What the boys ate: The gastronomy of growing up in Delhi
This food was not glamorous, and almost always eaten standing up. This was not food for indulgence, but food for function. What the boys ate was simple: rajma chawal from a stall near Shankar Market, bread pakoras from Kamla Nagar, coffee at the Indian Coffee House, and on special occasions, the hot chocolate fudge at Nirula's. No dish cost more than Rs 100 and no transaction took longer than two minutes. Yet the memory of the taste that lasted decades.
Back in school, the tiffin was a socioeconomic document disguised as Tupperware plastic box. One boy had a cold, hard aloo ka parantha. Another had a vegetable sandwich in a Ziploc pouch. The rich kid had foil-wrapped cheese toast. And then there was the boy with aloo-poori, the food that everyone secretly loved and publicly hated. Because food, like masculinity, was hierarchical. While some meals conferred status, others invited ridicule.
There was also the samosa. Not samosa in general but the school canteen samosa. It was misshapen, rarely hot, and left an oil stain on the school uniform that spread faster than the news of the cancelled maths class. Its brownish, blistered skin crackled when we bit into it, revealing a mash of aloo and green chilli, the occasional raisin, and a rogue ajwain. But, no one complained. The samosa did not taste particularly fancy, but still felt like an achievement, typifying a quiet rebellion against the conformity of the home-cooked tiffin.
Beyond the school, the food outside coaching centres formed its culinary micro-climate, whether it was FIITJEE in Kalu Sarai or VMC in Pitampura. Amidst back-breaking routines of juggling the delicacies of Irodov and RD Sharma, there was the veg cutlet sandwich passed off as an artisanal aloo-tikki burger, and the kulfi, which was served on sticks that bent if you did not consume it fast enough. The vendors who stood outside with their wooden carts knew their market well – boys with cavernous hunger, shallow pockets, and iron constitutions. Sanitation was a rumour. But no one cared. These were not merely meals, but pit stops. It was food that made you feel like you were surviving something important.
Every neighbourhood in Delhi had its unofficial cricket ground – a public park with an uneven wicket and at least one interruption by a jogging uncle. After the match, the boys, some in whites and others in yesterday's T-shirts, would congregate around the juice stall. Not to drink protein shakes or carrot-beet combinations. But the half-sweetened mosambi juice in plastic cups that always tasted faintly of iron. As an accompaniment, there was bhel puri – the crunchy, chaotic mix of murmura, peanuts, chopped onions, green chilli, and a dash of nimbu squeezed from a rusted squeezer. It came wrapped in newspaper cones, always carrying the faint smell of old ink and Delhi's crime stories. One bite and our mouths lit up with joy rarely found in gourmet eateries.
In college, food was laughter, rivalry, heartbreak, and the embarrassment of a female crush walking by just as you slurped down the redolent upma at Triveni Kala Sangam. Ordering food for her was chivalry and sharing a brownie from Wenger's meant something special. Middle-class Delhi boys, awkward in communication, relied on food as their Meghdootam. They did not write her a poem, but bought her golgappas from Bengali Market, without her having to ask.
The boys of Delhi did not grow up on fancy paneer tikkas or the (depressingly) ubiquitous soya chaap. They grew up on chowmein. You would be hard-pressed not to find it at every street corner. And mind you, this was no hakka or schezwan. It was the old-school Indian variety: soy-heavy (poured from a repurposed Bisleri bottle), oversalted (to a default), served in flimsy plates, and stirred in blackened woks. You asked for it to be extra spicy and with more of that red, fiery ketchup, because red signalled the richness of food. The hissing steam, the clang of the ladle, tossing of the noodles, and the sprinkle of chopped coriander on top – all of it added to the experience. And, trust me, it was some experience.
Eating was not merely an afterthought but an event. The boys would pool money and even run errands for the vendor, just to get a discount. Delhi itself seemed to hum with food. The air smelled of frying oil, roasting chana, the sizzle of tadka in a kadhai, the smell of melting butter, the floral whiff of agarbatti from street temples, pressure cookers hissing in the background, kulfi wallahs ringing their bells, and the distant puk-puk of banta bottle tops being popped open.
