Pooris in Peace
Hello and a Happy New Year!
Hope you have had a good start to 2022, despite the new Covid variant sending us back into lockdown and messing up with our heads.
This month’s newsletter is a bit of a light read with plenty of reading recommendations. I decided to write out a sort of monologue in defense of deep-fried food. This is also a sort of in-betweener as I plan on what I want to focus on in the next few newsletters. I have been trying to pin down a theme, but it eludes me.
Anyway, while I rack my head here’s something for you. And if you’re interested, here’s the link to the previous edition.
Pooris in Peace
It started with an innocent tweet - a video of pooris fresh out of oil. But as we all know, on social media any topic is good enough for an outrage…even more so if it’s about food. One stranger decided to tell me everything that’s wrong and “unhealthy” about deep-fried food.
Can a woman not eat her pooris in peace anymore?
It happened again when I posted a pic of kachnar ke pakode. Kachnar (Bauhinia variegata) tree is native to South Asia and South East Asia. Its purple flowers look like orchids and are used in cooking; pakodas or fritters are one of the ways they are cooked. My moment of indulgence was disrupted again, this time by someone who found it “shocking” - in a condescending way - that “Indians can deep-fry anything”. I would’ve taken an umbrage and written a piece in The New Yorker had the commenter been white. Alas! He was Indian.
Going back to his point (minus the offensive tone) that “Indians can deep-fry anything”, I do agree with it. A quick Google search for ‘deep-fried food India’ throws a link to Tarla Dalal’s website with ‘600 deep-fried starter, snack recipes’. 600! And that’s probably just scratching the surface. Our street-food from any part of the country is the testimony to our collective love for deep-fried - from bread pakoda in the north to goli baje in the south; and the samosa that encompasses all.
Deep frying is an art. Take poori for example - rolling a perfectly round one and dropping it in the oil at the perfect temperature, pressing it ever so gently with the kalchhi (spatula) so that it instantly puffs up…while also ensuring that the wok filled with hot oil doesn’t tumble over. A skill I have perfected over years. For me the epitome of this art is the kabiraje cutlet of Kolkata - fish coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried then dipped in egg and fried again and wrapped in beautiful deep-fried lacey egg. I’d recommend watching this video as a visual treat.
Deep frying is also a sensory experience. The sizzle of hot oil when food is dropped in it, the fluffing up of pooris, pakoras turning red, the textural play of the dish and the final crunch when you take a bite. This is also what enriches our street-food experience. In the words of Anthony Bourdain, “deep-fried food is the backbone of any street fair in the world”, and I can not agree more.
But, deep frying also gets a lot of bad press especially when it comes to street food. Most street food vendors across India are not properly trained or have enough means to spend on expensive oils. Hence, they end up using cheap refined or palm oil. Furthermore, the oil is used over and over till it turns rancid and has increased trans-fatty acids making it unhealthy.
It’s interesting to note that refined oils are fairly new additions to our kitchen. We’ve had a diverse set of cooking oils made in ghanis (wood presser) - mustard, coconut, groundnut, sesame, rape seed; ghee, which is now being claimed as healthy fat globally; and a host of animal fats and oils used by the tribal and Dalit communities across India. Farah Yameen has written a brilliant piece on how the othering of these cooking oils and fats has led to their diminished consumption (read here).
We continued using homegrown oils and cooking fats until India opened up its market in 1994. There were ads and campaigns positioning refined oil as the “better oil”. It’s lack of aroma and colour became it’s selling point. Edible Issues has done some wonderful research on the edible oil market in India and has put together a list of interesting articles to read on the subject.
In my own house refined oil replaced mustard oil and vanaspati ghee (remember Dalda?) as the preferred oil for deep-frying sometime in the late 1990s. While vegetables and meat were still cooked in the pungent mustard oil - we were too used to that taste to give it up - pooris etc. were deep-fried in refined. This continued for a few years till my parents switched back to old habits. In my own home in Delhi, I balance my deep-frying between mustard, coconut and sesame oil. With a higher smoking point these oils are better suited for deep-frying, are healthier, and mostly locally produced. Whether deep-fried foods are healthy or not largely depends on the fat it’s fried in. Having said that, the consumption should be in moderation. That goes without saying.
Historically, deep-frying was not an everyday practice. Producing and procuring cooking oils was an expensive process, hence frying food was limited to festivals and celebrations, or in Brahmanical practices, to free the food from “pollution”. In his Indian Food Tradition: A Historical Companion K T Achaya writes about the concept of kachcha and pucca food, a common practice among the upper castes in North India. Kachcha khana is food which is cooked in water, like dal, khichdi, rice etc. while pucca khana is where the food is cooked, fried or deep-fried in ghee. During festivals and rituals where brahmins are fed, the food that’s served is what qualifies as pucca khana - pooris, fried vegetables, halwa…all cooked in ghee and thus “purified” - the only way the brahmins deemed fit to eat at a lower caste home.
Deep-fried food has been categorized as rajasik food in Ayurveda - food that’s fit for kings. And in that context, having that cooking style as a marker of street food in India to me is the democratization of food.
So, yes to deep-fried food. But, in moderation and made in healthier, locally made, environmentally sustainable oils.