Last night I made shahi turkha for the sweet course of our dinner. After one mouthful my friend Vishu said ‘this taste reminds me of my childhood. It tastes just like the shahi turkha our old cook used to make’, and then proceeded to unabashedly ‘hog’ down two heaping platefuls: he could not have given me a more gratifying compliment. I am not Indian and I did not spend my childhood in India but I have spent more than a decade researching the history and culture of Indian food. I have also been able to spend some time in Indian kitchens learning the technical aspects of Indian cookery although I am largely self-taught. It gave me great pleasure to hear that I had captured the taste of a childhood spent on the other side of the world in a completely different culture. This was a fair exchange as Vishu had earlier taken me to visit a gypsy village (gypsies are believed to have set out on their global wandering from India) and this brought back my childhood memories of reading Famous Five books where the Five often shared their adventures with gypsy children: happy times all round.
Shahi means royal and any dish carrying it as an adjective in its title will be a rich one. Shahi turkha is a pudding made of bread and I reckon it can lay claim to the title ‘king of bread puddings’. To make it bread is fried in ghee then dipped in sugar syrup; this is then layered with nuts and dried fruit. The remaining sugar syrup is infused with cream and poured over the bread slices. Traditionally this is then set aside for some time to allow the bread to soak up the sauce but as it winter in India and very cold at night (in north and central India) I baked mine in the oven instead.

I have made shahi turkha many times but I know little about it origins. It is a dish from the Indian Muslim cookery repertoire. I am not sure it would have been devised to use up stale bread, as bread puddings elsewhere are, as it is too luxurious to have been made from leftovers. I imagine that a cook or a halwai (confectioner) must have devised using sheermal, a sweet bun like bread popularly eaten by Muslims in India, but this is entirely speculation on my part. As I am unable to share anything more substantial about the history of the dish I will leave you with the recipe and encourage you to try it yourself.

Shahi Turkha

serves 6-8

Each time I make this dish I make it slightly differently. For the version I mention in this post I brushed the bread with ghee and toasted the pieces in the oven until they were golden. This reduced considerably the amount of ghee needed for the dish and I think I prefer it done this way. I have also replaced the cardamom pods with a few slithers of orange peel when oranges are in season and then served the pudding with fresh orange slices as an accompaniment. On another occasion I replaced the cream and milk with a can of evaporated milk and produced another fine version of this dish. At the end of the recipe I give alternative methods for serving as a hot or cold pudding. So familiarize yourself with the method and then make it your own.

Ingredients

8-10 slices white bread*

1 cup ghee

1 cup sugar

3 whole cardamom pods

¼ cup roasted almonds, sliced

 1/3 cup pistachio nuts, chopped

2 tbsp chopped dried fruit

1 cup cream

3/4 cup  milk

2 tbsp rosewater

Method

Remove crusts from the bread and cut each slice in half.

Heat ghee in a frying pan and fry bread, turning once till golden on both sides. Drain on kitchen paper and keep aside.

Put the sugar, cardamom pods and 1 cup cold water into a saucepan and cook over a medium high heat until sugar dissolves. Allow the syrup to cook uncovered on high heat for five minutes or until it has reduced and thickened slightly. Remove the pan from heat. Carefully dip each piece of the fried bread into syrup. Arrange bread slices in a shallow baking dish sprinkling the nuts and dried fruit in between the layers.

Pour the milk and the cream into the remaining syrup and cook over medium heat for about 3 minutes, stirring constantly until the syrup reduces and thickens slightly. Remove the cardamom pods and stir in the rosewater. Pour cream mixture over bread and bake in the oven at 180°c until the bread has absorbed the cream and is golden on the top. Serve hot

. Alternatively you can refrigerate the pudding until the bread has absorbed the cream mixture and is firm to the touch. Serve chilled cut into squares. *I used soft slightly sweet buns to make my recent childhood memory inducing batch of shahi turkha.

The guest is considered a gift from god in India and is consequentially treated as if they were a representative of the divine being: this is true no matter which spiritual philosophy an Indian host subscribes to. While this practice has great benefits for the guest it is also leads to unintentional culinary deprivation.

If you are to be treated as a god then it is necessary that you are offered the best of everything, and that everything is done to make you comfortable; it is in this that the denial occurs. First there is the interpretation of what is ‘the best’. For an Indian host this will mean offering the guest the sort of food that is served on special occasions (the culinary equivalent of putting on your ‘Sunday best’ clothes). At the very least this will manifest in tea so highly sweetened that it is undrinkable, except that you have to drink it because to be offered such sweet tea is a sign that the host holds you in high esteem; at its most challenging it can result in a succession of ‘fancy dishes’ liberally enriched with ingredients considered most worthy of an esteemed guest: think fat, sugar and imported/out of season fruit and vegetables.

The second aspect manifests in anticipating the guest’s desires: it would be considered an imposition on the guest to leave him/her to ask for anything, this leaves the host to guess what it is they might need/want. Let me illustrate this phenomenon with an example: several months back I was invited by a family in Chettinar to join them the following day for a lunch of local dishes but when I sat down this meal I found myself faced with a hybrid breed of food I not previously encountered: continental-Punjabi or conjabi for short. Not wanting to offend my hosts I took a tentative mouthful of the white sauce soup and peevishly contemplated the chicken ‘lollipops’ placed before me but the look on my face gave me away and I had to admit it was not what I had been hoping for. It turned out that my hosts had ‘anticipated’ that as I must have eaten at least two meals of Chettinar food since we have made our arrangement the previous day that I therefore would have had enough of it and would want something ‘different’, and that as I was a westerner I would want western (continental) style food (which they had cooked by a Punjabi chef hence the resulting conjabi style cuisine). Once it was understood that all I wanted to eat was Chettinar food these charming and generous people invited me to breakfast the next day where I was treated to a spread of local specialties.

