Rarely has the world seen so rich a cuisine from so little that was available from the land. While the eastern region of the state has fertile soil capable of crops of everything from wheat and maize to millets and corn, for much part the desert’s dry terrain, prone to droughts, was incapable of producing even basic necessities of survival. Yet, live and eat they did, creating an exotic cuisine from the soil that threw up a few pulses, crops of millet, and trees with beans that were dried and stored for use when, in the summers, nothing would grow.

Communication and faster means of transportation have brought in a revolution in the choice of vegetables and fruits that are now available throughout the state, but this was not always so. Which is why, for the villager, his diet still remains sparse, and consists of dairy produce, bread of millets and accompaniments of gram flour and sour buttermilk which, say dieticians across the world, is a high-protein, low-fat cuisine. Perhaps that is what gives the people of the desert their erect gait and slender build.

Though the Rajasthani kitchen was able to create much from little, it had also to cater to different communities with their own ritual observances. The Rajput warrior, for example, was not averse to shikar, killing game to put in his pot at night. The Vaishnavs, followers of Krishna, were vegetarian, and strictly so, as were the Bishnois, a community known for their passion to conserve both animal and plant life. Even among the Rajputs, there were enough royal kitchens where nothing other than vegetarian meals were cooked. The Marwaris, of course, though not too different from the Rajputs, was richer in its method of preparation. And then there were the Jains too, who were not only vegetarians, but who would not eat after sundown, and whose food had to be devoid of garlic and onions which were, otherwise, important ingredients in the Rajasthan pot.

To begin with the Rajput, then: as a hunter-warrior, he often bagged his game, which is why the Rajasthani repertoire has everything from venison and hare to wild boar on its menu. However since these are banned by the government for fear of endangering these wild species, the Rajasthani meal has almost come to imply mutton. The Rajput is a recent, reluctant convert to chicken, and even though the lakes abound in fish, it rarely finds its way into his kitchen.

An important feature of non-vegetarian cooking in the Rajput kitchen was that it was rarely cooked on the main stove in the kitchen, and usually employed the male head of the family as its chef. Essential ingredients included, besides onions and garlic, a vegetable called kachri, which is part of the cucumber family, as a marinade. The meat, first basted in the spices and then roasted in a pot over a wood fire, was turned into gravy and eaten with millet rotis.

Colonel James Tod’s treatise, Annals and Antiquities of Rajputana, notes that ‘the Rajput…hunts and eats the boar and deer, and shoots ducks and wild fowl’. But though the Rajput is a meat-eater, he is by no means a passionate one who has to have mutton on his table for every meal. Vegetarian food too forms a large part of his diet. Game, in fact, has been a part of the creed of the warrior: when out camping in the desert, it is what is available that forms the basis of the next meal. And so too, when the rest of the country follows strictly rigid vegetarian protocol as during the celebration of Navratri, the festival of nine nights, the Rajput offers his Devi a goat as sacrifice, beheading the beast with one blow of his sword. On all nine days, a similar offering is made, and the cooked meat eaten as consecrated food. In Rajasthan, most families will arrange for ay least one such sacrifice during the festival, and sometimes goats are specially reared in family backyards for the ritual offering.

Shikar provided a meal for the family, or for the village, or else expedition members shared the spoils to take their individual portions home. However, if there was more meat than could be consumed, it was pickled for later consumption. Venison and pork, especially, were cooked in rich masalas before being preserved in oil and vinegar. Pork fat, called sauth, was kept for winter days, when it would be chewed as prevention against colds.

Since men often did the cooking themselves, and since expeditions away from home for reasons of war rarely allowed the luxury of well-equipped kitchens, amore rudimentary method of barbecuing created its distinctive style of desert cooking. When small animals were bagged, such as desert hare, the animal was cleaned, stuffed and allowed to cook in a sand pit with a bed of live coals covering it, often overnight. With large animals, this was not possible, so the meat was marinated using kachri to impart its distinctive tang, and then this was barbecued over a bed of live coals. This, called sula, is still considered a delicacy, and has a tangy flavour on account of the sour marinade.

The women, whether the family was vegetarian or meat eating, had their task cut out for them. They would dry the meager sangri and gwarphali beans that are eatables, and store them for future use. They would also make papads and endless other variations and dry them, also for storage, later to be turned into curries for the family. Once again, using onions and garliv, and with mustard, red chilli powder and a handful of other spices, these would be put on the family pot in the kitchen, with yoghurt for flavouring.

Accompaniments rarely changed over the region. Karhi, more popularly known as khatta, formed- as it continues today-a part of the staple diet. Made with buttermilk (thin form of yogurt), it is mixed with chickpea flour and allowed to cook with mustard seeds and crushed garlic cloves. The longer it stays on the fire, the better its taste. Usual vegetables are sangri and gwarphali, beans stored for the length of the year after drying, and cooked in yogurt and masalas. Papads, eaten roasted elsewhere in India, are also gravied in Rajasthan, as is bhujiya, a popular moth-lentil snack. Chickpea flour can be freshly rolled out as dumplings to make gate-ka-saag, while sundried moth-lentil dumplings are also cooked as badi-ka-saag.

These are all eaten with either bread consisting of bajra rotis, unleavened millet bread, cooked over wood fires, or a porridge made using millet grains and moth lentils cooked together with water, a little spice and some ghee, to make khichra, a more filling, more potent version of what elsewhere in India is called khichri (though this uses rice as it base). Khichra, the night mainstay of the state’s farming communities, is eaten with ghee, and accompanied by either jaggery or karhi. The day’s meal for the working class consists of bajra rotis eaten with moth-daal, or with a fiery red-chilli-and-garlic chutney and washed down with raabori, millet flour cooked in buttermilk, believed to be extremely cooling in the summer heat of the state.

