There are many dishes at every meal at Mr. Das’s house, but few are repeated. And there are always at least five or six desserts. I have started eating more abstemiously, avoiding much meat and trying to sample less than the largest possible number of desserts, but it isn’t easy. Here’s dinner last night, during which we watched India defeat Bangladesh in cricket on the very last ball. (All Indians are cricket mad!)
Fried bitter gourd to start:
A chicken stew:
Eggplant (brinjal) curry:
Daal:
A dish of spinach and peas cooked with an unknown crunchy topping (delicious!):
A Bengali fish dish:
Dessert (I show only three): chanar payesh, sweetened boiled-down milk mixed with “cottage cheese” (curdled milk), pistachios, and cardamon:
And my favorite Indian “dry” sweet, sonpapri, whose making we observed today on a visit to Mr. Das’s factory. It’s a fantastically complicated sweet to make, though it involves only sugar, ghee, and a bit of lentil paste. The allure of this sweet is its flaky consistency: I’ve dissected one so you can see. I have videos and photos of our visit to the sweets factory; I’ll put them up later.
Here’s a video of how it’s made, starting with the sugar syrup after it’s been boiled to thickness and then cooled a bit. Mr. Das’s procedure is far more organized, though with just as much hand labor.
And rasha madurai, spongy and moist with a sweet syrup inside:
It’s hard to be abstemious here, plus the cook and servers keep pressing you to take seconds and thirds.
Wow – watching the video of the making of soanpapri WORE ME OUT!!! You have to wonder how anyone ever invented such a dish??? yum
The first part looks like making pulled taffy – I’ve seen machines at seaside shops (selling “saltwater taffy”) that stretch and fold caramelized sugar like that; but once you add the ghee it must prevent the stretched mass “welding” itself together again as it’s stretched, giving that fibrous texture in the final product.
The best way to work off sonpapri calories would be to make more sonpapri…
This seems to lead to a “paradox” of the so-called “Tristam Shandy” kind.
PCC’s Indian nom postings caused me to head over to our local favorite Indian restaurant with my wife last night. This stuff is soooo good!
and sub
Beware of shemomedjamo.
*Googles*
Been there, done that. 😉
Anyone here remember watching the titanic Davies – Taylor snooker World Championship match?
In India, the words of PDQ Bach apply:
To curry favor, favor curry.
Bitter gourd is an acquired taste, and one of my favourite go-to, whenever I’m not feeling my best. Great stewed down with garlic and topped with a can of salmon (or stewed down with fresh fish or chicken or beef or whatever, with a little ginger, garlic and a tad of cane sugar, honey or maple syrup!). Serve over hot jasmine rice.
I suspect the crunchy bits on the spinach are fried onions. Not too difficult to perfect but amazing once you know how…
IIRC, India is the largest consumer of onions.
Indeed it is. Here’s a story about the 2010 Indian onion crisis.
I was going to suggest that the crunchy bits are the cricket that all Indians are mad about 🙂
How does one contact this blog with ideas for posts/themes? Is there a preferred email? I don’t tweet.
thx
t26
Go to the author’s website in the banner at top right – it will have an e-mail address. But read “Da Roolz” in the banner at the left before hitting “send”.
Sorry, as someone pointed out on another post, go to “Research Interests” to get Jerry’s e-mail address.
Thx but I see NO such banner on the rught. In fact there is Nothing on the right side of the page. It’s all on the left and the clicakables are 2 books (and a penguin email) and ‘author’, which give no way to contact.
I am not interested in speaking to Penguin
You should probably forget about it. My opinion, but carry on if you must.
You can also just Google “Jerry Coyne” to find his eddress.
But yes, do read “Da Roolz.” Jerry will consider reader-provided material but does NOT like being lobbied to use any particular input–i.e., told what he should write about.
And use the word blog at your peril.
Pulling the sugar looks exactly like how they make English Humbugs. The white stripe in the humbug is a section of the dark syrup being stretched and re-stretched to incorporate air. As that happens it turns white. Then the white candy is twisted into the dark and rolled into ,one “snakes”. Then chopped into Humbugs.
Bah!
If you like that sort of thing, you’ll probably find the manufacture of “seaside rock” (a popular British style of candy, with the name of the resort pulled length-wise through the stick) to be attractively hypnotic. For an example.
Man, I hate to pee in the punch bowl, but after viewing all of Jerry’s food photos of his trip to India, I find NONE of them good-looking enough to be appetizing. Maybe it’s the bland mixture of tan and green in most of the food. I’m sure some of it is indeed good-tasting, but nothing in the photos lead me to think that. I know I must continue to have a open mind; and I will plan to visit an Indian restaurant soon — if I can get past the view.
The majority of critics actually do not agree that Josephus or Tacitus are good primary sources b cause they are in actual fact not primary sources. They are sources from antiquity that were not witnesses but just reporting what they heard. This is a definition of a secondary source. The many years separating Tacitus’s account is an example of a secondary source. So far, there are no primary sources outside the bible that verify the existence of Jesus. We do have an obscure reference to Pilate and that is all.