Today, many of these food habits and those food spots are gone. The juice stalls have been replaced by Blue Tokai. The chowmein corners have given way to momo stands and the Rs 10 samosa is now Rs 130 with peri-peri sauce. The boys now eat not at Chaina Ram Halwai or Sitaram Diwan Chand, but at joints with Instagrammable lighting or (worse) alone in their office cubicles.
That is fine; change is the only constant. But in some corner of the city, some schoolboy still stands, licking chutney off his thumb, and stuffing a samosa into his blazer pocket to eat later in secret. That, I hope, never changes.
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Hindustan Times
2 days ago
- Hindustan Times
Review: From the King's Table to Street Food by Pushpesh Pant
Whenever I've heard Pushpesh Pant speak about food, whether in a three-hour Aaj Tak radio episode or from beneath the shade of a tree in Sunder Nursery, I always picture him with a mouthful of gulab jamun, mid-sentence. It's as if he's chewing on metaphor and syrup at the same time, swaad lagaake. This is not a complaint. It's a particular talent of talking as though the act of remembering is indistinguishable from the act of tasting. Every corner in this book is filtered through desire, rumour, and what the body once wanted at 4 PM in 1972. Fasting and feasting in Delhi's Jama Masjid market (Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times) Pant's great trick is that he does not try to prove a thesis (which he admits early on), he makes the reader feel the absences around which his city has always existed. You can feel the smoke of a missing kabab stall, the sweetness of a jalebi you can no longer find, the way someone once said, 'Yeh asli nihari hai' — and how no one says that anymore. 406pp, ₹699; Speaking Tiger This is not history as chronology. It's history as residue. Pant resists the academic impulse to flatten food into a stable 'object of study.' Instead, he treats it like an unreliable narrator which is part witness, part fabulist. He walks the reader through Mughal durbars, refugee kitchens post-Partition, and 1980s buffets in government guest houses with the same tone: curious, never conclusive. It's a tone I find strangely ethical. He does not lie. He simply doesn't pretend to know more than he does. 'Who's to say what is authentic anymore?' is the book's real question. And when the book refuses to solidify meaning makes Pant's writing feel ungovernable by typical non-fiction standards. A lesser writer might have lined up recipes, wrapped them in context, and added footnotes like garnish. Pant gives you traces. He gives you longing. And then he tells you that history, especially food history, is made of exactly that. This is where the book's revisionist quality emerges, not in the overwriting of old narratives, but in the refusal to grant them authority in the first place. From the King's Table to Street Food doesn't 'correct' history. It walks past it. Pant's loyalties are not with the court, the archive, or the textbook. They're with the forgotten halwai. The refugee daughter-in-law who invented a new biryani out of what she had. The rumour that this particular nihari joint used to serve the emperor's cook. All unverifiable. All valid. What's interesting is how political that stance is. Pant doesn't need to say, 'Food is political.' He shows you a city rearranged by displacement, war, plague, economic migration, caste. And he shows it through a single sentence: 'We must also remember that many of the so-called traditions of Delhi's food are hardly older than 175 years.' That's a statement which dismantles the fantasy of some eternal, static culinary identity. It tells you that Delhi, like its food, has been in motion forever. Even the Mughal nostalgia is handled with a wink. Pant clearly respects the imperial kitchens, but he's far more interested in what came after the empire broke. He's interested in the mutability of taste, in the way food adapts to new economies, new arrivals, new needs. In that sense, he's doing something quite radical: shifting the centre of Delhi's food story away from empire and toward entropy. The real protagonist of this book is change. You can see this in how Pant writes about sweets. Ghantewala's sohan halwa is more than just dessert, it's a ghost. It's a way to think about what happens when legacy stops being edible. Pant's nostalgia is forensic. Memory, in this book, is always being poked, disbelieved, laughed at. 'Memory tends to play strange tricks as you grow old and revisit old haunts, remembering them very differently,' he writes. That's the closest thing to a thesis this book can be. That is to say food is a memory device, and memory is unreliable on purpose. Here's what that does, formally. It frees Pant from the burden of being correct. He doesn't need to prove which dish came first, who made it, or where the cardamom was sourced. He needs only to make you believe that someone once cared enough to make it in the first place. And that someone else remembered it differently. The city's foodscape, then, becomes a series of layered misrememberings. It's history told in gossip, grief, appetite, and spice. There's also something about the way Pant treats 'Delhi' as a signifier. The term 'authentic' loses all structural integrity. There is no stable origin. Only imitation, translation, and habit. He quotes generously, from cooks, vendors, family members, friends. 