The Art of Making Gujiyas
And then of course there is that entire snobbery related to the pinching of the edges and the decorative pattern of folds of each of the dumplings. In traditional homes, this was an art form. As kids, we were pressed into service to complete the laborious task of hand-filling each guja/gujiya and then closing the casing by pressing together the edges into neat folds that had to be tidy and pretty-looking. If the exact folds in a dim sum are prized and if dim sum making is elevated to an art form, gujiya-making may have been the same thing—except for the advent of the molds. Like cookie cutters, they made life of the cook much easier but much less interesting and beautiful.
Hand-made gujiyas are now a lost or dying legacy of our pasts. But the fact that the sweet remains popular despite the globalisation of the palate – and despite the prevalence of the likes of “chocolate gujiya” in our midst— is meaningful in more ways than you can perhaps imagine.
The gujiya is a reflection of India’s composite past—just as the samosa is. If the samosa travelled from West Asia and the Mediterranean to India, replacing the filo sheets and minced meats with maidaand aloo, the gujiya is a dish with similar history. It belongs to the same genre as the samosa. Both have maida as the covering, and it is just the filling and the shape that got altered along the way, as inventive Subcontinental cooks played with ingredients and techniques.
Like the samosa, the gujiya too is a medieval dish then. It reflects a fusion of identities in India—and a fusion of tastes that took place particularly in the Mughal era. Ideas from the West, travelled East and found much vibrant cooking material in India. The local popular filling of khoya became a substitute for meat, frying—the popular Hindu way of cooking pucca and festive khana—took precedence in terms of cooking techniques and the filo was replaced by maida. As we bite into one, that is a bit of culture we should savour too.
0 comments:
Post a Comment