Dhundhar & Shekhawati · Arid Northwest
Two counters explain the region. The halwai's, where sweets are made to a festival calendar and then sold all year; and the bhojanalaya's, where a thali arrives in a fixed sequence with no onion or garlic in any of it. Jaipur's street food is largely fried and largely gram-flour based, which is a direct consequence of a pantry with no fresh vegetables and a trade that had to sell something that would sit on a counter. The western fringe of the region shades into Ajmer, and Ajmer's kalakand and feeni arrive in the shops from there rather than being made here.
A disc of honeycombed batter fried in ghee and soaked in syrup, made plain, or topped with mawa, or with a sheet of set cream as malai ghewar. It belongs to Sawan and Bhadrapada — Teej and Raksha Bandhan — and the Jaipur halwais build their year around those six weeks even though they now sell it beyond them.
Where to try: Johari Bazaar in Jaipur through Sawan, when the trays come out hourly.
A fried pastry filled with spiced onion. Jaipur's is flatter and crisper than the Jodhpur version and is served broken open with a spoon of tamarind and mint chutney over it; it is a mid-morning food here rather than a breakfast one.
Where to try: Rawat Mishthan Bhandar near the station, and the Chandpol lane shops.
A dal kachori crushed into a bowl and flooded with hot besan kadhi. It is a Jaipur breakfast and almost unknown as a dish thirty kilometres outside the basin, which is a good measure of how local a street food can stay.
The Dhundhari version leans sweet: the churma is finer, worked with boora sugar and cardamom rather than jaggery, and the baati is often baked in an oven in town. In Shekhawati it is still done over cow-dung cakes and the dal is thinner.
Gram flour mixed with wheat, worked with ajwain, coriander and chopped chilli, and cooked thick on a tawa or in embers. Eaten with white butter and a garlic-and-red-chilli chutney where that is allowed, and with curd where it is not. It carries more protein than a wheat roti, which is the point in a pulse-growing belt.
Gram-flour dumplings stuffed with dry fruit and paneer before being steamed and simmered in gravy, as against the plain sliced gatte of the everyday kitchen. A festival and wedding version of a subsistence dish.
Gram flour cooked into buttermilk until it sets, spread to cool, cut into squares and then simmered in a spiced curd gravy. It is gatte's flatter cousin and needs no frying, which made it the summer version.
Pearl millet and moong cooked to a soft mass and eaten with ghee, buttermilk and jaggery in winter; raab is the thinner drinkable form, coarse millet flour cooked into buttermilk. This is the actual daily food of Shekhawati, as opposed to the food Shekhawati is famous for.
Broken papad simmered in a gram-flour and curd gravy — a fifteen-minute curry for a house with nothing fresh in it, and a standard item on a Shekhawati thali rather than an emergency measure.
Unsweetened fried khoya balls in a spiced gravy, served at weddings. It is the merchant kitchen's answer to the problem of feasting without meat: extravagance supplied by dairy and ghee instead.
A poori stuffed with spiced ground urad and fried flat, eaten with a dry potato sabzi. The Shekhawati travelling version keeps for a day, which is why it went with people on journeys.
Sun-dried ker berries and sangri pods rehydrated and cooked in oil with chilli and amchur. In Shekhawati the khejri still grows in the fields, so this is a gathered dish here, and the further east into the basin you go the more it becomes a bought one.
Jaggery-and-wheat batter fritters fried in ghee, made at Holi across Shekhawati. Simple enough that they are still made at home in towns where nothing else is.
A moist, grainy milk sweet set in a tray, made by cooking down milk with a little acid so it curdles slightly and holds a coarse crumb. It belongs to Ajmer at the region's western limit and reaches Jaipur's shops from there; the smooth pressed version sold elsewhere in India is a different sweet under the same name.
Very fine fried strands of dough eaten crushed into warm milk on winter mornings, and associated with Ajmer and Beawar to the west. It is a seasonal item and disappears from the counters by March.
A kachori shell filled with khoya and nuts, fried and dipped in syrup. Jodhpur's invention, thoroughly adopted by Jaipur's halwais, and a good example of how quickly the sweet trade moves a product across the Aravallis while the savoury kitchen stays put.
Staples
Sweets
Street food
Drinks
The food of Dhundhar & Shekhawati — signature dishes, staples, sweets, street food and where to eat them. (16)