in the collection, she notes it is typical of Allahabad cakes, while other regions have their own additions, like cashews in Kerala and Tamil Nadu and chironji nuts in Maharashtra.

Candying process

Petha is rather odd. The candying process gives it an almost crackly exterior, with a hint of squeakiness when you bite in, and then an intense rush of syrup that can be, as David admits, rather cloying. But for sugar addicts it offers an intense high and Maneet Chauhan, in her book Chaat, happily admits to adoring it so much that, as a child on railway journeys that often stopped at Agra, she would drag her father off the train, risking the short stop, to stock up on boxes of petha. It was a while, she writes, before she realised that most people came to Agra for another translucent white attraction.

Chauhan gives a recipe for making petha at home, but most people leave it to professionals. Priya Mani details the process in her entry for Agra Petha in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Indian Cuisine. Ripe ash gourd is cut and cleaned of skin, pith and seeds. “Workers use a wooden stamp with pinheads (gudai) to puncture holes in the ash gourd pieces. Pricking is a very vital step as it allows better absorption of liquids during processing.”

These pieces are then soaked overnight in a chunam (calcium hydroxide) solution and then rinsed and boiled in fresh water that might have alum added. Finally, the pieces are boiled in sugar syrup for about an hour as the syrup reduces and the sugar starts to crystallise on the surface of the petha.

It is a sticky and tedious process and one can see why Flora Annie Steele and Grace Gardiner shy away from it in their Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (1888). This is a volume that gives detailed directions for the most mundane household jobs, but when it comes to “Preserved and Candied Fruits” they only sketch the basic procedure before adding: “On a small scale candying is very expensive, as so much sugar is wasted in the numerous processes.” It is easy to see why petha, which was easily bought locally, at least in North India, became an addition to Indian plum cakes.

Sugar is used to preserve fruits in India in syrups like murabba or leathers, like aam papad, but petha feels different. The origin stories in Agra are vague and speak about the sweet being invented to give energy to Emperor Shah Jahan’s workers as they built the Taj, which sounds like a tale cooked up by a Mughal marketing team. But it is plausible that building the Taj brought artisans from distant places to Agra and that, along with the presence of the Mughal court, made the city an exceptionally cosmopolitan place, ready to adopt exotic luxury innovations.

Sugarcane’s botanical origins lie in New Guinea, but India was where it developed as a viable crop. There are references from ancient India of “reeds that give honey”, which was boiled down to syrup and the solid form we call jaggery today. Thick cane sugar syrup can be a preservative, as can other sweet liquids like honey, dibs (date syrup) and pekmez (grape syrup), because the sugars in them are hygroscopic, killing microbes by sucking out their moisture. This works for preserving fruit as long as the liquid covers each fruit piece and the container is tightly sealed to prevent atmospheric moisture from being absorbed, which would risk diluting it to the point where spoilage could occur.

For petha-style candying, the sugar has to enter the fruit, replacing its moisture with sugar. This needs a fairly pure form of sugar, in the sense of a concentration of sucrose molecules. The other problem with liquid jaggery and similar syrups is that they have a strong taste of their own. This can work when the products being candied have a very strong taste, like spices. But in the case of fruits, the taste of the syrup usually overwhelms, defeating the very purpose of the exercise: to extend the short life of ripe fruit, allowing one to enjoy their taste, colours and even shapes out of season.

Sugarcane’s journey

Sugar refining developed during the centuries when sugar spread from India. This has been credited to the Arab spread of Islam, but Andrew M Watson, a historian of agriculture and Islam, is doubtful if this link was as direct as has been assumed in the past. In his book Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World, he points out that such rapid diffusion assumes existing knowledge of sugarcane cultivation in pre-Islamic Arabia, and evidence for this does not exist.

Instead, Watson suggests, the Sasanians, the last great pre-Islamic rulers of West Asia, were the catalysts for spreading sugarcane west from India. They had many contacts with India through the Kushan empire and sugarcane cultivation could have become well-established in parts of Persia. After the Islamic conquest of Persia, sugar must have become one of most addictive spoils of conquest, and was then spread by them west towards Europe and north to Central Asia. Places like Egypt and Cyrus became well-known for sugarcane cultivation, and here, where the hold of jaggery was not as strong as in India, new ways of refining sugar developed.

