Sweet for the milk and honey of Indian desserts

Mehru Jaffer, Contributor, Jakarta

A meal of just curry and rice will remain unconsummated unless topped off with some mithai as dessert.

It is the belief of all Indians that offering as many mithai, or sweetmeats, as possible to the gods is a sure ticket to heaven. Ancient scriptures describe mithai as the food of the gods. The core of the sea of nectar is made up, it is said, of honey, milk, clarified butter, sugar and water, the five ingredients that are intrinsic to all Indian sweets. They are blended together with vegetables, aromatic spices, dried fruit and the essence from plants like basil and rose petals to create a vast variety of delicacies not found anywhere else in the world.

There are also those who suspect that Indians first started to cook sweets in competition with the gods. After ancient hunters learned to differentiate between poisonous plants and sweet fruit like apples and bananas they tried to imitate the sweetness of nature in their own food. And the first morsel was always offered to the gods before mortals shared the sweets with each other in a symbolic gesture of love, peace and brotherhood.

The act of eating sweets is also said to be one that heralds good tidings. Vishnu, the preserver of the world, and his consort Laxmi dwell in the celestial waters of the ocean of milk and prefer an offering of rice cooked in milk. While Ganesh, the portly elephant god of auspicious beginnings, is crazy about ladoos, made from grains and lentils.

Folklore has it that lord Krishna spent his entire childhood frolicking with pretty milkmaids in the sylvan surroundings of central India and stole butter which his mother tirelessly churned from fresh milk. The area is still famous for its miniature pyramid-like patties deep fried in butter.

Indians are happy to consume sweets at the drop of a hat, actually. There is a sweet for every occasion. Sweets are distributed at birth, at funerals, during festivals and to the sick and healthy. Mithai are meant not just to pamper a sweet tooth, but are considered a great source of nutrition if eaten in the right proportion.

India's first mithai dates back to Vedic times, thousands of years before the birth of Christ, when whole wheat flour was cooked in milk and honey and topped with dried fruit and nuts. At some stage, the hunters also realized that cows were far more useful to them alive and stopped eating beef. Instead they found ways to increase the shelf life of milk products like yogurt, cream and cheese by cooking the same ingredients in different ways until all the moisture evaporated.

As India transformed into a center of peoples and cultures from around the world, its sweets too became more varied. The Arabs and Persians brought with them delicious varieties of halva, eaten especially during the winter. Made from cereals, flours and lots of butter, milk and nuts, sweets were decorated with sheets of beaten silver or gold with the belief that the consumption of just the right amount of precious metals was good for the respiratory system.

Modern culinary experts have probably lost count of the variety of mithai that exist around the Indian subcontinent. But in Jakarta itself it is possible to buy an assortment of at least 100 different kinds of mithai, some of them delivered to your doorstep.

Anuradha Ajwani calls dessert the most satisfying part of an Indian meal. Ajwani is one of the most sought after confectioners in town, able to make hundreds of rossogolla, spongy cheese balls or brown dumplings swimming in syrup appear at the flick of a finger. Spreading so much sweetness around is counted by Ajwani as one of her greatest joys in life.

Although the list of sweets is endless, nothing is said to compare with the rossogolla and its even more caloried cousin, the rasmalai. While the rossogolla lies in sugar water, rasmalai is soaked in a syrup made from heavy cream and sugar. It is difficult to say which one of them tastes better.

All Indian restaurants in the city offer an assortment of sweets, with Haveli being famous for its jalebi, or batter squeezed into spiraled circles in hot oil, fried until they are the color of molten gold and immediately transferred to a waiting bowl of cold syrup.