Of Butter Sheets And Malai Puris

I have been working on my design scheme now for very long. The tracing sheet is scribbled upon and a new layer added with changes.....more and more layers slowly accumulating and filling up the white of the sheet. It is through this that my wandering mind retreived a seemingly forgotten memory from the backlanes of my mind. Long back I remember watching a program on television on Mathura and its legacy of pedas and mithais.

At one halwai's shop I remeber seeing a huge cauldron...characteristic of mithaiwalas. The huge vessle of black with ivory milk boiling in soft hemispheres. Small mounds of creamy silk rising and dissapearing into the large sea of the sweetened frothy fluid. The center was boiling softly and sending small translucent bubbles tothe edges of the vessle. The egde gradually was accumulating a delicate looking lace of milk cream froth. The lean man stirring the pot intermittently flattened the mass of the froth against the edge of the cauldron. Gradually as the milk thickened and reduced the accumulation of the cream at the edges grew to coat the inner edge in a pale yellow layered satin of milk cream. It looked like the most heavenly sweet on earth.

Once the milk was all on the edge of the cauldron in the form of malai, by the evening, the lean man took the cauldron off the flame and rested it inclined against an old empty oil tin. The shop was now twinkling with small bare bulbs and the air was heavy with smoke from heavy inscence burning in almost every shop. The halwai then took am old lid of some can, about the size of a CD, and began cutting circles in the malai. This, he deftly scraped off the inner edge and served it to eager customers with a generous sprinkling of kesar and pista.

A disc of mellow sweet ivory and riotous streaks of saffron with pecks of green pista......a treat for the eyes and the palate.



A treat at the end of the day long wait ....a slow ardous process yeilding the very best.............