An ode to the Gujarati thali

When the Portuguese Prime Minister, Antonio da Costa, served a Gujarati meal in honour of his visiting Indian compatriot, Narendra Modi, I was delighted to find one of my favourite cuisines making its presence felt on the high table of international diplomacy.

Indians other than Gujaratis entertain ambivalent feelings about the community’s cuisine, either dismissing it as being too sweet, or deigning to go as far as only the farsaan (snacks, or ‘snakes’, as the stereotypical Gujarati is supposed to pronounce the word).

In my view, and I confirmed it during a recent visit to Vadodara (which, incidentally, is a 40 per cent Marathi-speaking city, thanks to its long history of being ruled by the Gaekwad dynasty), there’s a finesse in Gujarati food that is most evident in the manner in which it uplifts the humblest of all vegetables and in the delicate interplay of tastes and flavours in its most visible representation — the thali.

In Vadodara, I discovered that there’s nothing called a unidimensional Gujarati thali, for you can have the spicy and oily Kathiawadi thali, which I dug at the Kismat Kathiawadi Hotel on a sweaty night on the National Expressway 1 linking Vadodara with Ahmedabad, and the more popular minimalist version served at Mandap, a popular haunt at the Express Towers Hotel, situated on a road named after the Bengali civil servant, economic historian and litterateur Romesh Chandra Dutt, who served as Diwan of the Baroda State, and a popular one too, after his retirement from the ICS.

The Kathiawadi thali, which is what Mahatma Gandhi must have grown up on, having lived in Porbandar and Rajkot in the first 19 years of his life, consisted of sev tamatar (a savoury delight made with cherry tomatoes and crunchy chickpea noodles), dahi bhindi (okra seasoned with yogurt), lasania bataka (baby potatoes cooked in ginger, garlic and tomato puree, and liberally loaded with red chilli powder), papad ki subzi (my favourite) and masala khichdi, which is in a league of its own because its masala has cashew and raisins in it.

To wash all this down, one had to settle for either buttermilk, or Thums Up; instead of aam ras (a mandatory opener for the standard Gujarati thali), there was Maaza; and the dessert was gol and ghee (melt-in-the-mouth white jaggery with aromatic ghee).

The breads were rotlis (what we call chapatis) or the sterner bakhris (made with bajra and therefore requiring a lot of ghee for easy digestion), and to raise the pungency factor, just in case you consider Kathiawadi food to be not too hot, you have the tadela marcha, or fried green chillies.

The Gujarati thali, in stark contrast, starts with a sweet offering — aam ras in the mango season with ghee-smeared padvali rotis to dunk in — and farsaan (it could be methi na dhokla and vegetable cutlets, as in Mandap, or even baby samosas).

These starters were followed by tindora nu shaak (sweet-and-savoury ivy gourd), sev tameta, batata dahiwala, chana dal, followed by ‘Gujarati’ and ‘Punjabi’ dals — alternatives to the sweetish traditional dal and kadhi — but I stuck to the old-fashioned versions: their broad hints of sweetness sat well on my Bengali palate.

In season, the thali would have included ringana methi nu shaak (eggplant cooked with fenugreek leaves) and my all-time favourite, undhiy (the subject of the accompanying box). For me, the Gujarati thali stands out for the way it delicately balances sweet, savoury and sour. In my estimation, it comes next only to the Bengali thali with its calibrated progress from bitter to sweet, via savoury and sour.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)

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