[Note: This is an older post written on 18 Feb in Jaipur]
On Station Road (below) the busiest restaurants serve the Rajasthani specialty, Dal Batte Churma.
The Dal portion of dal batte churma is of course the same one served all over India: lentils cooked until soft, with turmeric and garlic, and tempered with whole spices and onion fried in oil. Batte are wheat- and millet-flour balls first boiled and then roasted on or below hot coals and served crumbled with a spoonful of ghee on top. While churma refers to the sweet version of this dish, as the batte can be served with both ghee and sugar.
In many parts of the province, the batte are cooked over the embers from cow dung cakes (see photo below) the most common cooking fuel in rural Rajasthan. They are pressed flat and left to dry in the sun.
At Shri Shankar Restaurant, fifty rupees, or a little more than one U.S. dollar, buys you an all-you-can-eat tray of dal batte churma. To ease recessionary woes in the States, don’t turn to Campbell’s soup; instead, move to India, where the rupee is at an all-time low against the dollar.
In addition to the dal, there are two vegetable curries, kadhi (a spicy buttermilk-based soup thickened with roasted chickpea flour and tempered with spices), a salad (sliced cucumber, carrot, and onion with lemon wedges for dressing), and a spoonful of tomato chutney. The center of the tray holds the crumbled batte, and you mix in dal, one or both vegetable curries, the kadhi, and the chutney.
It is said (notably by people very fond of their province’s regional specialty, so exaggeration here is not ruled out) that places like Shri Shankar — favored by locals and in close proximity to both the bus and train stations — serves up to 10,000 of these meals each day.
Above center is a potato-cabbage curry, and on the left yellow lentil dal. The kitchen is dark and feels like a dungeon, except instead of damp and moldy it is very hot.
Big, bare-chested men stir vats of dal; boys knead the dough for making the batte and keep the clay ovens filled with hot coals. They use big iron tongs to turn the batte as they roast below. Everyone is barefoot.
I spoke with the owner, Mr. Kishor Kumar, at one of the tables in the dining area.
He keeps a desk right out in the restaurant and sits there most of the day, periodically visiting with customers and checking on things in the kitchen. I asked Mr. Kumar about another specialty of Rajasthan, the most popular street food called kachories.
I wrote about these in Jaisalmer, but they are made a little differently in Jaipur: fried bread (chickpea-flour dough) stuffed with a chickpea curry, diced red onions, and spices and topped with yogurt, sweet chutney, and mashed fried green chilies.
Avi Kramer is a freelance writer and editor. He has lived in Chile, China
and India and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.
