The sweet struggle

My mother was undaunted by culinary failures. I plan to follow suit.

I speak from experience when I say that cooking Indian sweets can be challenging. It takes not only a lot of labour, time, and patience but also lady luck to cook sweets well. Even after following the best of recipes to a ‘t’, experiments go wrong. It was my mother’s experiments that taught me more than those of mine.

Every festive season, my mother would be eager to cook sweets. Mysore Pak is a sweet cooked with very basic ingredients such as besan, ghee, and sugar. The ingredients and the steps to follow look deceptively simple; arriving at that golden square piece that melts in your mouth is a herculean task.

It’s more the timing of plating the slurry that decides the consistency of Mysore Pak than the ingredients. If you plate it too early, it becomes gooey and sticks to your teeth. You plate it a little late, it becomes rock solid. Once it became so hard that my mother couldn’t break it into pieces and my late father suggested she serve a hammer with the sweet to help us savour it. As nobody was interested in risking their teeth, she simply powdered the Mysore Pak and used it in sambhar instead of jaggery!

After I got married, I tried cooking a couple of sweets myself, with results similar to my mother’s. After getting my fingers burnt —sometimes literally and more often metaphorically — I refrained from cooking sweets. After a long break, I thought of making holige, which firmly drove the nail in the coffin. The holige reminded me of my late father’s request for a pair of scissors to cut through the hard outer rim of Maida to get to the tasty sweet in the centre. As a child, I would wonder how my mother could smile at her culinary failures and my father’s criticisms. I took my own failures far too seriously and swore never to cook any sweets after the holige disaster.

Recently, I visited my mother with my three children. She had prepared Mysore Pak for us. I couldn’t wait to taste the sweet. I wondered how it would taste coming from a cook with three decades of experience. She offered her labour of love straight out of the tray on which it was plated. The colour looked good—a perfect golden brown. As I tried to break away a piece, it was reluctant to part from its neighbours. As I wiggled it more, the Mysore Pak left a trail as if in protest. It was soft and chewy but tasted good. She grinned apologetically, saying she should have simmered it a little longer before plating it.

My mother hasn’t mastered the skill yet, and she was willing to experiment. I was enchanted by her unwavering enthusiasm. I realised that she was not cooking to impress anybody. She was on her own voyage, and the rocks, hammers, and scissors could not stop her from experimenting.

I may just cook something sweet this Diwali!