Desserts were, by and large, rare, though exotic concoctions from vegetables were sometimes served. For most, for festive occasions, these would consist of seera, a halwa made of cooked wheat flour in ghee, or laapsi, a porridge made with desiccated grains of wheat. Rice, a delicacy in Rajasthan, was served as a sweet with the addition of sugar, saffron and dried nuts and raisins.

Many more vegetables are now available in Rajasthan, with even little towns made colourful with the produce of vegetable vendors. Most of these vegetables are cooked in the same way as its chickpea and lentil-based curries, and there are usually no distinctive recipes that allow the taste of one vegetable to differ from another.

The Marwaris, however, were considerably more lavish with the inputs in their kitchen. A typical meal for them could consist of pishta-lonj served with a glass of milk laced with cream. Then, puris fried in hot oil, made with both wheat flour as well as with matar added to turn them a lovely green. With it, tamatar-ki-sabji, a tomato curry, at once sweet and sour and hot, gate-ka-saag with shavings of cashew added, and sangri-ker-ka-saag with the oil oozing out, and dahi-bhallas, of course. This would be followed by sooji-ka-halwa, a pudding that’s easy to make but still a daily favourite, and perhaps a glass of lassi at the end of the meal.

Marwari food uses the same basic ingredients of the same basic ingredients of the state’s Rajputs, but is a richer version, with more spices and herbs being added to the masala, and cooked in more fat. The Marwaris eat two meals, in the morning and at sundown. Both consist of a great variety of rotis and puris puffed in piping hot oil. There are a large number of accompaniments by way of chutneys, some sweet, others sour. Gatta, sangri and a tomato vegetable curry are favourites, all of them cooked in a good deal of clarified butter, the sour taste of the flavouring ingredients cutting through the fat to create its own distinctive taste. Ker, a hard desert berry, is often added to pickles, or sangri, or cooked on its own. The amount of chillies used is somewhat more curtailed, and mango powder (amchur) and rai (mustard seeds) dominate. The Marwaris also prefer heeng or asafoetida over the Rajput preference for garlic.

The Marwari sweet tooth is legendary, and since they were traders, they had greater access to the markets not only of India but also South-east Asia. They were, therefore, able to store dry fruits such as almonds, pistachios, cashews, and together with poppy seeds (khus) were able to use them in puddings. Halwas, barfis and ladoos are part of the Marwari repertoire, along with til, sesame, which was used for both sweets as well as main courses.

Dairy has played an important role in the economy of the desert, especially since agriculture could never be taken for granted. The consumption of milk, and of buttermilk and yoghurt formed a part of the main diet, but with the exception of those regions with access to rice-growing areas, the rice-porridge, kheer, never became popular in Rajasthan. But milk based sweets, barfis, did, so much so that to date, sweet sellers all over the country refer to themselves as Bikaneri sweet specialists. Contrarily, the otherwise popular Indian dessert is the principal offering during the Muslim Urs and Eid festivals at Ajmer when cauldrons of it are prepared at the Dargah of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti. The cauldrons are up to three metres in diameter. Once the rice, milk, sugar, clarified butter, nuts, spices, dry fruits are blended and cooked, attendants at the shrine jump into its scalding center, to serve it as a holy offering to the pilgrims, the contents dramatically diminishing as the waiting crowds consume it as prasad. This, of course, is an occasional offering. Most days, the large tureens serve a mixture of rice, meat and lentils- a meal in one go.

FOREIGN INFLUENCES ON RAJASTHANI FOOD

The royal families, alone, could claim some degree of variety in their meals because of the influence, first, of the Mughal court, and later the English. Mughal cuisine was varied and lavish and used the huge variety of ingredients at its disposal, all of which was harder to come by in the desert, even in the erstwhile palaces. The Mewar or Udaipur family, forced to flee and hide in the rocky countryside by the Mughals, devised the form of barbecue called sooley. The Kac-hchwaha family of Jaipur, closest to the Mughals through proximity and matrimony, went on to create one of the state’s finest delicacies, safed maas or white meat. Con-sisting ofmutton, it uses a curry of cashewnuts, almonds, fresh coconut kernel paste, white pepper and poppy seeds to cook a dish that is white in colour, hence its name.

The British influence was to formalize the manner in which the meal was eaten at the table, and to make the Rajasthani dishes somewhat more bland. Over the years, however, even this Indiannished somewhat, with stews and bakes and roasts including Indian spices, so the peculiar Anglo-Indian cuisine of the palaces too created an all-too distinctive cuisine. It also groomed the royals into the Western style of dining habits. Earlier, food would be served to them in silver and gold thaals placed on low tables before which they sat on silk cushions. Even in this, a strict hierarchy was followed. The royals ate off gold, the nobles used silver, and all others were only entitled to bronze. Sometimes a thaal was shared between siblings, or with kinsmen, to create the spirit of comradeship so essential to kinship.

Old retainers and chefs can still stir up authentic shepherd’s pie or French onion soup, but the conquest, even then, was far from complete. So much so that even when going to London, for work or on pleasure, the princes would cart their meals for them. The maharaja of Jaipur even carried his own supply of Ganga water with him, to use on his English trip, which is the purpose to which the large silver urns displayed at the City Palace Museum in Jaipur were put. They are, it may be added, the largest silver objects crafted in the world.

Wedding feasts still include lapsi as the auspicious offering for the gods, followed by sweet yellow rice served to the guests. Yes, the easier availability of wheat flour means that people are replacing bajra (which is more difficult to digest) with it. Fewer have the time to cook soyta that delicious porridge when khichra includes wild boar cooked in it. Nowadays, chances are that it would have lamb or mutton added to it, which detracts from the taste but only a little. But the process of cooking have the labour required to cook it in the original manner.