An Invitation to Indian Cooking - Madhur Jaffrey [109]
Remove moistened cloths. Brush the center portion of each naan with water, leaving a ½-inch margin. Sprinkle the center portion with the onion or poppy seeds.
Place sheets under the broiler, about 2½–3 inches away from the heat and broil quickly for about 2½ minutes on each side or until lightly browned.
To serve: Serve naans hot with Tandoori Chicken, Seekh Kabab, Lamb Cooked in Dark Almond Sauce, or Chicken Moghlai.
Kulfi
Gajar-ka-halva
Broiled bananas
Fried dates
Shahi tukra
Malpua
Kheer
Gulab jamun
n Europe and America, most meals end with dessert and coffee. In India most meals end with fruit—leechees, loquats, melons, watermelons, cheekoos, and mangoes in the summer, and apples, oranges, bananas, guavas, and pomegranates in the winter. These are often peeled at the table by the eldest woman of the house, and then passed around, always starting with the children. Desserts or “sweets” are served mainly at very special luncheons and dinners, at snack time and tea time, and at religious festivals (which come extremely frequently!).
“Snack time” seems to have an unusually elevated place in Indian life. I remember when I was working in television shows in Delhi. We would be deep in rehearsal when, almost every hour, there would come a desperate cry from some corner of the studio: “Quon bhai, chai hojai?” (“Well now, brother, how about tea?”). Every actor and technician would stop (happily) in his tracks, and the whole group would saunter off to the nearest snack shop to have sweet and savory snacks—and tea. The very spicy hot samosas and the sugary-sweet gulab jamuns were eaten simultaneously—a bite of one balancing a bite of the other and each swallowed with a soothing sip of scalding tea.
Tea has not always been drunk in India. Until the end of the last century it was more or less unknown in the subcontinent. With their sweet and sour snacks, Indians generally drank shurbut—fruit juice concentrates diluted with cold water—or hot, frothy milk. This milk was, and still is, sold by the snack vendor whose status often hinges upon how much froth he can raise. Since he has no frothing machine at his disposal, he achieves his bubbly result by briskly pouring the hot milk back and forth from one tumbler to another. These tumblers are first held close to each other. Slowly they are moved to a distance of several feet. The fast-flying milk never misses its mark and the stream of milk looks like taffy being pulled between the tumblers. This sight is responsible for one of Delhi’s oldest jokes, about the visitor from the old Northwest Frontier who asked if he might have “two yards of that white thing” along with his other sweets!
Tea, which is easily North India’s favorite snack beverage, has now replaced both shurbut and milk. It was introduced to India by the British in the early 1900’s. By this time the English had already been drinking Chinese teas for over two centuries. They decided to try planting Chinese tea seeds in the hilly regions of Assam. There they discovered, much to their surprise, fully grown tea trees that turned out to be not solitary accidents of nature, but parts of whole forests of tea trees. So the English went in with their Chinese seeds, their Chinese labor, and their pruning shears to tame this “wild” area. Soon they realized that neither the Chinese seeds nor the Chinese labor was necessary and that the native Indian tea was not only good but also proving very popular with the customers in England.
The next market they looked to was India itself. This turned out to be no problem at all. The Indians took to tea like fish to water. They learned to drink it like the English—strong, with a little milk and sugar. The milk was added to the strong tea to “fix” the tannin content and rid it of most of its astringency.
The Indian teas come from various regions of both North and South India and are generally of the dark fermented