Anoothi Vishal | Updated: November 14, 2020 11:40 IST
Diwali 2020: These foods have long been forgotten.
I wonder if anyone remembers traditional Diwali foods any more. The festival of lights has been redefined as the festival of flash. It's the season of excess and of parties, where all you need to worry about is which caterer or cook to call to deliver sealed pots of biryani—everyone's favourite after-cards food.
Traditionally, of course, Diwali foods have been much more than just party foods. However, as the festival has made its transition from being a celebration within an essentially agrarian society to becoming the shopping extravaganza that it is today, many of these foods and food traditions have got lost. Kheel-batashe belong to that league of lost foods that we hardly ever see any more, at least in the cities.
Kheel (a form of puffed rice) and batashe (sugar confections) were typically part of Diwali festivities on the main day of the Lakshmi Puja. Food rituals around festivals are often symbolic. The charms stirred into Christmas puddings were meant to ensure prosperity in the households. Similarly, newly-harvested rice in the form of the rough, unflattened kheel was put at the altar in the Hindu universe, before lit diyas, to promot efood security for the entire household in the months to come.
A variety of rice based snacks would also be made this time of the year—the munchies made from dried rice powder stored away for future use. Ricepapads and kachri were common crisps in so many parts of the country before the advent of packaged potato chips and fryuums. These would often be made in homes months before Diwali, sun-drying on sheets on the terrace. With the advent of winter, it was natural for people to want some fried comfort and these were the go-to snacks.
Pinni, a flaky confection from the hills, particularly Nepal, is a sort of mathri but where the maida is layered with rice flour as well. Painstaking to make but utterly sophisticated, this is a traditional Diwali snack too that may soon find a place in the growing tribe of lost recipes of the Subcontinent. In Old Delhi homes, another form of special mathris would be made this time of the year—Deewale, called that because you pressed down on the dough with your thumb to make an impression shaped like a diya.
The other ingredient that dominated Diwali snacks and sweets all over the country was chickpea flour, or besan. Heavier than wheat or rice and thought to give warmth to the body, besan was cooked with ghee to give us many warming, winter foods—from laddoos to besan ke sev, thin noodle-like fried snacks. The Farsi poori from Gujarat layers besan with wheat flour. While the puran poli from Maharashtra, another traditional Diwali food, has it stuffed inside the folds.
