by Madhulika Liddle
Years ago, before we were married, my husband (who’s Hindu) was convinced that when Christmas came around, my family (we’re Christians) would be pigging out on turkey. Or goose. There would be a whacking big cannonball of a Christmas pudding, all aflame with brandy and served with a brandy sauce. There would be brussels sprouts and stuffing, golden potatoes and gravy. In essence, everything he’d seen in innumerable Hollywood Christmas movies and read about in everything from The Blue Carbuncle to A Christmas Carol.
I tried to explain that we are Indians. We don’t do all of that. Christmas cake, yes. Doughnuts, even (though our family’s doughnut recipe uses a somewhat unorthodox baking powder dough, not the more usual yeast one). On occasion, my mother has even made chocolate fudge. But as for the rest, you’d find some very ‘Indian’ goodies on offer. Gujiyas, for example, have been a staple as far back as I can remember — I still have childhood memories of standing at the kitchen counter beside my mother, using a little cutter with a serrated edge to cut away suji-and-raisin stuffed crescents of dough and placing them around the rim of a platter so that Mama could deep-fry them once she’d finished rolling out and stuffing all the gujiyas.
Baajre ki tikiyaan, made with bajra (pearl millet) flour, faintly sweet and no-nonsense in a rustic sort of way, used to be a favourite at our ancestral home in Western UP. This was a great big house, inhabited by several generations of Liddles. So many, in fact — especially with children and grandchildren coming ‘home’ for Christmas (no matter if they typically lived at the other end of the country, as we did) — that Christmas preparations were a lavish affair. There were, for instance, too many cakes to be baked, both for family as well as for visitors, and for gifting, to be able to do it at home.
Baking, therefore, was a task handled by the local baker. My grandmother, my aunts, sundry male relatives, anybody old enough to be entrusted with the task, would be roped in for the duty of getting the cakes baked. The ingredients had to be bought — the flour, the sugar, the butter, the many spices, the vast quantities of candied fruit and peel — and taken, on the appointed day, to the baker’s. He was the one who would do the weighing and the mixing before bunging the tins into the massive oven at the bakery. You’d sit down and wait, two hours or three or however long it took. Or, if you were lucky enough to live close to the baker’s, and to have a good rapport with the baker, you’d go back and return later, lugging back dozens of cakes.
One of the byproducts of those mass-made cakes was something those of us who bake our Christmas cakes at home in small and manageable quantities never encounter: cake ki roti. When the baker had doled out, into the many lined cake tins you’d taken along (yes, you had to provide the lined tins), there would invariably be some batter left. Not enough for one entire cake, but not little enough to be mindlessly thrown away. The baker would tip into it some more flour, perhaps add a little sugar, and then knead the resultant dough out into a large, flat roti, rather like one of those readymade pizza bases you now get in supermarkets.
This, baked to a firm biscuity golden-ness, was always kept away when the Christmas goodies were being stacked and stored. You didn’t put out cake ki roti for visitors who came calling: it was too pedestrian, too homely. You didn’t even really take it out for the family to consume at Christmas. Or even for several weeks after, when each cup of tea or coffee meant the unearthing of at least one form of Christmas goodie or the other. The cakes, the doughnuts, the fudge, the gujiyas, the thinly sliced collar (‘rolled ham’, for the uninitiated): those came first. Then, as all the fancier foods got depleted, what would finally emerge — perhaps in early February, in late January if we had been especially gluttonous — would be the cake ki roti. It would have the faint fragrance of the spices that had gone into the batter. There would be the occasional bit of candied fruit or peel, too. But it was very definitely not cake, more a ghost of Christmas cakes past.
One of the byproducts of those mass-made cakes was something those of us who bake our Christmas cakes at home in small and manageable quantities never encounter: cake ki roti.