'Who's to say the street food we eat today isn't more honest than what the royals dined on?' he asks. The question is rhetorical, but the provocation is real. What if the greasy paratha on your plate tonight has more to say about Delhi than the feasts of Shah Jahan ever could? Let's pause there. That sentence 'more honest' is doing heavy lifting. What does honesty mean in the context of food? Purity? Origins? Intention? The paratha you eat today in Moolchand isn't less authentic than the one your grandfather ate, it's just a different version of the same desire. Which is perhaps the book's deepest claim: that taste is a theory of history. And when taste changes, so does everything else. To speak of food, Pant reminds us, is also to speak of gaps — of what is no longer eaten, or no longer made the same way. One of the more haunting threads in From the King's Table to Street Food is his unspoken obsession with disappearance. Foodways are how a people remember themselves, and when they vanish, so does a particular version of history. Pant never mourns these losses directly. But he circles them. He writes around vanished eateries the way one speaks about old friends no longer seen. No judgment. Just absence, noted. We get a map with missing neighbourhoods, a route that doubles back on itself. We also get an ethnography of hunger. What people in Delhi craved at different moments in time. What they missed. What they insisted on reinventing. This insistence is key. Delhi's foodscape, as Pant sees it, is not a static inheritance. It's a constant improvisation. He gives the example of how Mughlai cuisine was repurposed by post-Partition Punjabi refugees. What was once slow, courtly, ceremonial became fast, fiery, and practical. Nihari, korma, and qorma changed hands. Changed oils. Changed meanings. The migrants who arrived from Rawalpindi and Lahore had different needs, different tongues. They didn't preserve Mughal recipes, they mutated them. This is culinary history as lived resistance in the kitchen. We then collectively arrive at a conclusion: food as adaptation. Not nostalgia. Not restoration. Not even survival exactly but a kind of semi-conscious synthesis. His prose mirrors this ethic. It lifts phrases from old Urdu poets. It riffs on colonial gazetteers. It quotes hawkers. It also speculates. This can make for an uneven reading experience. There are moments where the digressions pile up. A description of a long-lost kachori leads to a historical aside, which leads to a personal memory, which leads to a speculation about Persian influences and you feel the chapter is more compost than essay. But even this, I'd argue, is the form doing its work. Pant is essentially letting things rot. Break down. Ferment. That's what food does when left alone, and that's what language does when released from a thesis. Still, the absence of critical friction can feel like a missed opportunity. For all its richness, the book rarely addresses power directly. Caste is mentioned only glancingly. Class appears more often, but often as background. And while Pant is certainly aware of these forces, his inclination is to observe, not intervene. This reluctance feels generational, maybe even aesthetic. It seems his eye is trained on continuity, not rupture. But sometimes, I wished he'd push harder and ask who gets to narrate this city's food stories, and who disappears between bites. There is also an irony in the book – Pant is both an insider and an outsider to his own material. He is a trained academic, but he distrusts academia. He is a Delhiwallah, but one who arrived in the city as a student from the hills. His nostalgia is earned, not inherited. And that makes him unique to write this kind of book. Author Pushpesh Pant (Courtesy the publisher) What stays on the tongue long after the meal is over. What stories repeat themselves in different accents. What dishes resurface years later under new names. This, I think, is the radical heart of the book. It's not about preserving Delhi's culinary past. It's about showing how the past lives on in distortion, in mishearing, in new combinations. So what does that make this book? A field guide to edible memory? Perhaps. By the end, you do not know more about Delhi's food history. But you know how it might have felt to eat your way through it. You know how the city might have smelled on a humid day in the 1960s. You know why someone once said the chaat at Bengali Market was 'what love tastes like when it breaks your heart.' You know that history, too, can be eaten and that its aftertaste is often more vivid than the event itself. And maybe that's enough. Or maybe it's everything. Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.
