Marathi Munchies
Indian house gatherings in the UK have one great incentive – the food. If not the starters then definitely the main meal. If Indian shops didn’t exist in the UK then yes I unfortunately would have been resigned to eating cheese and onion flavoured crisps for starters and a sad looking casserole for dinner. Thankfully, I’ve never had that experience in all my twenty five years of being in this country.
Every Indian household often has drawers or whole cupboards full of all things deep-fried, they are normally bright yellow coloured and lets not forget, crunchy. They have aggressive and violent sounding names like khakra or “khatta meetha chewda”; I’m positive a missile or spaceship would have been named after one of these, the fafranaut 2000 has a nice ring to it. They often come in handy for young students who can’t cook (particularly 20-something boys) who pack them like bricks into their shared kitchens at uni accommodations. These snacks can also be the focal point for three main types of home gatherings:
1) Aunty Gatherings: At some point, if you are Indian you will find a large group of aunties in the kitchen or the “tv room”. They all sit in a uniform circle talking about their new washing machines and compare their husbands’…shoes…and are often very hungry. It is at this time that one child from the household (me) is given the task of walking around to each aunty holding a massive bowl of snacks. Each aunty will smile sweetly (but secretly be assessing why I am not married) and pick at a cheeky chakli or a bakarwadi or exclaim “no thank you, I gym now beta.”
2) Fat Kid Gatherings:
Technically these are family/family friend gatherings, but we can call them fat kid gatherings; there always happens to be a very quiet, very sneaky Fat Kid. Fat Kid tends to always be on his portable PlayStation, he wears t-shirts with some scary comic book character on them and he is always on the lookout for food.
These gatherings are very fun and are normally very loud which is the perfect opportunity for Fat Kid to sit closely to the snack bowls and slowly but surely devour all of them. I envy Fat Kid because I don’t possess the stealth to do this without getting caught.
3) For Show Gatherings:
These gatherings normally take place in the kitchen and instead of a beautiful vase of flowers in the middle of the table there are an assortment of different snack bowls. I always find these gatherings the most stressful because it is never the best time to actually reach for the snacks. Either my aai will tell me to “wait until dinner is ready” or Fat Kid will spring into action and copy me, eventually finishing off the whole thing. Snacks are only a centrepiece at these types of gatherings, they stay there for hours and nobody acknowledges them.
Living in the UK and having an abundance of Indian shops down the road means there is never a point where the kitchen drawers won’t be filled with oily, crispy goodies but there is definitely a lack of Maharashtrian snacks available. I normally end up having to smuggle them over from India in my bright pink bag hoping they don’t leave that fried cholesterol smell in it. There are some typically Maharashtrian snacks that we will explore as well talk about the perfect time to eat them without being told to “wait until dinner.”
Bhadang
I discovered this monstrosity a few years ago through an uncle. If bhadang was a person he would probably look just like Ashutosh Rana in Sangharsh:
I’m not even kidding. Bhadang is also the same stuff that makes fireworks explode, you know those Roman Fountain fireworks people buy for Diwali? They are made of bhadang. In reality, anything that explodes is in fact made of bhadang.
One small spoonful of these seemingly innocent looking puffy rice bits will make your palms sweat and your ears turn red. The worrying part however is that they are so moreish, the spice hits you the same way a bowl of kheema does and rather than screaming and running away in pain in manner of Ashutosh Rana, it makes you want to fill up a whole bowl, and eat it while suffering quietly but smiling inside. can be a very welcome snack during gatherings with guests from India (because let’s face it, UK spicy is baby level spicy for Indians). Never EVER serve this to British people, unless you live within walking distance from a hospital.
Pathal Pohe Chivda/The crispy, yellow chivda
Chivda, the most versatile of all snacks, a step up from crisps. I can see why so many people sit around eating fried things because this chivda is incredibly addictive. I have never been able to find the perfect pathal pohe chivda in the UK, it’s either too sweet or it just doesn’t have the same taste. The best bit about this chivda is the crispy coconut bits but for some reason there is never enough of them. Who ok’d that? Who woke up one day and said “I’m going to make pathal pohe chivda BUT I’m going to make sure I put 0.000000005% of coconut bits in it”? I suppose some people genuinely just want to watch the world burn. I also have to confess that I am the type of person who opens a fresh bag of this chivda and picks out the coconut bits before anybody else can enjoy them. Life is a race unfortunately, and I am winning. In my personal opinion this chivda is good for gatherings but it’s also one of my favourites so I prefer to hide it in the back of the snack drawer so it can be appreciated only by those who can respect it. Yes that means only me.