I tried to explain all of this to my husband the first Christmas after our wedding. We were headed to my parents’ home to spend Christmas with them, and by the time we reached he had been primed enough to actually be surprised to see Christmas cake at tea time. There were no doughnuts that year, but there were brownies — baked by my sister — and ham sandwiches. My husband, catching my eye, gave me an accusing look, hurt at having been so completely taken in.
That night, Christmas Eve dinner was served up, and my husband did a double take. It was simple enough: masoor ki dal (tempered with finely minced onion, garlic and ginger fried in ghee); phulkas; salad — and, the pièce de resistance — shaami kababs with wedges of lime on the side. These shaami kababs, from a family recipe that’s been passed down over the generations (and which, in its original handwritten version, still has the quantities of ingredients written in tolas and chhataanks) are a must at Christmas Eve. They’re a far cry from the spicy version you find at most commercial establishments: these shaami kababs have only three spices — black cardamom, peppercorns and cloves — and the ‘heat’ comes from chopped green chillies that are added to the finished meat paste along with chopped mint and raw onions. They’re velvety on the inside, crisp on the outside, and addictive.
Topping off that Christmas Eve dinner (and many since — we are not a family to budge easily from tradition) was dessert. Not the Christmas pudding my husband was half-expecting, despite indications to the contrary. No, it was gajar ka halwa. Slow cooked in milk (no condensed milk shortcuts here), with ghee and khoya added later. Plump raisins. Finely powdered green cardamom. Always made with at least a couple of kilos of good red winter carrots, because you have to have gajar ka halwa both on Christmas Eve and after Christmas lunch.
… Which brings me to Christmas lunch. In my maternal grandparents’ home in Kolkata, the highlight of Christmas lunch used to be a brilliant mutton curry: rich and spicy and satisfying on many levels. My mother, who has spent all her married life — just over fifty years of it, now — in North and Central India, has made a change to that: it’s a chicken curry now, not a mutton one. Quicker to make, healthier, and just generally easier: an important consideration when you don’t have a battalion of willing hands from a large joint family to do all the heavy work involved in cooking Christmas lunches.
So, this is what Christmas lunch in our home now looks like (yes, we still go to my parents’ for Christmas, so what if they live only half an hour’s drive from our home). There is mattar pulao, studded with loads of fresh green peas — no frozen ones for my mother. There is salad, in the form of a kachumbar: diced cucumbers, tomatoes and (sometimes) onions, dressed simply with salt and lime juice. There is a tamatar ka bharta: chopped tomatoes, simmered in a little water until they’re soft and pulpy; cooled, mixed with chopped onions, green chillies and coriander, and seasoned with salt. And there is the chicken curry. Sometimes Mummy makes it with a proprietary ‘chicken masala’, because she just couldn’t be bothered with roasting and grinding loads of masala, a real chore since my mother, shunning such namby-pamby stuff as spice grinders, does the grinding on a proper sil-batta, a grinding stone so heavy that once when it slipped from her hands and fell, broke her toe. Sometimes, Mummy cooks khade masale ka chicken instead: browned onions, a paste of ginger and garlic, some red chilli powder and salt. That’s all that goes into it, producing a warm and comforting dish that is sparse enough to allow the chicken to really shine, instead of being smothered by spices.
Followed up, of course, by gajar ka halwa.
And so it goes on. Not just at Christmas, but at Easter too, when — often — lunch consists of coconut pulao (rice cooked in coconut milk and some judiciously used whole spices) and kofta curry. Easter eggs, yes, which are usually bought, more because they appeal to the children than anything else. And hot cross buns on Good Friday. But those hot cross buns are invariably accompanied, not with hot tea, but with home-made bael ka sharbat, made from the sweetened pulp of wood apples.
This was the food I grew up with, and it never struck me as unusual. Yes, we did have more frequent ‘Western’ food than did most of my friends, but that was probably because my mother, having grown up in Kolkata, always a rather more Westernized city than (say) Delhi, and much more educated than most women of her time, turned to Mrs Beeton and Constance Spry for inspiration. Now and then we had fricasseed eggs, soups, watermelon salad, shepherd’s pie. More often, though, we had good old dal-chawal-sabzi. My mother made achars and murabbas and chutneys. Namakparas and kalkals. Dessert, more often than not (and if it was there) was suji ka halwa or perhaps kheer.