Mint
2 days ago
- Mint
Breaking Stereotypes: From the homes of Punjab to the restaurant menu
It's sad but true that what passes for Punjabi cuisine in many of the restaurants in the National Capital Region (NCR) is a bit of a cliche. You know what to expect even before opening the menu card—some sort of tandoori kebab, dal makhani, garlic naan, a sweet shahi chicken gravy enriched with a paste of nuts. The list is somewhat incongruous with the image that the landscape of Punjab conjures up: lush fields, a wide variety of seasonal produce, community kitchens and slow-cooked meals. There is a disconnect between what is peddled under the monolith of 'Punjabi food" and what is actually cooked in homes across the state. One wonders what led to dishes such as dal makhani, tandoori chicken and butter chicken becoming synonymous with Punjabi cuisine in Delhi. Historian-academic Pushpesh Pant offers the sociological and psychological reasons behind this. 'Partition impoverished people. It made them refugees who didn't have access to individual kitchens. Later, when they became a little more affluent and put roots down in Delhi, they started to enrich and embellish their food," he explains. Some became proprietors of dhabas and what they created was not a mirror image of the dishes from their hometowns but a repertoire to inform people that they were not always impoverished. And those dishes caught on. Over time, instead of supervising the cooking themselves, they got cooks from Nepal, Garhwal and Kumaon to the kitchens. 'They would add large amounts of ghee and later on dalda and palm oil so that they didn't need to watch over the frying of the onions closely. To disguise the grease, they started adding a paste of badaam-pista and called it a shahi gravy," he explains. Later, those who couldn't afford the dry fruit, substituted it with peanuts. But neither were these homestyle recipes nor did they offer any nuance on the various regions of Punjab. After the Partition, people who fled their hometowns and made their way to Delhi or Mukteshwar, where Pant is from, came to be bracketed under the umbrella term of refugees, bared of their identities and cultural markers of the regions of Multan, Sindh and Lahore that they hailed from. 'Where is the food from regional parts of Punjab, which people used to eat? Is it possible to retain the original recipes after 75 years? In such a scenario, it remains to be seen how culinary practices from homes make their way to the mainstream dining scene," he says. In the past year, however, there have been renewed endeavours to showcase familial recipes backed by strong storytelling about the rich history of the region. The initial effort was made in 2018-19 when Reetika Gill started Curry Singh Kitchens as a small-covers restaurant in Gurugram. The trained chef—and daughter of Manjit Gill, one of the most well-respected Indian chefs—served dishes like bharwa tinda, a thin and light homestyle chicken curry and radish greens besides the usual staples. These were dishes that she had grown up with. 'Her alu vadiyan are to die for. Unfortunately, the space for Curry Singh Kitchen had been taken on a lease and was no longer commercially viable after the pandemic. Now you have to visit her home to taste some of these dishes. But her restaurant offered that rare glimpse of Punjab ke gharo ka khana," says Pant. In 2025, that conversation has been taken up once again by a niche set of restaurants such as Ikk Panjab by Rajan and Deepika Sethi of Bright Hospitality, and Kikli—the latest addition to the Capital's dining scene—helmed by chef Amninder Sandhu. Recently, chef Sherry Mehta curated a menu as part of the pop-up, 'Undivided Punjab", at Ishaara in Mumbai. The showcasing of memories from Punjab could be viewed within the larger trend of chefs putting familial recipes on the restaurant table. But for Sandhu, Kikli is not about following any sort of market swing but rather a personal passion project to document knowledge from across Punjab—be it through oral histories or royal records. 