“Rock candy, in large, transparent, sparkling crystals, is perhaps the most elemental confection, with at least a thousand years of history,” writes Laura Mason in Sugar and Candy: a Global History. “Described in medieval Arabic, it was known as qand or sukkar nabat, and deposited on sticks.” The sticks or strings suspended in sugar syrup became a surface on which pure sugar crystals were deposited and then grew. Qand is the root word for candy, though it is interesting to note that one word for it in Hindi is mishri, which is very similar to Misr, the ancient name for Egypt (and the country’s own name for itself).

Mason notes how close observation of sugar boiling revealed distinct stages, usually called by the forms taken by spoonfuls dropped in cold water: thread (102°C-113°C), soft ball (113°C-116°C), hard ball (121°C-130°C), soft crack (132°C-143°C) and hard crack (149°C-54°C): “Full codification of this took several centuries.”

The ones doing the observing became known as confectioners. Theirs was an almost alchemical knowledge of sugar, about how, by manipulating the stages of syrup, cooling or adding ingredients, many different candies could be made.

Simple preserved fruits were among the first products made. Prized by the rich, they would first be sucked, to enjoy the syrup or hard sugar shell deposited during candying. Sucket became one term for these sweets and a device called sucket fork was used by particularly posh people. It had a small fork on one end and a spoon at the other, so that the syrup could be spooned up and then the candied fruit speared and eaten with the fork. As confectioners’ skills developed, the fruit increasingly became natural-looking, delicious reminders of summer ripeness, even in the depths of winter during Christmas.

This was less of an attraction in India, where the temperate winter was the season for the most delicate fruits, such as strawberries. This may be why, when fruit preserving developed in India to cater to British demand, it tended towards the basic, for use in baking cakes. Thick skinned limes were used for preserved peel, local berries like karonda used to simulate cherries, and papaya, the most accommodating of fruits, was candied, diced and dyed to make tutti-frutti titbits, which were baked in buns and biscuits or scattered over puddings.

It was not always easy getting them. In Mumbai’s Crawford Market candied peel was only sold at Lobo’s Gloria Stores. The first sign of Christmas was when the Bandra aunties did their annual visit to buy it, along with the other dried fruits and nuts needed (from other stores) for their Christmas cakes. The really dedicated bought their supplies for next year’s cake since soaking the fruit in alcohol for a year resulted in a mellow, rounded taste. Petha was often just a cheap addition, made at the last minute, to make up fruit weight when more cakes were needed than were planned for a year before.

The development of canning and refrigeration offered new ways to enjoy fruit out of season, and preserved fruit started seeming old-fashioned. Perhaps this is why Agatha Christie’s character refers to them with nostalgia, or a tradition that had to be observed because it was Christmas. But in recent years there has been a revival of interest thanks to social media. A New York Times article in 2023 quoted London caterer and content creator Marie Cassis on why she created candied fruit for her Instagram account: “It’s a very long and difficult process but, at the end, you have this beautiful object that looks like stained glass.” Candied fruit has been served at fashion shows and formal dinners.

This seems unlikely to happen with petha. It has, literally, been under a cloud in recent years, accused of adding to the pollution that threatens the Taj Mahal’s pure white marble. Agra’s petha makers use coal burning stoves for the long, slow sugar boiling, and this has pollution consequences. In addition, making so much petha results in huge amounts of vegetable waste, which piles up stinking on the sides of the city.

Meanwhile, the efforts of petha makers to entice new customers with flavours like paan and chocolate (in addition to traditional variants like saffron and rose) seems unlikely to find favour with those buying it for Christmas cake. Not many are likely to want a burst of paan in their Christmas cake.

There has been one preserved fruit innovation recently that might have value for Christmas. Goa has been trying to find new ways to sell its spices and one product that has been devised uses mace (javantri). This is the bright orange, net-like coating that grows around nutmegs and is prized as a spice in itself. It is similar to nutmeg, but spicy-floral where that is spicy-woody. A government initiative has got producers candying mace and the result is nice, with a musky, aromatic quality. Dried mace already features in the spice blends used in Christmas cakes and seasonal drinks like eggnog. Candied mace might be an excellent addition to an Indian Christmas.

Vikram Doctor is a writer based in Goa. His email address is vikdocatwork@gmail.com.