Perhaps it is part and parcel of this widespread stereotyping of Christians — largely by Hindi cinema, though I’m sure there must be other offenders as well — that leads to this notion that food eaten by Christian families is a sort of transplanting of British food habits to this part of the world, a colonial hangover. Hindi cinema for decades altogether kept depicting Indian Christians as always wearing dresses (if female) or trousers and shirts (if male — or, when dressed in a suit, complete with cardboard top hat), speaking atrocious Hindi and crossing themselves at the drop of said hat. To expect that this lot would eat only ‘Western’ food for every meal was hardly a stretch.
But no. The reality is that most Indian Christians, after all, are Indians who, at some point in their family tree, had an ancestor who converted from another religion to Christianity. On both sides of my family, for instance, I have ancestors who were Hindus but who decided to convert. When you convert, you change your religion, but why should other things, really, undergo much of a change? If you’ve grown up wearing one type of clothing, why — unless it somehow is taboo in the faith you’ve now adopted — should you give it up? Why should you switch to another language (which reminds me of a Hindu lady, a close relative of my husband’s, who was stunned to discover that I could read and write fluently in Hindi)? After all, all across India, from Nagaland to Goa, from Kerala to Uttar Pradesh, thousands of Christians worship in the languages they grew up with, not English.
Why, then, should one expect that in one of the most vital aspects of life itself — the consumption of food — people would change simply because they have changed their religion? True, some religions have very strict rules about what may be eaten and what may not: Christianity is not one of them. Yes, you may give up foods like meat or chocolate or other sinful delicacies for Lent, but nobody’s going to excommunicate you if you don’t. We can — and do — happily eat just about anything we wish to.
So why leave, when we leave one religion and adopt Christianity, the dishes we enjoy the most? We found comfort and a sense of continuity in going on eating our everyday rotis and rice, our dals and vegetables. Meat, instead of being roasted and served with mint sauce and Yorskhire puddings, is made into curries — in our home, with some vegetable or the other being added to it: pumpkin, arbi (colocasia), turai (ridge gourd), okra, aubergines… the list goes on. The same with fish: curry is the norm, but whenever my mother makes fish cakes (how English those sound) — there’s a generous helping of sautéed onion, ginger and garlic added to the fish, along with a handful of chopped green coriander and a good sprinkle of powdered garam masala.
Yes, even when we cook ‘Western’ food, we adapt it to our taste buds. Just as most other Indians do, Christian or not. Even our family recipe for Christmas cake — several generations old now — includes some definitely Indian ingredients that you’d typically not find in a Western version. Powdered cardamom, for instance, is one of the spices added, and petha, the candied ash gourd that is so ubiquitous in North India during the winters, is absolutely essential.
It’s not as if the Liddles are an anomaly: in all my years, I have never come across an Indian Christian, from whichever part of India, who habitually consumed only these ‘firang’ foods (yes, they’re firang to us, too). For all of us, the foods our ancestors grew up with are primarily the foods we continue to eat. Perhaps that’s why gujiyas, so intrinsic a part of Holi festivities, have been transferred to Christmas festivities.
And Christmas, for us at least, is still curry and pulao and kachumbar and halwa. Not a hint of Christmas goose or sage stuffing or what have you.
Madhulika Liddle is a novelist and award-winning short story writer. Best-known as the author of the Muzaffar Jang series, about a 17th century Mughal detective, she also writes short stories in different genres and across themes ranging from black humour to social awareness, crime to romance. Her most recent book, a collection of women-centric short stories named Woman to Woman: Stories was released in November 2017. Madhulika lives in Noida and blogs — mainly about classic cinema, food and travel — at www.madhulikaliddle.com.