'That is the legacy that I want to leave behind," she says. The restaurant, which opened in late July, is set within a restored heritage site in Connaught Place. The ethos of the menu is carried forth in the interiors designed by Ariane Ginwala—mud work and phulkari motifs in the upholstery and a mix of wooden and brass elements run through the space. The idea had been on Sandhu's mind since 2017 while doing pop-ups in Mumbai. This yearning to showcase the warmth of Punjab gained strength while she launched Bawri Goa in 2023 to serve regional heirloom recipes and embarked on other pop-ups in recent years. Born in a Sikh family, Sandhu grew up in Jorhat, Assam. The spirit of Punjab stayed alive within her through the stories and recipes of her mother and grandmother. 'When they would make vadi, for instance, they would put a little blade of grass on it to ward off the evil eye. This is not common knowledge in Punjab even now," she says. In a way, Kikli is an ode to the wisdom and strength of the women of her family. It was during a research trip to different cities of rural Punjab that she picked up on oral histories around food and complex techniques practised within homes even today. Sandhu deepened her travels by speaking to craftspersons about utensils and equipment such as the handmade sarblohdeghs (iron vessels) for slow cooking lentils and the earthen kundas (cooking pot). Some of these have made their way into the Kikli kitchen. She grinds her chutneys such as the imli and tomato one, for instance, in a danda kunda (a stone mortar with wooden pestle). She built a hara inspired by a 120-year-old one at a farmhouse in Dyalpura Bhai Ka, Punjab. Traditionally used for slow cooking lentils and saag over pathiya, or cow dung cakes, this piece of equipment also works as a smoking chamber. The menu steers clear of stereotypical dishes to showcase recipes from different regions like alu vadiyan, pathiya sekiya kukkad, a chicken preparation from Granthgarh village, pani de hath ki roti or rotis made only with water, chibar or wild cucumber, and mungre (rat-tail radish) cooked in kundas. The dal is cooked overnight over a pathiya. This is then tempered with a dollop of white butter or ghee—just the way people have it at home. 'We are not mad to add cream and butter to everyday dishes. Most of the people that I spoke to during my travels were happy eating just dal and roti as long as the produce was organic. The speed at which wheat is ground to make the flour for the roti is important. For Punjabis, the produce, the utensils and the techniques are paramount," she says. Sandhu has tied up with local farmers to curate her seasonal offerings—the restaurant will have two menus every year, one for summer and the other for winter. The organic produce lends an authentic touch to creations such as chapparwale koftey, or bottle gourd koftas with alu bukhara. Sandhu envisions Kikli as a community space where people can share oral testimonies and heritage. 'The restaurant is only the beginning. I will continue travelling back to Punjab, adding to my research and documentation," she says. Ikk Panjab too brings to the table the spirit of pre-Partition Punjab. The restaurants in Connaught Place, Gurugram and Chandigarh have personal roots in Sethi wishing to honour his father. It has been designed as an old Punjabi home with vintage photos and memorabilia to etch a portrait of a well-travelled person, rooted in the ethos of the state. The menu features a mix of well-known and oft-overlooked dishes such as atta chicken from Kotkapura in which the poultry is wrapped in dough and baked for hours. Then there is Ferozpuri macchi, which brings fresh catch from Punjab's rivers to the forefront. Instead of heavy lababdar and kadhai preparations, paneer is featured as a simple bhurji as cooked by families today. Deepika Sethi mentions the linkages between some of the home-cooked dishes and folk culture. The masur dal, which goes into the khatti masar preparation, is an intrinsic part of folklore and songs. 'It is important to bring to the fore the stories of food we have grown up with. It breaks the myth created by older restaurants and dhabas," she adds. One of the signature dishes is matthi chhole, which is an heirloom winter recipe of the Sethis. Rajan's grandmother would use leftover chickpeas or any thick dal to top the matthi. The making of the matthi was also significant as it heralded the change in season. Ikk Panjab has also been created as a community space, where gatherings are held on a regular basis to spotlight literature, music and craft from Punjab. 'At a time when popular culture doesn't truly represent the depth of Punjab, spaces such as these become important," says Sethi.
