Culinary Chronicles
By Yasmin Rahul Bakshi
“Give her bran in roti and only brown bread.” He recommended for my tender gut.
Bran sounded exquisite and brown bread meant some gourmet variety of bread to me. For a child of eight years these were fancy words. In the entire Mussoorie, only Chick Chocolate on the Mall Road offered premium bakery products in early and mid-eighties. So, the hazel hued loaves with a drizzle of coarse bran on top were picked from there for me.
There can be fond memories of doctors too. I grew up in an era when the world wasn’t as commercial as it is now. Association and business was divided by clear margins. There was a relation of fiduciary and therapeutic trust between a doctor and the patients.
Mussoorie had a scarce number of doctors with less medical facilities yet it did not pinch the residents, for the town was under the care of Dr Sunil Sanon. A soft spoken medical practitioner with a charismatic personality and healing hands. He had remedies for anything and everything.
Once he himself got unwell and I wondered how a doctor could fall sick. It was beyond my comprehension as a kid.
“Switch over to bottled carbonated water for drinking, especially for both the children.” He suggested it to my parents during the peak of monsoons. The water in the hills would become unsafe for drinking and the archaic ceramic candle water filters would become ineffectual.
Effective advice and minimal medications from the Doctor made great impact and saved from maladies. Every summer he would be ready with immunity boosting vaccines for his own children and us two to ward off the seasonal infections. There was a confidence then which later developed into a latrophobia with passing times when medical ethics changed into business and patients became customers in this digital age.
Eating brown sandwiches and drinking sparkling water from the glass bottles of Bisleri instead of water in those days definitely gave me an opulent feel, not realising that bran was for the frugal and livestock.
Morality, goodness, reliability seem to be a bygone era yet brown bread and soda still remind me of the kind Dr Sanon, who now leads a cherished life in Rickvan’s Ridge, a place with a history in the mountains.
Ingredients:
- Whole wheat flour – 2 ½ cup
- Instant yeast – 2 tsp
- Milk – 1 ¼ cup
- Sugar 3 Tbsp
- Salt – 1 ¼ Tbsp
- Oil – 3 Tbsp + 1 Tbsp
- Milk – for brushing
Method:
- Dissolve sugar in milk. Add yeast and stir.
- Leave aside for 10 minutes to foam up.
- Mix 3 Tbsp of oil in the yeast mixture.
- Mix salt with flour.
- Add in the yeast mixture and mix well.
- Gradually add the milk and knead well by pressurising with the palm in forward and return movement.
- Grease a big bowl and place the dough ball in it.
- Cover and let it rise until it doubles up.
- Punch again to take out the gas.
- Shape in desired form and place it in a greased and dusted baking tin.
- Let it rise again (proofing).
- Brush the top with milk.
- Bake in a preheated oven at 170 degrees for 24 minutes.
- Take the loaf out of the tin.
- Cool it completely before slicing.
(Yasmin Rahul Bakshi is an accomplished senior consultant Chef and a food historian. A widely travelled Army wife from the Mussoorie hills with exposure to international cuisines & preserving recipes with the medium of food photography and digital content creation in the form of stories.)
