56/ 100 Dessert Heaven Dog

We eat a huge amount of Indian food here at home. Mostly we cook it ourselves in the form of a curry or lentil dhal but even when we go out for dinner we will often choose an Indian restaurant. I think that like most British people we consider ourselves to have a good knowledge of Indian food, yet on every trip to India I have eaten things I have never even heard of before. Even the things I have eaten here are served in a completely different way.

I absolutely love trying new food (as long as it isn’t seafood or insects, although we did accidentally eat some bugs in Mexico) but sometimes I get cold feet when I can’t figure out what exactly it is we are eating or, more often, how you actually eat it. Luckily for us the people of India are always more than happy to lend a hand and are always very proud of their food, as they really should be.

Having just eaten some red-hot fritters, with even redder and hotter spicy sauce, we were in need of something cool and sweet to reset our mouths. At first we played it safe and bought some bananas (nothing can be surprising about a banana, except for the hiked-up tourist price) but they didn’t really hit the spot. Walking around the market I stopped to make the photograph above and became curious as to what the dog was finding so tasty in the crate that served as the bin for that food stall.

It turned out that we had inadvertently discovered something quite rare and very seasonal – Makhan Malaiyo.

A little apprehensive at first, because it looked like a large bowl of yellow whipped cream and I didn’t fancy getting E.Coli so close to the end of the trip, the man in the blue sweater encouraged us to give it a whirl and even guided us through the process of eating it. We discovered why the dogs loved it so much.

Indian cuisine utilises milk like no other. They make an incredible array of foods with it from sweets to cheese to desserts like Makhan Malaiyo. I found a recipe in the Hindustan Times that will give you an idea of the fascinating process involved:

“A mixture of milk and cream is simmered. It is left in the open to cool down and for dew to fall into it. In the wee hours of the morning, this mixture is churned using a mathani (a traditional wooden churner). The jhaag (froth) that appears is collected, mixed with kesar and dry fruits. It’s served with karara (coarsely powdered sugar) and khurchan. This entire process takes around six to seven hours.” Dew is vital to the process. According to Kumar, it’s the dew that creates the froth and that’s one of the main reasons why it is sold in winter. Malaiyo milk — saffron-flavoured sweet milk left behind in the vessel after the Malaiyo has been taken out — is also served in Varanasi.”

Apparently it’s all about the dew. Even the jumper guy said it had moisture from the sky in it but, at the time, I didn’t really understand him.

As they say in the recipe, once we had finished our little disposable clay pots of this gorgeous froth the man in the jumper told us to hand them back to the folk who had made the dessert whereupon they filled each of our cups (khulads) with a ladle-full of the same mixture, only in an un-frothed state. You were supposed to rinse all the froth and spices from around the cup and drink the milk however we hadn’t left even a trace of froth so we just drank it.

I can’t really explain exactly why it was so nice. I think it was the subtlety of the spices, the gentle sweetness and the intense creaminess from the buffalo milk that they had used. Suffice to say we went back every night we were in Varanasi and it will be the first place I go to when we return next winter.