connecting with India
my internet was out, and i needed to reconnect it on the same day as my lovely lady friend’s dinner party. She had been cooking Indian food all day, and asked me to make dessert (recipes below! – oh, so good). Spending a day all to myself, I was excited to cross-read about the recipes I found in the cookbooks from the library that morning, post-farmers’ market. So – gotta have the net.
the over-the-phone technician and I are working through the issues cheerfully, and he pipes up, what time is it there?
twelve noon – what time is it there?
midnight.
where are you?
you know Bombay?
yes.
I am 600 kilometers outside of Mumbai.
oh! i am making Gajjar Ki Burfee for desert tonight!
Gajjar Ki Burfee!?!?!, he bursts out laughing. You are?!?!
am I saying it right?
yeah!
His favorite dessert is gulab jamun (“jamun” also a pet name for a lover, sweetheart), but he likes burfee a lot. I like desserts with fruit, he learns, also that I’ve never made burfee before.
where are you?
Brooklyn!
Only later I think that I want to know if he was drinking a Coke.
****
After the subways flooded to a halt throughout New York and the tornado in Brooklyn, and I was surprised I made it out of NY to DC, my train back into the city from DC lost power just before Philadelphia. Stillness and sudden absence of the train racket and air conditioning and the unnecessary glare of the lights gone. I am weeks-of-long-workdays tired, and I look up from midnight’s children. My seatmate is sleeping.
Outside, tracks run rusty through rusty, sandy rocks, and the dried-out, flat remains of a deer of all the same colors, with eyes and mouth outlined in black. A college student with shopping bags flips open her phone, and I turn and glare – she’s two sentences in then says, “oh, yeah…it is suddenly awkwardly quiet…so i’ll call you later.” Flips it closed. The deer is dry as bone but not yet bones, half-flattened into the patch of ground that looks like clay. The engine turns, and we ride on to Philly.
The jazz festival is playing, and the cute conductor with tattoos tells us to get off the train and stretch out legs, hear the music, smoke a cigarette. When the engineer comes and examines the engine, she will tell the conductor if we need to get on another train. The shopping bag woman’s friend in a hoodie scolds the voice of the conductor for promoting cancer-causing tobacco. I grab my purse and my pack, and sit on the platform on a small cement round between the edges of its metal beam, and do nothing but smoke and listen to the music. And watch bicycle t-shirt and yoga pants use the time to flirt and neck, and I smile at the old Indian guy pacing the platform. On his second lap, he approaches in his man sandals and gives me a bottle of water.
for your smile
thank you, and another smile under big sunglasses, behind red hair.
third lap: he came to America in 1965—when he was 21 years old (he was 3 years old when his country emerged as independent from the British empire)—to earn his masters degree in chemistry at a school in Washington state, where he was supposed to get a stipend. The woman who processed his paper work was no longer working at the school when he arrived, promises of his stipend were lost, and he couldn’t afford to stay. Invited by another Indian student with an apartment near Colombia, he came to in New York, where – he said – any one could get by. He has lived in every borough, and he worked in labs, processing movie film. Eventually, he moved to Pennsylvania, where he has lived for twenty years now. His parents – they came and visited him when they could, and only in the past three years has he been back to India.
and what do i do?
I work in women’s health and rights. I work with questions like: why do so many women still die in childbirth, and how do we change this? why are women contracting HIV faster than men now, and why aren’t they getting the care they need when they have AIDS?
this is mostly in the developing world, yes?
yeah – here too, but the global south is hit harder.
India does not want to say it has a problem, but in the cities like Bombay, I think, it is a problem Is it true it is through sex? Do they know that for sure?
yes—for certain. You can contract the virus through fluid exchange during unprotected sex, and also through blood – for example, if a clinic cannot screen its blood transfusions or through dirty needles. So HIV is epidemic among injection drug users too.
when they have dirty needles?
yes – when they cannot get clean needles.
and we talk about drug use in Asia, and how people do not want to discuss drug use or sex or AIDS or poverty. Our fresh train arrives, and we roll on.
gajjar ki burfee
also – gaijjar ki burfi; or served as gajjerella
In about ½ a cup of hot water, soak
¼ cup of almond slices.
Scrub clean
two pounds of carrots.
This is one of those recipes that are not worth making if you cannot lay your hands on fresh, local, in-season, smells like fake carrot they’re so carroty carrots. It won’t be near the same with craptastic mass produced carrots. Do not peel them, just scrub them a bit and grate. Be as careful as you can be, and maybe grate in shifts or invite a helper bee friend over—grating two pounds of carrots by hand isn’t easy on your fingers.
Cook the grated carrot in a large, heavy sauce pan with a lid (I use the pot I love best for risotto) over a medium-high flame for 10 minutes. Stir occasionally. Lower the flame and cook 10 minutes more, covered and stirring every few minutes. Add a pat or two of butter if you like.
Add
¾ cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
and cook for another half hour or so over medium-low heat, cover the pot and stir occasionally. The carrots will absorb the sugar, and it will become “dry.”
While the carrots are cooking, in another saucepan, combine
1 ¾ heavy (whipping) cream
1 cup ricotta cheese
3 cups nonfat dry milk.
Cook over medium high heat while whisking occasionally until the dairy cooks down to a batter-like consistency—about 15 minutes. When the cream mix is good and thick and the carrots good and dry, pour the cream into the carrots, stirring and cooking for 5 minutes or longer. Add the almonds, and
2 tablespoons of chopped pistachios, and 1 teaspoon cinnamon.
Cook over medium-low heat until thick and hefty – almost like fudge. Poor it into a large, shallow backing dish or on a cookie sheet with sides or very carefully on one without. Let cool a bit, and top with
edible silver leaf
if you can get it. You cannot get it in Brooklyn; you have to, the clerks said, go to Manhattan for that. You can also top with
sparkly decorator sugar, or
dessert masala: cinnamon, cardamom, pistachios, sugar.
burfee with rose water, cardamon and pistachios
Most Indian deserts are made on a stove top, not baked like cakes, brownies, and pies. Not many ovens in India. But when they do have a birthday cake – story goes- there is a cake fight.
In a heavy saucepan, melt
3 tablespoons of unsalted butter.
Stir in
1 pound of ricotta cheese
and cook for 20 minutes, stirring with a slotted spoon or a whisk, banging it against the side frequently (a whisk really cages the cheese). Whisk in
just more than half of one 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk.
Cook for another 20 minutes, until very thick and fudgey. Add
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons of rosewater
3 tablespoons of almond shavings
or whatever other flavoring feels like nirvana or Narnia or night-blooming jasmine scented seduction to you.
Pour into a shallow baking pan or onto a cookie tray or into a mini-muffin tin. Top with
2 teaspoons of ground cardamom
2 tablespoons crushed pistachios.
sparkly decorator sugar; i used “silver”
Or edible silver leaf, but like I said… Refrigerate until solid; great to make the night before and let sit overnight. Cut into diamonds.
These recipes are based primarily on Neelam Batra’s recipes in The Indian Vegetarian: Simple Recipes for Today’s Kitchen, Hungry Minds Inc. (1998). Neela likens burfee to brownies.
I want to make beet burfee. The improvising will soon begin, but if anyone who reads this has a recipe, please do share.
