Cooking, the milky way
When the temperature soars, I remember a refreshingly cold drink we drank in our village home. Buffalo milk was mixed with sugar and cold water from an earthenware pot. This, served in tall steel glasses, was our summer drink — simple, yet satiating.
Milk is indeed versatile: it can lead to all kinds of sweets and savouries, from chhena and curd to paneer and cheese. Since humans domesticated animals some 10,000 years back, milk has been an essential part of our food regimen. Different kinds of milk have varying quantities of fat, protein and lactose, as I garnered from a book titled ‘Milk: A 10,000-year History’ by Mark Kurlansky. He writes that in 1906, Bengali food writer Bipradas Mukhopadhyay rated the milk of goats, sheep, camels, buffaloes, cows, humans, mares and elephants, and concluded that while human milk was the best, cow’s milk was the second-best. Many believe Bengal’s sweets are special because they are prepared with cow’s milk.
Buffalo milk has its aficionados, too, for it has more fat and less cholesterol than cow’s milk. The 14th-century traveller-chronicler Ibn Battuta mentions a porridge prepared with buffalo milk that he’d eaten in India. And we all know the role that buffalo milk plays in the making of mozzarella cheese.
My all-time favourite milk product — not counting the sweets, of course — is paneer. I like it with spinach, capsicum, peas, potatoes, or with just onions and tomatoes. I was surprised to know that US President Richard Nixon used to eat a lot of cottage cheese. Kurlansky recounts that Nixon was once asked how he controlled his weight. “By eating cottage cheese”, he had replied. Nixon said he added dollops of ketchup to his cottage cheese — a trick he learnt from his grandmother. Incidentally, Kurlansky writes, there were no cows or cattle in America until the Europeans brought them.
For the Europeans, of course, milk is an essential part of their cuisines. White sauce, for instance, can thicken and liven up any dish: you just need to melt butter in a pan, stir in flour and a cup of milk on slow heat, and add a little black pepper and seasoning. Some cream can add to the taste and consistency. And this sauce goes with almost everything — from fish and chicken to pasta and mushrooms. A friend, a trained chef, once served me a roasted lamb dish with an incredible sauce of milk thickened and flavoured with garlic.
In Indian cuisine, milk is often used to add taste to curries. A Kolkata friend swears by her rohu recipe, in which fresh pieces of marinated rohu are simmered in milk tempered with asafoetida. Rajasthan’s safed maans is another flavourful meat dish, in which the gravy is prepared with milk and whole red chillies. A Kashmiri dish called aab gosht — or dodhe maaz — is meat in thick milk gravy.
Quite a few special rice dishes require milk. In Rajasthan’s malai ki biryani, meat pasandas are cooked with rice and milk in layers and, when done, garnished with thickened rabri. Delhi’s mewa pulao is an aromatic dish of rice and fried nuts, cooked with whole spices, milk, saffron and sugar.
Hyderabad is known for its white biryani called sofiyani or safaida, which is prepared with milk, almond paste, mawa and ghee. But I think milk is at its best when it is turned into a dessert. Think of kheer, payesam, payesh and sandesh. One of the most sublime sweets is khurchan — a sweet dish of thickened milk, where the solidified sweetened milk is scraped from the bottom of a pan, and eaten. But if I have to name my favourite milk-based dessert, it will be Odisha’s chhena poda. All this talk brings to mind one of my favourite summer drinks: rose-tinted milk, sweetened with Rooh Afza.
Chhena Poda
Ingredients
Full-cream milk 2 kg
Sugar 150 g
Semolina 30 g
Green cardamom powder 1 tsp
Cashew nuts (chopped) 2 tbsp
Raisins 1 tbsp
Ghee 1 tbsp
Juice of lemons 2
Method
Boil the milk, and gradually add the lemon juice when it starts to bubble. Mix thoroughly. When the milk curdles, quickly strain using a muslin cloth. Drain out the liquid (you can use it in curries and dals if you wish), but ensure that the chhena is a little moist. Now mash the chhena. Add sugar and other remaining ingredients. Mix and mash well. Preheat the oven to 170 ºC. Take a baking dish and lightly oil the dish. Put the chhena mix in it, and flatten it. Bake in the oven for 40-50 minutes, or till it becomes golden. Take it out, and let it cool. Cut into wedges and serve.
— The writer is a Delhi-based food critic
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