Matar Karanji
The crunch is strong with this one. I know some people are a bit iffy about peas, but let’s clarify that those people are also missing out on these which is totally fine by me. One less person to battle with. Matar karanjis are more of a meaty type of snack, a Maharashtrian alternative to those obese potato samosas. The great thing about these karanjis is that they make you feel as if you are being healthy. Technically they are healthy...strictly speaking they are filled with green vegetables and fried so they have the best of both worlds. Matar karanjis are PERFECT for aunty gatherings because they even appeal to the gym aunty so it’s always good to have a frozen emergency stash of these on standby. My aai did attempt to teach me to make these but unfortunately for me mine didn’t turn out looking like crispy golden dumplings…they just looked like lumpy balls with peas poking out of them. Lesson to self – keep practising. Although, my crap cooking skills have never stopped me from setting alarms for 1 am to creep to the kitchen and have an early morning snack of karanjis and ketchup before anybody has a chance to eat anymore.
Kande Pohe
I bet you all £5 each that you won’t be able to finish this paragraph without humming Avadhoot Gupte’s “Kande Pohe”. I read somewhere that one serving of this is roughly 280 calories…firstly, this is a lie unless one serving is a small handful of the stuff. If you have no willpower to stop eating then one serving is at least three bowls full so I will let you do the maths on the number of calories that really is. I insist to aai that she makes industrial quantities of kande pohe because I will genuinely eat it at any point in the day for weeks on end. It is however, nothing without adequate squeezes of lemon juice and a total overload on coconut sprinkled on top. I only found out recently that this is typically served during “the talk” between parents of two people who are potentially getting married (I mean, I already planned to have this served at my actual wedding). What this basically means is that it is an excuse for Fat Kid to exercise his right to eat the whole serving of kande pohe without worrying about anything. Except in this situation, Fat Kid is actual potential husband.
Bakarwadi
There would be no point discussing Maharashtrian snacks if there was no mention of bakarwadi. These are Maharashtrians’ answer to swiss rolls, (except they aren’t made of cake and taste infinitely better). I never come back from India without bags of bakarwadis from that Chitale Bakarwadi store in Pune. They can be enjoyed with a cup of sweet tea (minimum serving is ten), or they can be enjoyed as a meal (serving of twenty). Unfortunately for me I have a younger brother. Brothers are like bottomless pits, they just don’t stop eating and for some reason he seems to like eating everything I like eating, including bakarwadis. If I open a fresh bag and eat one, I’ll blink twice and somehow nine more have gone missing; so I make a point to hide them around the house. Don’t be surprised to find my attic full of bakarwadis or a bag under the floorboards somewhere because it’s the only way I can stop him from hoovering up my private stash. They never disappoint and the only problem with them is that everybody else likes them too.
Sabudana Vada
Sabudana vade are yet another Maharashtrian snack that has caused genuine physical fights between my brother and I. I’m fiercely protective over these squishy squashy circles made of squishy bouncy balls; and nothing can tear them apart from me.
Whenever sabudana vade are served I transform into the king of fat kids and will literally charge at a plate of them if I see them lurking anywhere. The only worrying part is how they can make me full for days on end. Just two of these deep-fried treats can make me feel like I have swallowed a bowling ball and I only begin to feel better after limiting myself to green tea for the rest of the day. The best time to have these I suppose is if you plan on drinking copious amounts of alcohol shortly after (because they are so heavy that they can soak up anything). My aaji makes the best sabudana vade known to man, with the perfect ratio of outward crispiness to inside squishiness, hopefully one day she shares her secret recipe and I can make the world a better place with them.
Now I know I have missed out tonnes of other Maharashtrian snacks, but there are so many out there that this blog would probably be a book the size of a dictionary rather than a few pages of light reading if I included all of them. I am yet to find any type of starter or snack that can actually rival any of these that I have mentioned. Let’s not pretend we don’t all love a good plate of sizzling meat served with green chutney of course, but even food like chilli paneer, tandoori chicken and the legendary seekh kebab don’t measure up to an innocent helping of pathal pohe chivda or the familiar crunch of a bakarwadi.
Living in the UK it is pretty natural for people here to keep a bowl of salt and vinegar crisps and a pathetic helping of peanuts on the table during gatherings rather than anything remotely filling. So on that basis I am thankful every day that I am not in that position. However I must confess that having good Maharashtrian snacks in the house keep me on edge, there is always an impending threat of a hungry sibling or potentially beast-like guest who will devour anything edible placed in front of them; so it is up to me to protect my secret supplies of snacks, ESPECIALLY my bags of Chitale bakarwadis. In fact, I think I’ll go and check on them right now.
**Note to potential hosts of upcoming house gatherings – buy a Playstation 4 as well as some form of gun shooting game and I promise you Fat Kid won’t even be thinking about devouring any food. If that fails and he eats the whole table, take revenge and make sure his parents enrol him in Kumon. You are welcome.
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