All this is done with the best intentions but it results in hosts withholding the truly best food from guests: the simple home cooking they enjoy every day. Fortunately I have homes in India where I have moved beyond being a guest to a family member so I get to eat everyday Indian food. In fact in my Indian home in Madhya Pradesh I have infiltrated so far that I am even fed fast food.

You might want to read that last sentence again. Yes I said FAST food but it is not of the ‘junk ‘ kind. It is very common for Indians to undertake dietary fasts: some people fast one or two days a week while others do it less regularly. There are also fasts associated with different festivals. These are not the type where one does not eat , or eats very little, that are undertaken in the west in preparation for medical procedures, political protests or to ‘lose a dress size by Saturday’. Indian fasts involve the avoidance of certain foods, for example on Tuesdays Hindus are not mean to eat meat but there is no limit on other foods. Other fasts may involve avoidance of certain cereals, salt, certain fruit and vegetables or spices. A common ‘fast’ for men is to avoid alcohol one day a week. Despite the less than punitive nature of these fasts people feel like they are giving something up and therefore need to reward themselves with particularly delicious food made from the ingredients they are allowed. Someone told me recently that the food served on some fast days was so rich with dairy products and sugar that they found ‘fasting’ a pleasure rather than a penance. None the less fast food is seen as somehow less and is never offered to a guest (unless that guest happens to be maintaining the same fast) resulting in the culinary deprivation I mentioned in the opening paragraph as there are many interesting and delicious dishes to be enjoyed in the cannon of Indian fasting food.

Hidden Domestic treasure No.1: Ragni’s Subudana (sago) kitchri

Sago is made from the pith of the trunk of the sago palm. It requires processing to make it useable as a food and at the end of this it is extruded as small white balls about the same size as the large couscous that is currently very fashionable. Sago is out of fashion in the west where if it is used at all it is usually made into a pudding; it is commonly added to sweet coconut milk based drinks in south east Asia. I cannot remember the last time I ate sago at home but two of the most memorable things I have eaten on this current research trip are savoury items made from sago: the first subudana wada (fritters) at Prakash restaurant in Mumbai and the second this kitchri. Subudana kitchri is eaten when the fast being undertaken requires abstention from cereals and a certain type of salt: I was unable to ascertain which variety of salt was to be avoided—another type of salt was added to the dish —so just used whichever salt you have at hand. Sago is quite bland and its deliciousness lie in its texture (it is also provides inexpensive bulk) so make sure you season this kitchri generously to bring out the best in it.

The recipe was given to me by Ragni who lives in my Madhya Pradesh home and who looks after me as if I was a goddess.

You will find sago either in the baking section of the supermarket or in amongst the Asian/exotic foods. Most Asian grocery stores will stock it. This recipe makes a fairly substantial quantity but you can halve or even quarter the ingredients to make a smaller amount (which you might regret). Ingredients

Serves 10

500gms sago

1 small bunch coriander, washed and roots removed

1 green chilli

2 tbsp ghee or vegetable oil

500gm cooked, boiled or steamed, potato

 1-2 tsp salt or to taste

1 cup roasted peanuts, roughly ground

12 fresh curry leaves

Freshly ground black pepper to taste

a handful of fresh coriander leaves

Method

Soak the sago overnight in enough water to cover it with an inch to spare. When you are ready to use the sago drain it well.

Grind the clean coriander with the green chilli (deseed it if you don’t like too much ‘heat’) with a cup of water. Mix half of this mixture in with the drained sago and set aside. Break up the cooked potato with your hands into a rough mash. Mix half the potato with the remaining coriander and chilli liquid and mash it with your hand until it is a reasonably smooth. Don’t use anything but your hand otherwise it will become too homogenous.

Heat the oil in a heavy based pan, large enough to hold the amount of sago you have prepared, over a medium-high heat. Add the plain potato and allow to cook slowly until they start to turn golden brown. Add the sago and stir the potato through it. Stir for a couple of minutes then add the rest of the potato. Mix well and keep stirring for five minutes. Add salt to taste, the ground peanuts, curry leaves and black pepper. Turn down the heat and allow to cook until the sago is cooked through but still retains its shape. Stir through the fresh coriander leaves and serve warm with a bowl of spiced yoghurt and potato sauce/soup on the side.

 Spiced yoghurt and potato soup

 Serves 8-10

Ingredients

400gm cooked potato

2 cups plain yoghurt

Salt to taste

2 dried red chillies , or to taste, broken up into large pieces

12 curry leaves ½ tsp red chilli powder or to taste

 1 tsp ground coriander powder

½ tsp freshly ground black pepper

Method

 Remove the skin from the potato and crumble into small pieces with your hands. Blend the yoghurt with two cups of water and put it into saucepan and place over a medium-high heat. Allow this mixture to come to a strong simmer (do not boil it). Mix in the crushed potato and stir well. Allow it to cook until it reduces and the potato breaks up a little more and thickens the liquid. Add salt to taste. Heat the ghee or oil in a heavy based pan over a medium-high heat. Add the red chillies and the curry leaves. Allow to cook until the curry leaves start to change colour (this will happen very quickly). Remove from the heat add the red chilli powder, coriander powder and black pepper; stir these around quickly then pour into the yoghurt and potato mixture. Cover the pot and let it cook for another 1-2 mintues. Serve hot with the kitchri.