What’s More Indian than a Pakora?
Batter coated, deep fried and enjoyed across the country, the
bhaja, bhajia, bonda or pakora is one dish for which we can take full credit
I DISAPPOINTED so many people a few
weeks ago by pointing out that the samosa is not an Indian invention (it comes
from the Middle-East) that I resolved to find something that was uniquely
Indian for this week’s column. My first choice was the kachori but I abandoned
that idea because it is a regional dish that is not well known in South India.
But the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the great
Indian deep fried dish was neither the samosa nor the kachori, but the pakora.
When I say pakora, I mean a family
of food. Growing up in a Gujarati home in Bombay, I was unfamiliar with the
term pakora. We called it a bhajiya. But it was more or less the same dish as
the North Indian pakora. In the South (and oddly enough at Bangladeshi curry houses
in the UK), they use the term bhajji for roughly the same kind of snack. And
more distantly related members of the same family also go by different names.
The batata wada of Bombay (or bataka wada as we called it at home) is a cousin
of the potato bonda of the South. And all of South India’s bondas are clearly
members of the bhajiya/pakora family even when they include eggs or even
tapioca in the recipes.
For the purposes of argument, I
propose a broad definition. Any vegetable dish which involves slicing the
vegetable (and sometimes no slicing or chopping is even required), dunking it
in a besan batter and then deep-frying it in a kadhai is a member of the
bhajiya/pakora family.
Sceptics may ask: well what about
the chicken pakora, then? That is not a vegetable dish. Fair enough. I concede
that point. Over the last century we’ve started making our pakoras with all
kinds of non-vegetarian ingredients (though chicken is a clear favourite), but
the traditional form of the dish is vegetarian.
As for the potato-vada/ bonda, this
involves mashing up the potato first. But, in my view, that is only a minor
refinement of the original recipe so the dish falls squarely in the bhajiya/
pakora category.
So is the pakora the great Indian
snack?
I reckon it is. And it is an
all-India snack, one that you’ll get in every corner of the country, a
testament to India’s love affair with deep-frying.
Moreover, unlike samosas which are
still usually bought from outside, the pakora is essentially a home-style dish.
Nearly all of us grew up in homes where pakoras would be made in our kitchens.
Gujaratis love eating pakoras at tea-time. In many Punjabi households, the very
hint of a rain shower is enough of an excuse for chai and pakoras. In the South
bondas of one kind or another turn up on the tea table.
Which is not to say that pakoras are
only a home-cuisine staple. Some of the most delicious pakoras are made
outside. When I was young, an important stop on the way to Poona (there was no
fancy highway in that era) was Khopoli for Kanda bhajiya. These were strips of
onions, covered in besan and deep fried till they were crisp. They were so
delicious that, to this day, I can’t eat the Punjabi onion pakora in which
thick rings of onions are covered in a stodgy batter and fried.
At school, we could stop at Churu
(at least that’s what I think it was called) on the Jaipur-Ajmer road for
steaming tumblers of sweet and milky tea served with pakoras that came straight
from the kadhai.
The bhajiya also is the one great
Indian culinary export that has gone around the world without anyone even
recognising that it is an Indian dish. In the sixteenth century, Spanish and
Portuguese ships would stop in India on their way to Japan. They would pick up
their cooks from India and experiment with Indian dishes. It is these cooks who
taught the Europeans how to love vegetables and bhajiyas. And when the ships
got to Japan, some of these cooks got off and stayed on.
Most experts (including the
Encyclopedia Britannica) now accept that it was as the Indian bhajiya/pakora
that the Japanese first encountered the dish they would later call tempura. In
fact there is no trace of tempura in Japanese cuisine till the Portuguese
arrived as traders. And while the Portuguese were creators of pork dishes and
Port wine, bhajiyas were never part of their cuisine. So the only way they
could have taught the Japanese to make tempura was if their Indian cooks
introduced Japanese chefs to pakoras.
HTBR19APR15
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