If you’re keen on mix of good old namkeen
A song — an earworm, really — has been going round and round in my head. It’s an ode to jhalmuri, that delicious eastern Indian mix of puffed rice, boiled potatoes, chopped onions, mustard oil, and several other ingredients. Then, just as I was humming Sawan Dutta’s foot-tapping “Jhalmuri jhalmuri” to myself, a friend, who had come to dinner and was helping himself to a bowl of besan papdi, pointed out that one couldn’t beat Gujarat’s namkeens. That got me thinking. If there were a namkeen competition, who’d win?
I don’t think there are any easy answers to that, for the namkeens we have are mind-boggling. There are some common threads across India — many varieties, for instance, are prepared with besan or rice — but the regions have their specialities. Think of the South, and you, at once, picture murukku ribbons, pappu chekkalu and bitter gourd chips. Gujarati farsan brings to mind, among a host of other images, gathiya and fafda, while Madhya Pradesh throws up a bowl of spicy Ratlam sev. North India is known for its bhujiya, dal beeji and mathri.
Speaking of mathri, these fried flour discs are of various kinds, too: methi (fenugreek), aloo (prepared with potatoes) and achari (pickle-like spicy), to name a few. East India, of course, is famous for its nimki (fried maida triangles), cheerey bhaja (roasted or fried pressed rice with peanuts and chickpeas) and jhalmuri.
Namkeens are somewhat different from snacks. They are very often a mix of ingredients: think of the southern Indian mix of thin sev strips, peanuts, curry leaves, and chana dal, or East India’s chanachur, which is often hot, spicy and mildly sweet. Besan has a vital role to play in namkeens. “Puffing the Bengal gram on hot sand causes its brown covering to disengage, releasing a shiny yellow kernel,” writes food historian KT Achaya in ‘A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food’. “This is ground in stone mills (chakkis) to yield besan flour or kadalai-mau in Tamil. It is the batter usually chosen to deep fry snacks.” They are sometimes named after their shapes.
The murukku, for instance, gets its name from its twisted shape. Kerala’s mildly sweet accha-appam or rose cookie (the state is believed to have inherited it from the Dutch) is not precisely a namkeen but can be served as one. Deep fried, it is prepared in a typical floral mould called accha. Sometimes, the names have interesting stories. Legend has it that the Congress mixture, also known as Congress kadlekai or masala peanuts, was named after the 1969 Congress split — the dividing lines in the shelled peanuts were seen as a symbol of the faction-hit party.
Crops ranging from rice, wheat and chickpeas to bananas and vegetables such as carrots and jackfruits are moulded into namkeens across India. Food historians tell us that these emerged when people started the process of drying and roasting ingredients such as dal or fruits and vegetables to preserve them. Though namkeens have a pan-Indian presence, these were traditionally prepared with an ingredient that came from a region where it was grown in abundance. So, you have many rice-based namkeens in the East and besan-based ones in the chickpea-growing Gujarat.
I can’t decide which of the namkeens may be crowned the hero or heroine of the genre. They are not the star lead on the table, though I do like to add plain bhujiya over my rice and mutton curry. But they do play stellar supporting roles — quite like character actors in Hindi films — in culinary customs. And like Johnny Walker or Helen, or Arshad Warsi and Johnny Lever, they fill us with immense joy.
Jhalmuri
Ingredients
Puffed rice 3 cups
Onions (chopped) ½ cup
Cucumber (chopped) ½ cup
Tomato (chopped) ½
Potatoes (boiled, diced) ½
Bengal gram (sprouted) ¼ cup
Lemon juice 1 tsp
Green chillies (chopped) 1 tsp
Coriander leaves (chopped) 2 tbsp
Chaat masala 1 tsp
Black salt ½ tsp
Roasted cumin powder 2 tsp
Roasted peanuts 2 tbsp
Fresh coconut (finely sliced) 1 tbsp
Sev 1 tbsp
Red chilli powder To taste
Salt To taste
Mustard oil 2 tbsp
Method
Mix all the ingredients, barring the lemon juice, coconut pieces, coriander leaves and the sev, in a bowl. Add lemon juice and then the remaining ingredients, except the sev. Drizzle some mustard oil, sprinkle the sev on top, and serve
in small bowls or sal leaf donas.
— The writer is a food critic
Features