I can’t really say whether it was the residual flavor of a dream or not but I awoke to the thought of Maddur and smacking my lips. And no, Maddur is not a man. Nor am I in the habit of smacking my lips at drool-worthy specimen (in an obvious sort of way, that is). This sort of public display of affection is, in fact, strictly reserved for food, my favorite four letter word, and I never tire of emphasizing that enough.
Maddur, a small town in Mandya district in Karnataka, lies between Bangalore and Mysore and is home to one of the most popular snacks of the region, the vade. Eponymous with the town it hails from this is not your typical doughnut shaped one. It is made of rice flour, semolina and maida mixed with sliced onions, curry leaves, grated coconut, cashew nut and masala.
The dough is shaped into a patty and deep-fried to an irresistible golden brown. For travellers along the Bangalore-Mysore highway, making a quick halt for the vade at Maddur is near tradition.
Owners of Maddur Tiffanys claim that their family invented the Maddur vade over a hundred years ago by accident. Doddamane
Nagaraju, the proprietor of Maddur Tiffanys shares that his grand grandfather Madvachar, who ran the canteen at Maddur railway station, used to prepare pakodas for train passengers.
This one time, a train reached the station ahead of its arrival time. Madvachar didn’t want to lose customers so he hurriedly turned the pakoda dough into vade and fried it.
Et voila, the Maddur vade was born. Purists swear by the railway station version, which continues to be a hit with passengers, even though the highway boasts of a number of joints selling this piping hot any-time snack.
Puneetinder Kaur Sidhu, travel enthusiast and the author of Adrift: A junket junkie in Europe is the youngest of four siblings born into an aristocratic family of Punjab. Dogged in her resistance to conform, and with parental pressure easing sufficiently over the years, she had plenty of freedom of choice. And she chose travel.
She was born in Shimla, and spent her formative years at their home, Windsor Terrace, in Kasumpti while schooling at Convent of Jesus & Mary, Chelsea. The irrepressible wanderlust in her found her changing vocations midstream and she joined Singapore International Airlines to give wing to her passion. She has travelled extensively in Asia, North America, Australia, Europe, South Africa and SE Asia; simultaneously exploring the charms within India.
When she is not travelling, she is writing about it. Over the past decade or so, she has created an impressive writing repertoire for herself: as a columnist with Hindustan Times, as a book reviewer for The Tribune and as a contributor to travel magazines in India and overseas. Her work-in-progress, the documenting of colonial heritage along the Old Hindustan-Tibet Road, is an outcome of her long-standing romance with the Himalayas.
