This is not the first time we talk of food at this blog. But the first time I heard of the bhel puri, I was surprised that my father’s company had a salad named after them.
That was more than twenty years back when my father worked in the Bharath Heavy Electricals Ltd., a thermal power equipment manufacturer of India. In the last twenty years spiced, leaved and chutnied under many different names, this dish took many avatars. It even grew wings (a la chicken wings) and flew West in a H2 visa, married to the Indian Store wallahs. But in its soul, it remained a simple healthy salad, served in a dirty platter with a eversilver spoon in its mouth.
Those days this dish of North Indian origin was exclusive to the cities - any vice, originates in the city. Whenever I visit my cousin in Madras, we go to a specific Pondy Bazaar corner shop in the evenings, to devour this hot and spicy delight. Invariably within a week, one of us would get fever, but that is because of the juice we drink after eating this. Bhel puri itself was a healthy salad.
Eventually, the gastronomic influence of bhel puri reached my home town stomachs. Meals on wheels shops carrying this salad sprouted next to our town police station. The girth of the cops knew no bounds. On any occasion I used to taste bhel puri at those shops, I fell ill. Bhel puri itself was a healthy salad. The water used to wash the plates in which it was served weren’t.
Anyway, growing with bhel puri inside and outside of me, I like it enough to have mastered the art of making a quick meal out of one of its avatars anytime the spirit of my house goes down. As it happened today.
For those of you who are yet to taste this salad, here is a quick recipe.
Get all those items listed in the picture below. If you were me, that would hardly take you a two minute phone call. Only to reach a wrong number and hang up and spend the next thirty to forty minutes to go out and procure.
Now for some tasty tricks of the trade
- If you couldn’t get all of the above items, make sure you could collect (1), (12) and some vegetables (else, it is no more a salad). Alternately, you could also add slices of green mango, oma podi or chillies soaked in butter milk and dried.
- You can use a teaspoon of vegetable oil to jell well the spices and chilly powder to the puffed rice. Haldirams laminar flame fatafut bhel puri dry pre-mix is also available in small, handy combustion chambers (marked 1 in the above picture) with accompanying sweet and spicy chutney (marked 8).
- The apple is a god-mode substitution in place of the absent cucumber by your truly to get the integral solution right. One half of the apple balances the taste on the LHS, when a teaspoon of chilly powder is used in the RHS.
- Potato chips are an afterthought. They can be skipped without loss of generality of the bhel puri taste solution.
After about twenty minutes of patient chop, chop, scrunch, scrunch, snip, pour, tap, tap, atichoo atichoo (15 times - the chilly powder got into my nose), squishhhhhh (blowing my nose) and accompanied expenditure of enough Newton meters of stirring work, the main vessel is filled with the bhel puri. The quantity should fill four, if two were children and one of the other two eats up all of the remaining bhel puri that, in principle, should have been more than enough for both.
How to eat
- Don’t dig your eversilver spoon deep into the bowl. When you bring it out, you will invariably spill precious stuff on to the table. Don’t talk while you eat. And don’t stuff more than you can chew. Anyway, all these rules apply only to your children.
- Take a spoonful and stuff it into your mouth. Keep talking to whoever is eating opposite in the table. Before you finish the morsel in the mouth or the talk, take one more spoonful into the mouth. Chances are, you will bite right at the center the cut chilly that you didn’t notice while picking the second morsel. The immediate effect would be seen in your moist eye.
- The second helping can be augmented with a squish of a lemon.
- The third helping can be served with curd (yogurt), a dahi bhel puri to end a traditional South Indian meal of a north Indian dish.
Cleaning Up
- The cleaning up is a big chore. Have a wife.
- Wait, wait. Have your wife.
- They always help you with their absence.