Rarely has the world seen so rich a cuisine from so little
that was available from the land. While the eastern region of
the state has fertile soil capable of crops of everything from
wheat and maize to millets and corn, for much part the
desert's dry terrain, prone to droughts, was incapable of
producing even basic necessities of survival. Yet, live and
eat they did, creating an exotic cuisine from the soil that
threw up a few pulses, crops of millet, and trees with beans
that were dried and stored for use when, in the summers,
nothing would grow. Communication and faster means of
transportation have brought in a revolution in the choice of
vegetables and fruits that are now available throughout the
state, but this was not always so. Which is why, for the
village, his diet still remains sparse, and consists of dairy
produce, bread of millets and accompaniment of gram flour and
sour buttermilk which, say dieticians across the world, is a
high-protein, low-fat cuisine. Perhaps that is what gives the
people of the desert their erect gait and slender build.
Though the Rajasthani kitchen was able to create much from
little, it had also to cater to different communities with
their own ritual observances. The Rajput warrior, for example,
was not averse to shikar, killing game to put in his pot at
night. The Vaishnavs, followers of Krishna, wer vegetarian,
and strictly so, as were the Bishnois, a community known for
their passion to conserve both animal and plant life. Even
among the Rajputs, there were enough royal kitchens where
nothing other than vegetarian meals were cooked. The Marwaris,
of course, were vegetarian too, but their cuisine, though not
too different from the Rajputs, was richer in its method of
preparation. And then there were the Jains too, who were not
only vegetarians, but who would not eat after sundown, and
whose food had to be devoid of garlic and onions which were,
otherwise, important ingredients in the Rajasthani pot. To
begin with the Rajput, then: as a hunter-warrior, he often
bagged his game, which is why the Rajasthani repertoire has
everything form venison and hare to wild boar on its menu.
However, since these are banned by the government for fear of
endangering these wild species, the Rajasthani meal has almost
come to in imply mutton. The Rajput is a recent, reluctant
convert to chicken, and even though to lakes abound in fish,
it rarely finds its way into his kitchen. An important feature
of non-vegetarian cooking in the Rajput kitchen was that it
was-rarely cooked on the main stove in the kitchen, and
usually employed the male head of the family as its chef.
Essential ingredients included, besides onions kachri, which
is part of the cucumber family, as a marinade. The meat, first
basted in the spices and then roasted in a pot over a wood
fire, was turned into gravy and eaten with millet rotis.
Colonel James Tod's treatise, Annals and Antiquities of
Rajputana, notes that 'the Rajput hunts and eats the boar and
deer, and shoots duchks and wild fowl'. But though the Rajput
is a meat-eater, he is by no means a passionate one who has to
have mutton on his table for every meal. Vegetarian food too
forms a large part of his diet, Game, in fact, has been a part
of the creed of the warrior: when out camping in the desert it
is what is available that forms the basis of the next meal.
And so too, when the rest of the country follows strictly
rigid vegetarian protocol as during the celebration of
Navratri, the festival of nine nights, the Rajput offers his
Devi a goat as sacrifice, beheading the beast with one blow of
his sword. On all nine days, a similar offering is made, and
the cooked meat eaten as consecrated food. In Rajasthan, most
families will arrange for at least one such sacrifice during
the festival, and sometimes goats are specially reared in
family backyards for the ritual offering. Shikar provided a
meal for the family, or for the village, or else expediton
members shared the spoils to take their individual portions
home. However, if there was more meat than could be consumed,
it was pickled for later consumption. Venison and pork,
especially, were cooked in rich masalas before being preserved
in oil and vinegar. Pork fat, called sauth, was kept for
winter days, when it would be chewed as prevention against
colds. Since men often did the cooking themselves, and since
expeditions away from home for reasons of war rarely allowed
the luxury of well-equipped kitchens, a more rudimentary
method of barbecuing created its distinctive style of desert
cooking. When small animals were bagged, such as desert hare,
the animal was cleaned, stuffed and allowed to cook in a sand
pit with a bed of live coals covering it, often overnight.
with large animals, this was not possible, so the meat was
marinated using kachri to impart its distinctive tang, and
then this was barbecued over a bed of live coals. This, called
sula, is still considered a delicacy, and has a tangy flavour
on account of the sour marinade. The women, whether the family
was vegetarian or meat eating, has their task cut out for
them. They would dry the meagre sangri and gwarphali beans
that are eatable, and store them for future use. They would
also make papads and endless other variations and dry them,
also for storage, later to be turned into curries for the
family. Once again, using onions and garlic, and with mustard,
red chilli powder and a handful of other spices, these would
be put on the family pot in the kitchen, with yoghurt for
flavouring. Accompaniments rarely changed over the region.
