We cannot abandon wheat from the menu. The protein provided by this and other ingredients is very essential. Flour preparations only give the best results. Whole meal wheat flour if available can be utilised in any manner to suit the taste! This cannot remain an insoluble problem.
PseudoMorekali
Salted flour pastry is called ‘MorekaW in South India. The Tamilian’s tongue will water even at the mention of this name! There are two categories of this Morekali. The pseudo, and the real. The first takes birth in the stinginess of the miserly kitchen. In this wheat, buttermilk and oil, main features endearing this preparation will be absent. Even the smell of ghee will not be tolerated! Mustard and red chillies will lovingly pock-mark this paste. Pure undiluted essential water cooking! Asafoetida will saturate this stuff and even asphyxiate the unwary! Silvery white flour ground out of machine rice will only be used. One will get only diarrhoea and dyspepsia out of this wonderful morekali.
The real Morekali
The real Morekali is nice to prepare and nicer still to eat. Supposing North India learns to prepare this? We are afraid, they may discard the more laborious chappaty and take to this only. This is something like the Halva. Only salt is mixed instead of the sweetening sugar. To the toothless this comes as a blessing. Wheat need not be given up. You will hardly know that you are eating. In fact there is no eating. It is simply a question of swallowing. No one will be the wiser as to how it has vanished and how much. The diner may not even be inclined to open his eyes. The process will be so calm and something like an eating lullaby!
Those who have read these lines, would by now be on the high-pitch to prepare and swallow it straight away even from the frying pan! They shall not be tantalised much longer. Here is the short cut to this pastry. We cannot give grammes and pounds arithmetics to mix the ingredients. The cooking sense must guide. Set apart the required quantity of whole-meal wheat flour. Pour this wheat flour into fairly thick buttermilk, slightly sour. Add enough salt to give taste and mix the entire thing by hand well, without leaving clots.
Then add more butter, milk mixing all the time, until this paste becomes a homogeneous thick liquid capable of being poured thick from vessel to vessel. On the even must be a steel hollow pot, or vessel coated with tin. Pour in it a liberal necessary quantity of pure gingely oil. If you anxiously insist you can put some mustrad. Put one or two spoons of whitened black gram dhal. Heat the whole till the white dhal become brown. Add some coriander leaves nicely cut into pieces. In South India people use karukapilai. Those to whom the hot taste is indispensable, can add half a spoon of broken black pepper. Now the flour-better-milk paste is poured into the oily Chatti. Keep the oven midly going and go on turning the paste with a flat laddie till the liquid is almost dried up and the remainder assumes a slushy-paste-like condition.
Get down the pot from the oven. Spread good ghee on a plate. Remove the paste from the hot pot into the ghee besmeared plate. Flatten out to fill the plate. Spread more ghee on top and allow the whole thing to cool. Use flat spoons to make divisions on the paste. Morekali is now ready for eating or swallowing after a nice turn round the tongue. The good lady of the house must be beware. It may so happen that only the pot may reamain for her! So glibly will the contents vanish. As days pass the skeleton chest of the eater will vanish under a veil of growing muscle. No necessity to eat belly full. Without acquiring a pot-belly, good healthy tissues could be built up with this salt Halval
The poor can substitute ghee by gingely oil and use watery buttermilk instead of thick one.
Parota
The wheat flour usually takes on another incarnation. We have got big ‘Bhavans’ and Restaurants. Here ordinary food-stuffs will take on curious names for the mere change of colour or paste. The servers will cry out in thundering voice Parota! The high sound of this stuff need not cause tribulation. This can be brought to life in our own kitchens.
Mix whole-meal wheat flour with a little salt and milk or water and knead into a paste with butter or ghee mixed. Make them into small balls. Flatten the ball as for chappatiy. Smear ghee again over the flat surface. Fold fourfold. Flatten again. Put it on the hot frying pan. Smear ghee all round the chappatiy. When fried brown on both sides, take it down. This is the blessed ‘Parota!’ Eat this with jaggery powder or a vegetable stew. One word of caution. Don’t be too much in a hurry to taste. The hot stuff may burn the tougue!
Side dish
This is not as easily digestible as the unroasted unfried chappatiy. Instead of ghee, good gingely oil could be used for everything except to coat the flattened wheat paste. That which is easily digestible and suitable even for a weak stomach and constipated colon, is the ‘chappatiy’ or the ‘phulka’.
Somehow the South Indian lady is afraid of chappatiy business. Perhaps she is unaccustomed for this labour. She always grumbles when this point is mooted. She has to search for the wooden roller, a plank, and two ovens. She finds it easier to cook rice with any number of side dishes. North of the Deccan reverse is the case.
They can not understand a meal without chappatiy. A Karnatakan cannot conceive of his meal without the all powerful Ragi Ball. The hotel-wala has to prepare in North Indian hundreds of these each time to feed his guests. It is a common sight to see these gentlemen, paying guests, take vengeance on the proprietor by consuming a dozen, two dozens or more of these chappaties. They easily prepare. It is best to copy their system in other households in India.
Chappati
Let us depict this scene of chappaties in manufacture. This happened to be in Lucknow. Under temporary canvass hangers, miscalled tents, were squatting two ‘Maharajas’. Not Maharajas! Cooks are termed ‘Maharaj’ in North India. Sometimes they sail under the name of ‘Pandit’. All around them at some distances were hungry souls. You could trace in that crowd, the Tamilian, the Malayalee, the Andhra and others. Two firewood ovens were burning. Over each was covered a brass pot, its convex surface facing up. On a plate was the bazaar wheat flour heaped up. Part of it was pasty.
One ‘Maharaj’ scooped small balls out of it. With his hands he flattened each and put that on the first heated pot. Continued his flattening process. At the same time when the contacted surface became browned up, removed it to the other heated vessel with the other sids in contact. The other Maharaj shifted it when ready to the live charcoal down below near the oven. Roasted both sides. The chappatiy bloated its sides. The second maharaj caught it and sent it flying through the air. It fell into the pan of one of the hungry souls. The sky used to get thick with chappathies. Through the air were supplied in quick succession these nice things and the consumers went on munching and swallowing! They could not of course complain in Lucknow, the sand coating received by the chappaties.
Our South Indian sisters, if they just happened to witness this occurrence, they would consider the chappaty supply no special trouble. It would become just fun; as the other complicated menus they are so expert in preparing!