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It was in 1949 at the ripe age of 6 that I first saw wheat.
There was a rice famine in our Nellore District then and Father one day brought with him a red card the size of a Money Order Form. I asked him what it was and he said proudly that he managed to get hold of a Ration Card by pulling strings.
The next day he went to the shop and returned with a bag of white rice and half a bag of what he called godhumalu (wheat grain). And said that the shopkeeper had orders to compulsorily sell wheat to anyone who wanted to buy rice.
The wheat grain looked funny and odd to me. It wasn't milk white like our Nellore rice...it was reddish...its shape was ungainly with a notch on it, and it tasted odd when I tried it. Mom didn't quite know what to do with the wheat grain but since she had lived for a year in a semi-arid village where the staple cereals were sorghum (jonna) and millet (sajja), she thought she would try rotis made of broken wheat, broken in her backyard pounding stone.
The end result was a disaster...the rotis didn't bind.
Then one day Grannie was visiting us from the city of Vizagh where she said she had learned how to make chapatis out of wheat powder. So she asked mom to pound the wheat into fine powder (we didn't know it was called atta). And Grannie sat down on the floor after asking Father to bring down the papad-making rolling pin and plate from the attic, and went to work. The whole household including us kids and our parents thronged round her to watch chapati-making...the word chapati was so new to us.
Grannie took a lot of atta in a dish and added what she felt was enough salted water to the powder. And, after applying some ghee to her palms, started kneading the atta with both her hands like we did to our papads. And after the thing came out like a snake she divided it into a dozen balls...she didn't know that she had to keep the kneaded stuff aside for a while.
And she sprinkled some atta powder on the roller plate like she was performing some puja. And started rolling a ball with her pin. The flattened ball got stuck to the rolling pin and she teased it out with her hands, cursing inwardly, and said she forgot to dip the wet ball into fresh atta powder. And laid some fresh atta by the side of the rolling plate. And succeeded at last in making it into a white rough circle. And she applied lots of ghee on the circular thing and folded it into a semicircle. And rolled it a bit and added more ghee. And she folded it once again and added some more ghee, all the while teasing the stuff from the rolling pin. At last she got a ghee-laid triangle while all of us watched her magic effort with wonder...triangular layered papads!!!
After rolling all the dozen balls, she kept the roller happily away and took to frying the triangles on a dosa-making frying pan (tavva). She waited till the pan got reddish hot and spread lots of steaming ghee on it and eased out a triangle on to the pan. It sizzled and she added some more ghee around the edges. And after a while she turned it over and added some more ghee, while Father was getting demoralized at the sight of his monthly quota of ghee tin getting exhausted in a trice. And Grannie took her chapati down from the pan and asked us kids to taste her city-recipe. And I was the guinea pig, as usual, being the only son of my parents.
Grannie's chapati had its novelty alright but that was about all...it was flaky, layers after golden brown layers with black islands on them peeling out, tough on my tender teeth, and all I liked about it was my weekly ration of ghee...I had to then wash my hands with rice powder and kerosine maybe. But I said it tasted marvelous and then everyone followed suit. Grannie was as pleased as Punch and returned to Vizagh, and my mom never tried her mom's recipe again...her hubby would scowl.
Mom tried exchanging her wheat ration for rice with her brahmin neighbor ladies but they wanted to outdo her, bringing out their quota of ration wheat. I think all of them tried to sell their wheat to their milkmen but the milkmen said that their cows kicked up a row when they tried to feed them with wheat powder instead of their cherished rice bran.
Next month all of us surreptitiously sold our ration wheat back to the shopkeeper at 1/4 the price he sold it to us, and the shopkeeper sold it at 1/3 to the wholesaler in Nellore, and he sent huge bags of returned wheat to Benares at 1/2 the retail price there.
And the pundits of Varanasi bought them in tons chanting the holy mantra: NaMo! NaMo!! NaMo!!!
It was in 1951, when I graduated to our high school in Muthukur that I first heard of maida (superfine white wheat powder). My HM Father had announced that he and his team consisting of the local doctor and police sub-inspector would go round all the class rooms one by one and select the best decorated one for the award of the Flag of Honor. And gave a notice period of one week to all the Class Teachers and Class Pupil Leaders and students to compete for the honor, decorating their class rooms as best as they could.
Our Class Teacher, a young man called Hari Hara Sarma, went about it with great enthu and collected subscriptions from all students and bought thin color paper rolls, red and yellow and green, and asked us all to come to school on the weekend to help our leaders in making interlaced wall-to-wall paper ring buntings. And drawing pictures of Saraswati Devi and writing in color chalk select Sanskrit aphorisms on the walls like:
that would be sacrilegious in our modern world where women are more equal than most men.
And I was wondering how the thin color paper strips could be glued around one another by our blackish tree gum. But Hari Hara Sarma, being from the town of Nellore, had found a way. He bought a huge tin of what he called maida from Nellore and asked our CPL to boil it in water till it became a paste. And the whitish maida paste (which everyone of us called gonz) served as a clean gum-substitute. And we walked away with the Flag of Honor (our competitors of other classes whined that it was because I was in the class).
Imagine what Mrs SDM, the good wife my Bengali Guide at IIT KGP, would have said of the tremendous waste of godly maida...she would have made a couple of hundred of sumptuous loochies with it and fed me every afternoon at their house for a year while her hubby gassed away...