Karhi, more popularly known as khatta, formed- as it continues
today- a part of the staple diet. Made with buttermilk (thin
form of yogurt), it is mixed with chickpea flour and allowed
to cook with mustard seeds and crushed garlic clover. The
longer it stays of the fire, the better its taste. Usual
vegetables are sangri and gwarphali, beans stonred for the
length of the year after drying, and cooked in yogurt and
masalas. Papads, eaten roasted elsewhere in Indian, are also
gravied in Rajasthan, as is bhujiya, a popular moth-lentil
snack. Chickpea flour can be freshly rolled out as dumling to
make gatte-ka-saag, while sundried moth-lentil dumplings are
also cooked as badi-ka-saag. These are all eaten with either
bread consisting millet bread, cooked over wood fires, or a
porridge made using millet gains and moth lentils cooked
together with water, a little spice and some ghee, to make
khichra, a more filling, more potent version of what elsewhere
in India is called khichri (though this uses rice as its
base). Khichra, the night mainstay of the state's farming
communities, is eaten with ghee, and accompanied by either
jaggery or karhi. The day's meal for the working class
consists of bajra rotis eaten with moth-daal, or with a fiery
red-chilli-and-garlic chutney and washed down with raabori,
millet flour cooked in buttermilk, believed to be extremely
cooling in the summer heat of the state. Desserts were, by and
large, rare, though exotic concoctions from vegetables were
sometimes served. For most, for festive occsions, these would
consist of seera, a halwa made of cooked wheat flour in ghee,
or laapsi, a porridge made with dessiccated grains of wheat.
Rice, a delicacy in Rajasthan, was served as a sweet with the
addition of sugar, saffron and dried nuts and raisins.
Many
more vegetables are now available in Rajasthan, with even
little towns made colourful with the produce of vegetable
vendors. Most of these vegetables are cooked in the same way
as its chichkpea and lentil-based corries, and there are
usually no distinctive recipes that allow the taste of one
vegetable to differ from another. The Marwaris, however, were
considerably more lavish with the inputs in their kitchen. A
typical meal for them could consist of pishta-lonj served with
a glass of milk laced with cream. Them, puris fried in hot
oil, made with both wheat flour as well as with matter added
to turn them a lovely green. With it, tamatar-ki-sabji, a
tomato curry, at once sweet and sour and hot, gatte-ka-saag
with shvings of cashew added, and sangri-ker-ka-saag with the
oil oozing out, and dahi-bhallas, of course. This would be
followed by sooji-ka-halwa, a pudding that's easy to make but
still a daily favourite, and perhaps a glass of lassi at the
end of the meal. Marwari food uses the same basic ingredients
of the state's Rajputs, but is a richer verion, with more
spices and herbs being added to the masala, and cooked in more
fat. The Marwaris eat two meals, in the morning and at
sundown. Both consist of a great variety of rotis and puris
puffed in piping hot oil. There are a large number of
accompaniments by way of chutneys, some sweet, others sour.
Gatta, sangri and a tomato vegetable curry are favourites, all
of them cooked in a good deal of clearified butter, the sour
taste of the flavouring ingredients cutting through the fat to
create its own distinctive taste. Ker, a hard desert berry, is
often added to pickles, or sangri, or cooked on its own. The
amount of chillies used is somewhat more curtailed, and mango
powder (amchur) and rai (mustard seeds) dominate. The Marwaris
also prefer heeng or asafoetida over the Rajput preference for
garlic. The Marwari sweet tooth is legendary, and since they
were traders, they had greater access to the markets not only
of India but also South-east Asia. They were, therefore, able
to store dry fruits such as almonds, pistachios, cashews, and
together with poppy seeds (khus) were able to use them in
their puddings. Halwas, barfis and ladoor are part of the
Marwari repertoire, along with til, sesame, which was used for
both sweets as well as main courses. Dairy has played an
important role in the economy of the desert, especially since
agriculture could never be taken for granted. The consumption
of milk, and of buttermilk and yoghurt formed a part of the
main diet, but with the exception of those regions with access
to rice-growing areas, the rice-rice, milk, sugar, clarified
butter, nuts, spices, dry fruits are blended and cooked,
attendants at the shrine jump into its scalding centre, to
serve it as a holy offering to the pilgrims, the contents
dramatically diminishing as the waiting crowds consume it as
prasad. This, of course, is an occasional offering. Most days,
the large tureens serve a mixture of rice, meat and lentils- a
meal in one go.