Time of India
13-06-2025
- Time of India
What the boys ate: The gastronomy of growing up in Delhi
There are two types of food stories in Delhi. The first is about Mughlai gravies, royal khansamahs, and secret spice mixes. The kind you see on the Epic channel narrated by Prof. Pushpesh Pant, or experience on a heritage walk with Ms. Rana Safvi. The second is about what the middle-class boys ate and where. This kind has no place in curated food walks or five-minute reels. It has little to do with heritage and even less with presentation. But it is real. It is grounded. And woven, indelibly, into the muscle memory of an entire generation of Delhi boys. This food was not glamorous, and almost always eaten standing up. This was not food for indulgence, but food for function. What the boys ate was simple: rajma chawal from a stall near Shankar Market, bread pakoras from Kamla Nagar, coffee at the Indian Coffee House, and on special occasions, the hot chocolate fudge at Nirula's. No dish cost more than Rs 100 and no transaction took longer than two minutes. Yet the memory of the taste that lasted decades. Back in school, the tiffin was a socioeconomic document disguised as Tupperware plastic box. One boy had a cold, hard aloo ka parantha. Another had a vegetable sandwich in a Ziploc pouch. The rich kid had foil-wrapped cheese toast. And then there was the boy with aloo-poori, the food that everyone secretly loved and publicly hated. Because food, like masculinity, was hierarchical. While some meals conferred status, others invited ridicule. There was also the samosa. Not samosa in general but the school canteen samosa. It was misshapen, rarely hot, and left an oil stain on the school uniform that spread faster than the news of the cancelled maths class. Its brownish, blistered skin crackled when we bit into it, revealing a mash of aloo and green chilli, the occasional raisin, and a rogue ajwain. But, no one complained. The samosa did not taste particularly fancy, but still felt like an achievement, typifying a quiet rebellion against the conformity of the home-cooked tiffin. Beyond the school, the food outside coaching centres formed its culinary micro-climate, whether it was FIITJEE in Kalu Sarai or VMC in Pitampura. Amidst back-breaking routines of juggling the delicacies of Irodov and RD Sharma, there was the veg cutlet sandwich passed off as an artisanal aloo-tikki burger, and the kulfi, which was served on sticks that bent if you did not consume it fast enough. The vendors who stood outside with their wooden carts knew their market well – boys with cavernous hunger, shallow pockets, and iron constitutions. Sanitation was a rumour. But no one cared. These were not merely meals, but pit stops. It was food that made you feel like you were surviving something important. Every neighbourhood in Delhi had its unofficial cricket ground – a public park with an uneven wicket and at least one interruption by a jogging uncle. After the match, the boys, some in whites and others in yesterday's T-shirts, would congregate around the juice stall. Not to drink protein shakes or carrot-beet combinations. But the half-sweetened mosambi juice in plastic cups that always tasted faintly of iron. As an accompaniment, there was bhel puri – the crunchy, chaotic mix of murmura, peanuts, chopped onions, green chilli, and a dash of nimbu squeezed from a rusted squeezer. It came wrapped in newspaper cones, always carrying the faint smell of old ink and Delhi's crime stories. One bite and our mouths lit up with joy rarely found in gourmet eateries. In college, food was laughter, rivalry, heartbreak, and the embarrassment of a female crush walking by just as you slurped down the redolent upma at Triveni Kala Sangam. Ordering food for her was chivalry and sharing a brownie from Wenger's meant something special. Middle-class Delhi boys, awkward in communication, relied on food as their Meghdootam. They did not write her a poem, but bought her golgappas from Bengali Market, without her having to ask. The boys of Delhi did not grow up on fancy paneer tikkas or the (depressingly) ubiquitous soya chaap. They grew up on chowmein. You would be hard-pressed not to find it at every street corner. And mind you, this was no hakka or schezwan. It was the old-school Indian variety: soy-heavy (poured from a repurposed Bisleri bottle), oversalted (to a default), served in flimsy plates, and stirred in blackened woks. You asked for it to be extra spicy and with more of that red, fiery ketchup, because red signalled the richness of food. The hissing steam, the clang of the ladle, tossing of the noodles, and the sprinkle of chopped coriander on top – all of it added to the experience. And, trust me, it was some experience. Eating was not merely an afterthought but an event. The boys would pool money and even run errands for the vendor, just to get a discount. Delhi itself seemed to hum with food. The air smelled of frying oil, roasting chana, the sizzle of tadka in a kadhai, the smell of melting butter, the floral whiff of agarbatti from street temples, pressure cookers hissing in the background, kulfi wallahs ringing their bells, and the distant puk-puk of banta bottle tops being popped open. Today, many of these food habits and those food spots are gone. The juice stalls have been replaced by Blue Tokai. The chowmein corners have given way to momo stands and the Rs 10 samosa is now Rs 130 with peri-peri sauce. The boys now eat not at Chaina Ram Halwai or Sitaram Diwan Chand, but at joints with Instagrammable lighting or (worse) alone in their office cubicles. That is fine; change is the only constant. But in some corner of the city, some schoolboy still stands, licking chutney off his thumb, and stuffing a samosa into his blazer pocket to eat later in secret. That, I hope, never changes. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
