Feast while you fast
By Sayoni Sinha
It is that time of the month when people give up on their favourite dishes. But despite restrictions, fasting or upwaas food doesn’t need to be boring and unhealthy.
Eighty-four-year-old Kamalini Raja recalls the day her cousin was asked to have ‘falahar’ for the rest of her life. “Everyone in the family used to feel sorry for her and tried to substitute the regular ingredients with ‘upwaas’ items,” she says. But the rigour of the diet sunk in when she herself tried to practice it for seven years, from 1978. “I realised that it is possible to substitute most items. For example, I started having chapattis made of two parts of amarnath and one part of arrowroot flour or samvat rice (barnyard millet), instead of rice. So I decided to publish the recipes in 1989,” adds Raja whose book Faraali Rajbhog has gone for a fifth reprint recently.
While non-vegetarian food is not factored into the diet at all, cultivated grain, including rice and wheat in all forms, maize, pulses and lentils, root vegetables such as radish, onion and garlic, salt other than rock salt, spices such as asafoetida, red chillies, fenugreek seeds, turmeric, mustard seeds also don’t find a place. “It also excludes other hot or warming ingredients such as jaggery, sesame, betel leaves and vegetable oil. Even leftovers from a prior meal are believed to be either tamasic (hot) and not to be consumed on the day of a fast,” says Rushina Munshaw Ghildiyal, owner at APB Cook Studio, who remembers looking forward to her grandmother’s fasting days when she would sit away from the rest of the family for her meals. “We were not aware of the religious connotations then and we would just wait for her to be done, in order to finish the leftovers. There were a host of ‘treats’ we grew to love and look forward to — from the textured sabudana khichdi where soft globules of sago, steamcooked to perfection with chunks of savoury potato to the delicious morio, a dish made from granular flour, cooked into a porridge with sour buttermilk, potatoes and peanuts and spiked with a bite of green chillies. It retains its grainy texture on cooking and the potatoes absorb the spiciness of the chillies most deliciously,” she adds.
Zing it up
Earlier this month, Ghildiyal teamed up with JW Marriott Sahar for a special collaboration with ingredients such as barnyard millet, sago, amarnath, and water chestnut among many others as a part of their Shravan festival. The experimental-yet-traditional fasting menu included farali pattice, kokum lassi, kesar aam panna, samo rice kheer, some of which were crafted from her childhood memories. “I remember coming home from school and having the most delicious meal of puri, aloo, kadhi and rice. The upvaas meal that I recall was a full thali. Kadhi was thickened with shingare ka atta (water chestnuts) while the puris would be made from rajgira flour. Instead of rice, we would have samvat ke chaawal or parsai ke chaawal. There would also be a khandvi made from shingare ka atta while dessert would be a sweet potato kheer,” she says.
While every region in Maharashtra has its own interpretation of upvaas meals, for Smita Deo, author of Karwar to Kolhapur via Mumbai, it means having ingredients that are not locally available, such as wheat. “I come from a Saraswat family in Karwar where we have puris made with wheat and a simple aloo ki subzi during shravan,” she says. As a child, she would feast upon rava dhodak, a sweet spicy crisp roti made from semolina and a kasai, a simple warm concoction made by boiling coriander seeds, cumin seeds and fennel seeds with a little sugar and milk. “There is a very famous saying in Marathi ‘Ekadashi la duppat khashi’, which means that when you fast, you tend to eat more. I substitute potatoes with sweet potato and use rajgira instead of sabudana for my thalipeeth. I replace peanut curry, which is calorie-dense with a simple kadi of cucumber and yogurt.”
It is that time of the month when people give up on their favourite dishes. But despite restrictions, fasting or upwaas food doesn’t need to be boring and unhealthy.
Eighty-four-year-old Kamalini Raja recalls the day her cousin was asked to have ‘falahar’ for the rest of her life. “Everyone in the family used to feel sorry for her and tried to substitute the regular ingredients with ‘upwaas’ items,” she says. But the rigour of the diet sunk in when she herself tried to practice it for seven years, from 1978. “I realised that it is possible to substitute most items. For example, I started having chapattis made of two parts of amarnath and one part of arrowroot flour or samvat rice (barnyard millet), instead of rice. So I decided to publish the recipes in 1989,” adds Raja whose book Faraali Rajbhog has gone for a fifth reprint recently.
While researching, Raja got in touch with the Indian Institute of Nutrition and listed the nutritional values of the recipes. “Fasting doesn’t mean you deprive your body of nutrients. It is about releasing the accumulated toxins in the body,” she says, adding that the most prevalent method of fasting is that of ‘phal aahar’. However, with time, this has grown to encompass in a larger sense all foods not raised with a plow or cultivated in contrast to “anna” or cultivated foods. What is “allowed” during a fast and what is not is mostly a question of perspective and interpretation,” she adds.
While non-vegetarian food is not factored into the diet at all, cultivated grain, including rice and wheat in all forms, maize, pulses and lentils, root vegetables such as radish, onion and garlic, salt other than rock salt, spices such as asafoetida, red chillies, fenugreek seeds, turmeric, mustard seeds also don’t find a place. “It also excludes other hot or warming ingredients such as jaggery, sesame, betel leaves and vegetable oil. Even leftovers from a prior meal are believed to be either tamasic (hot) and not to be consumed on the day of a fast,” says Rushina Munshaw Ghildiyal, owner at APB Cook Studio, who remembers looking forward to her grandmother’s fasting days when she would sit away from the rest of the family for her meals. “We were not aware of the religious connotations then and we would just wait for her to be done, in order to finish the leftovers. There were a host of ‘treats’ we grew to love and look forward to — from the textured sabudana khichdi where soft globules of sago, steamcooked to perfection with chunks of savoury potato to the delicious morio, a dish made from granular flour, cooked into a porridge with sour buttermilk, potatoes and peanuts and spiked with a bite of green chillies. It retains its grainy texture on cooking and the potatoes absorb the spiciness of the chillies most deliciously,” she adds.
Zing it up
Earlier this month, Ghildiyal teamed up with JW Marriott Sahar for a special collaboration with ingredients such as barnyard millet, sago, amarnath, and water chestnut among many others as a part of their Shravan festival. The experimental-yet-traditional fasting menu included farali pattice, kokum lassi, kesar aam panna, samo rice kheer, some of which were crafted from her childhood memories. “I remember coming home from school and having the most delicious meal of puri, aloo, kadhi and rice. The upvaas meal that I recall was a full thali. Kadhi was thickened with shingare ka atta (water chestnuts) while the puris would be made from rajgira flour. Instead of rice, we would have samvat ke chaawal or parsai ke chaawal. There would also be a khandvi made from shingare ka atta while dessert would be a sweet potato kheer,” she says.
While every region in Maharashtra has its own interpretation of upvaas meals, for Smita Deo, author of Karwar to Kolhapur via Mumbai, it means having ingredients that are not locally available, such as wheat. “I come from a Saraswat family in Karwar where we have puris made with wheat and a simple aloo ki subzi during shravan,” she says. As a child, she would feast upon rava dhodak, a sweet spicy crisp roti made from semolina and a kasai, a simple warm concoction made by boiling coriander seeds, cumin seeds and fennel seeds with a little sugar and milk. “There is a very famous saying in Marathi ‘Ekadashi la duppat khashi’, which means that when you fast, you tend to eat more. I substitute potatoes with sweet potato and use rajgira instead of sabudana for my thalipeeth. I replace peanut curry, which is calorie-dense with a simple kadi of cucumber and yogurt.”
