Paruppu (Dhal) Paayasam

It’s been a while since my whirlwind of posts. I always seem to work in batches and alternate between the binary states of 0 and 1 :).  To dust up this space, here is a “festive” post.

The Hindu lunar calendar recently entered a very busy phase. It is choked with festivals until the month of Marghazhi (i.e. December). In India (or rather South India), this is the time when Saree and Apparel stores advertise a million sales and tantalize the customers with attractive new designs. Oh, I miss the colorful advertisements! Every cook and sweet shop is busy preparing truckloads (yes) of favorite sweets and innovative ones that mark the occasions. From now on till Diwali, every other week will have some festival knocking on our door!

Yesterday was Krishna Jayanthi, Lord Krishna’s birthday. Lord Krishna’s fables make him an endearing God. He is supposed to have loved butter and sweets, so on his birthday, we prepare butter-rich delicacies for him. Cheedai, fried balls of rice flour and butter, is one such offering. But, as I have been warned, one needs guidance and supervision before embarking on a cheedai-making project, for cheedais are known to splutter and pop when dropped into hot oil, and have caused many unfortunate accidents. Hot oil within 10 meters of my presence is a constant source of concern for everybody, so I didn’t venture into trying cheedais. But, as mentioned before, any festival can be satisfactorily celebrated if one makes one sweet and one savory offering. One such common and widely accepted sweet is - Paayasam (sweet porridge), and a hugely popular savory item is - Vadai (deep fried patties of black gram batter).

There are many types of Paayasams, of course. But one of the most popular ones is - Channa Dhal Paayasam. You can’t come out of a wedding in our community without being served this kind of Paayasam. It is blasphemy otherwise!

I followed Meenakshi ammal’s recipe this time. It is slightly different from my mother’s and mother-in-law’s recipes, but I found it much simpler!

Ingredients

1. ¾ cup of channa dhal
2. 1 cup of sugar
3. 2 cups of milk
4. 2 teaspoons of ghee - you can’t skip this, or you’ll be offending Krishna!
5. a few broken cashews
6. a few raisins
7. a sprinkle of saffron
8. 2 teaspoons of cardamom powder

Procedure

1. Dry roast the channa dhal until it gains a bit of color. Immediately remove from heat, and soak in water for about 1-2 hours.
2. Drain the water from the soaked dhal and grind it to a paste, with as little water as possible.
3. Transfer the paste into a heavy bottomed pan. Add 2 cups of water to it.
4. Constantly stir on medium heat until the raw scent of dhal subsides. Take care to not let the paste stick to the bottom of the pan, or form any lumps
5. After about 5 minutes, add 1 cup of sugar and continue stirring constantly till the sugar is fully incorporated.
6. 5 minutes later, add 2 cups of milk and continue stirring. You may reduce the heat to low at this point. Keep stirring till everything comes to a boil.
7. Add this point, add a few strands of saffron, and cardamom powder (If you happen to have edible camphor, throw in a tiny bit of it). Stir till the saffron brings out its lovely sunset hues.
8. Fry the cashews and raisins in ghee till they turn golden brown and plump respectively. This garnish is what gives the Paayasam its unmistakable taste and scent!
9. Add the garnish of cashews and raisins to the porridge, and remove from heat.

That’s it! My mother usually adds jaggery instead of sugar, and cooks the dhal instead of grinding it. But cooking the dhal involves using the dicey pressure cooker which sometimes decides blow up, so I found this much easier. Besides, this is how I remember Paayasams being served at weddings.

The Paayasam tends to get thicker with time, so diluting it with a bit of milk and reheating it up to two days won’t hurt. A hint of this Paayasam is served at the beginning of every festive meal - a teasing teaspoon full of it finds it way to the bottom right corner of the plate (or traditional plantain leaf). It is to symbolically start the event/meal with a sweet, happy note. But in Brahmin meals, Paayasam is not had as a dessert at the end of the meal, but during the middle of the meal. After the second course, you will be served with several ladles of this sweet concoction that will decide to wildly run around the plate (or worse, the plantain leaf) and it is an art to scoop it with your palm and fingers and slurp it down! I can never do this. I will fascinatingly watch everyone around me casually make a swift nimble movement with their fingers to tame the Paayasam within their palm and relish it down, while mine will dribble down my arms (embarrassingly) or slither down my leaf, as I request to have a cup of it after meals. I am always reminded of the Panchatantra tale of the fox and the stork during these innumerable events. A fox invites a stork to dinner and serves food on a plate, in a manner that the poor stork can’t fathom to eat with his sharp bill. Hence to teach the fox a lesson, the stork invites the fox to dinner and serves him food in a tall jug from which the stork can easily pick out his dinner, thanks to his long and sharp bill, but the fox will morosely repent his mistake. Not that I intend to teach anyone a lesson! This is a nuanced way of eating/drinking that I unfortunately never learned, but I always feel out of place and very much like the stork as I attempt to gather the Paayasam with my thin, unyielding fingers :)