Rampur, UTTAR PRADESH :
The halwa sold today is not the halwa of my childhood. It has been revised, adapted, diminished, like so many sweetmeats of times past.
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My childhood winters could not be considered complete without Rampur halwa sohan from the shop of Amanat Bhai. The halwa used to come in a crimson and gold box with, appropriately enough, the words “mausam e sarma ka tohfa”, meaning the gift of winters, written across it.
Like mutable memories, the halwa sohan of Rampur too has changed. For one, the “gift of winters” is now available throughs the year. For another, it no longer tastes the same. The texture used to be finer in my childhood, each piece coalescing with the barely visible ghee, leaving behind not a smidge of aftertaste. The halwa today has a thick, grainy texture. It is crumblier and instead of the old red-brown, it is of a darker brown hue with a sheen of glistening ghee.
This confounding degeneration led me to Amanat Bhai ki laal dukaan in Rampur’s ancient Nasrullah Khan bazar. Maybe they could give a ready explanation for the decline. The shop is not hard to find. Its rouge walls, which gave rise to the vivid name, distinguishes it from the other stores outside the qilla.
Haris Raza, the grandson of Amanat Bhai who runs the shop, informs me that it dates to the time of Nawab Raza Ali Khan (1930-1949). Its founder Amanat ulla Khan learned the art of making halwa sohan from his father and used to prepare it, along with gulqand (a rose petal sweet), for Nawab Raza. There are now two Amanat Bhai shops, each run by a different branch of the old maestro’s family, each claiming to possess the genuine recipe.
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At Rs 600 a kilogram, halwa sohan today is not hard on the pocket of the ordinary man. I believe it is to achieve this economy that the ingredients and their proportions have been altered. Where the older recipe used genuine ghee, the newer one employs ghee substitutes, possibly contributing to the aftertaste.
Haris says he makes special halwa sohan for members of the royal family with large quantities of pure ghee. But even this possesses the same grainy and burnt dark brown look as the everyday one. There is also an overpowering taste of caramel to it. Haris lays the blame on the evolving palate: customers’ preferences have changed. He nods when I describe the halwa sohan of my childhood. “Khaane pe ghee ki pichkaari nikalti thi,” he exclaimed. When you ate it, ghee would squirt in the mouth.
We go up the rough steps to the kitchen above the shop. Haris shows me pictures of celebrity chef Kunal Kapur stirring halwa in a large kadhai and asks if I have watched the episode of The Royal Palate in which the chef visited his shop. I tell him I have, but that is not how I know of the shop. My association with it goes back far longer. He smiles and decides to call me Appi (elder sister). He says he was compelled to give up his fledgling career as a real estate agent and take over the family business in 2016 after his father’s sudden death. It was important for him to continue the family tradition.
As I watch the cooks working furiously over large steaming kadhais, Haris enlightens me on the finer points of halwa-making. The process is as lengthy as it is laborious. It all starts with the making of samnak or wheat germ. The grains are first sifted for broken or blackened seeds and then soaked in water for three days. Great care must be taken at this stage. When the sprouts are about an inch long, they are dried and then ground to a flour. Next the flour is dissolved in just enough milk to make a thick paste. The rest of the milk is added in splashes while sautéing.
The halwa gets its sweet caramel flavour and dark red-brown colour from being sautéd in a kadhai for a long time. According to Haris, the normal cooking in the past was six hours, but now they cook it for nine hours because customers – including the erstwhile royal family – prefer a darker colour. Once cooked, the halwa is spread on trays, sprinkled with pistachio juliennes, and cut into squares. Each chewy soft square with its sweet and caramel taste is still delectable.
Haris says it takes a halwai years of practice to get everything right, from the intensity of the sauté to the timing of when to add the ingredients. At precisely the right time, a little alum must be tossed in to curdle the milk and effect a daana, or grainy texture, in the halwa. Just one error can make the difference between adequate and delicious. Most halwais, Haris explains, make the mistake of adding all the milk with the flour.
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