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It was in 1949 at the ripe age of 6 that I first saw wheat.
There was a rice famine in our Nellore District then and Father one day brought with him a red card the size of a Money Order Form. I asked him what it was and he said proudly that he managed to get hold of a Ration Card by pulling strings.
The next day he went to the shop and returned with a bag of white rice and half a bag of what he called godhumalu (wheat grain). And said that the shopkeeper had orders to compulsorily sell wheat to anyone who wanted to buy rice.
The wheat grain looked funny and odd to me. It wasn't milk white like our Nellore rice...it was reddish...its shape was ungainly with a notch on it, and it tasted odd when I tried it. Mom didn't quite know what to do with the wheat grain but since she had lived for a year in a semi-arid village where the staple cereals were sorghum (jonna) and millet (sajja), she thought she would try rotis made of broken wheat, broken in her backyard pounding stone.
The end result was a disaster...the rotis didn't bind.
Then one day Grannie was visiting us from the city of Vizagh where she said she had learned how to make chapatis out of wheat powder. So she asked mom to pound the wheat into fine powder (we didn't know it was called atta). And Grannie sat down on the floor after asking Father to bring down the papad-making rolling pin and plate from the attic, and went to work. The whole household including us kids and our parents thronged round her to watch chapati-making...the word chapati was so new to us.
Grannie took a lot of atta in a dish and added what she felt was enough salted water to the powder. And, after applying some ghee to her palms, started kneading the atta with both her hands like we did to our papads. And after the thing came out like a snake she divided it into a dozen balls...she didn't know that she had to keep the kneaded stuff aside for a while.
And she sprinkled some atta powder on the roller plate like she was performing some puja. And started rolling a ball with her pin. The flattened ball got stuck to the rolling pin and she teased it out with her hands, cursing inwardly, and said she forgot to dip the wet ball into fresh atta powder. And laid some fresh atta by the side of the rolling plate. And succeeded at last in making it into a white rough circle. And she applied lots of ghee on the circular thing and folded it into a semicircle. And rolled it a bit and added more ghee. And she folded it once again and added some more ghee, all the while teasing the stuff from the rolling pin. At last she got a ghee-laid triangle while all of us watched her magic effort with wonder...triangular layered papads!!!
After rolling all the dozen balls, she kept the roller happily away and took to frying the triangles on a dosa-making frying pan (tavva). She waited till the pan got reddish hot and spread lots of steaming ghee on it and eased out a triangle on to the pan. It sizzled and she added some more ghee around the edges. And after a while she turned it over and added some more ghee, while Father was getting demoralized at the sight of his monthly quota of ghee tin getting exhausted in a trice. And Grannie took her chapati down from the pan and asked us kids to taste her city-recipe. And I was the guinea pig, as usual, being the only son of my parents.
Grannie's chapati had its novelty alright but that was about all...it was flaky, layers after golden brown layers with black islands on them peeling out, tough on my tender teeth, and all I liked about it was my weekly ration of ghee...I had to then wash my hands with rice powder and kerosine maybe. But I said it tasted marvelous and then everyone followed suit. Grannie was as pleased as Punch and returned to Vizagh, and my mom never tried her mom's recipe again...her hubby would scowl.
Mom tried exchanging her wheat ration for rice with her brahmin neighbor ladies but they wanted to outdo her, bringing out their quota of ration wheat. I think all of them tried to sell their wheat to their milkmen but the milkmen said that their cows kicked up a row when they tried to feed them with wheat powder instead of their cherished rice bran.
Next month all of us surreptitiously sold our ration wheat back to the shopkeeper at 1/4 the price he sold it to us, and the shopkeeper sold it at 1/3 to the wholesaler in Nellore, and he sent huge bags of returned wheat to Benares at 1/2 the retail price there.
And the pundits of Varanasi bought them in tons chanting the holy mantra: NaMo! NaMo!! NaMo!!!
It was in 1951, when I graduated to our high school in Muthukur that I first heard of maida (superfine white wheat powder). My HM Father had announced that he and his team consisting of the local doctor and police sub-inspector would go round all the class rooms one by one and select the best decorated one for the award of the Flag of Honor. And gave a notice period of one week to all the Class Teachers and Class Pupil Leaders and students to compete for the honor, decorating their class rooms as best as they could.
Our Class Teacher, a young man called Hari Hara Sarma, went about it with great enthu and collected subscriptions from all students and bought thin color paper rolls, red and yellow and green, and asked us all to come to school on the weekend to help our leaders in making interlaced wall-to-wall paper ring buntings. And drawing pictures of Saraswati Devi and writing in color chalk select Sanskrit aphorisms on the walls like:
Niraasharayaa Na Shobante Punditaa Vanitaa Lataa
And I was wondering how the thin color paper strips could be glued around one another by our blackish tree gum. But Hari Hara Sarma, being from the town of Nellore, had found a way. He bought a huge tin of what he called maida from Nellore and asked our CPL to boil it in water till it became a paste. And the whitish maida paste (which everyone of us called gonz) served as a clean gum-substitute. And we walked away with the Flag of Honor (our competitors of other classes whined that it was because I was in the class).
Imagine what Mrs SDM, the good wife my Bengali Guide at IIT KGP, would have said of the tremendous waste of godly maida...she would have made a couple of hundred of sumptuous loochies with it and fed me every afternoon at their house for a year while her hubby gassed away...
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