It was a long tiresome August evening in 2023 when I first tasted what is colloquially known in India as Shahi Tukda. I was eating the usual drab dinner at the cafeteria in the Indian Institute of Science. The cafeteria occupied the ground floor of a two-story greystone building. At the entrance, the lettering on the walls read ‘D Mess’. In most Indian companies, factories, bureaus and colleges, ‘mess’ is the word used to refer to a dining hall. This one most certainly was a mess: large hordes of chattering students, clattering plates and cutlery, and incessant screeching sounds of steel chairs being dragged around the floor. The dining tables were long steel rectangles seating about ten people each. It pained me to know that my table had one leg slightly short; it kept wobbling from one side to another, and I kept pushing it the other way to fiddle with it. I was mindlessly staring at the unfinished plate of food in front of me. About a year back, I had adopted a policy of complete disinterest in food. “It is mere sustenance,” I would say, “if humans ran on diesel, I would drink that, too.”  

In one corner of the plate lay the dessert: two triangular pieces of fried, golden-brown bread coated in a yellowish-greenish-white cream, strewn with chopped nuts. I had read the menu at the buffet counter; the dessert was called Shahi Tukda.  I later learned that this delicacy became widely popular in North India during the rule of the Sultans  (Ghosh). Shah literally translates in Persian to “Emperor,” while Tukda, an Urdu word, means “piece.” I cut out a spoonful of the dessert and placed it in my mouth. I first sensed the cold, thick creamy liquid on my tongue. It was mildly sweet, perhaps even somewhat salty.  Then my jaws bit through the inner golden bread, giving off a delightful crunch. This let off a burst of warm rose-infused sugary syrup into my mouth. This sequence of flavors, textures and temperatures cyclically repeated each time my jaws went up and down. I had experienced an entire culinary journey in the short twenty second span that the morsel had survived in my mouth. Five minutes later I went back to the food counter and sheepishly asked for another helping of Shahi Tukda. And five minutes after that, yet another.  

Before I left the cafeteria that day, I knew I had to learn to make this dish. Unfortunately, I did not have too much experience with desserts. In fact, I did not really have too much experience with cooking in general. I was counting on two extremely useful resources: my mother and YouTube. 

My mother is what I like to call an “organic expert.” When complimented about her culinary skills, you will hear her modestly say: “I started off not knowing how to cook anything but roti-sabzi¹ and rice. But thanks to Dhruv’s foodie-ness, I was forced to learn a lot of new recipes, and I can cook almost any cuisine now!” Beyond just knowledge of many recipes from a wide variety of cuisines, she is gifted with an excellent understanding of the working of flavors in general and spices in particular. This talent seems to have gradually eroded in many Indian households, since the dawn of the consumerist era whence colorful rectangular packages of processed ingredients have destroyed much understanding of raw spices.  

A few weeks later, on a Saturday evening, I decided it was finally time to try making the dessert. I opened YouTube and typed into the search bar: “Easy Shahi Tukda recipe.” The recipe was presented by a crisply dressed chef speaking in clear Hindi, who claimed that the recipe was a piece of cake. I disagree: it is a piece of bread. Anyways, I showed my mother the recipe. She told me it would take about four hours. 

I did not plan to follow the recipe verbatim. In our kitchen, experimenting with random flavor combinations has often resulted in some unexpectedly tasty food. The egoist within me wanted to make a better dish than I had eaten at the cafeteria, and I was looking for a unique flavor to boost the recipe. We had three drawers full of spices kept carefully in glass jars, many of which I cannot identify, and many of which perhaps do not appear in the English language. Just for the heck of it, I decided to use star anise. The underrated hero of spices, star anise is star-shaped, dark brown in color and about the size of a half dollar. I believed that its unique, beautiful aroma and sweetishly spicy undercurrent of flavor would complement the dessert.  

Shahi Tukda is a two component dish. The first is a thick condensed paste made of milk, flavored with spices and nuts, which we call rabdi.  The second is a bread deep fried in clarified butter, subsequently soaked in a very sweet syrup with saffron and possibly rose petals.  

I began by boiling milk in a big steel vessel on our old black gas stove. Unlike in much of the Western world, most plates, saucers, cups and vessels in India are metallic – generally made of steel or aluminium. For around an hour I kept stirring the boiling milk carefully;  it is very easy to let the milk shoot up and overflow. Spilt milk is one thing, which is not forgiven in the Indian household. 

After the milk reduced to about half the volume, I first added the star anise, to let its flavor infuse the milk. Then came some chopped pistachios, almonds, and a bit of salt. Next, I brought out almost thirty pods of fresh green cardamom, a staple in Indian desserts. I broke open the pods and emptied their contents into a brass mortar. The cup-sized brass mortar and pestle are my favorite pieces of cookware at home: I absolutely love the clanging sound of the pestle while grinding up some masala² or nuts.  I added the cardamom just when the milk had condensed to a fifth of its volume. After more than an hour and a half, I could let the condensed milk cool in the fridge. 

Now for the fun part – I made the syrup in a pan by dissolving sugar in water, and adding saffron, the hallmark of Indian cuisine. Saffron, or kesar as we call it in Hindi, is ubiquitous in our culture (“Saffron, The Red Gold”). It is used as a strong dye, as a core ingredient in perfumes, sometimes in ceremonies; but most importantly to flavor Indian desserts. The little glass bottle of saffron was the prized possession of our kitchen; it had been bought by my parents in Kashmir, the northernmost part of India. 

One look at the clock and I realized I was horribly late; dinner time was fast approaching, and I had to ready the dessert before we took our seats at the dinner table. Luckily, both my parents are at home on Saturdays, so I recruited my father to help with the bread. I began frying the bread in a huge pan with clarified butter. This was no easy task for me; not because frying is a complicated process, it most certainly is not. But I absolutely hate clarified butter, or ghee, as it is known in Hindi. It is my arch nemesis. I never touch it and make sure I do not eat it, and if I had a time machine, I would most certainly go back a thousand years and shoot the person who invented it. On the contrary, many Indians  opine that ghee is a special, important ingredient: at the very least, ghee substitutes for butter, and at the very best, it is a cultural status symbol of divinity. I would say it belongs to the devil. I do not entirely understand my distaste towards ghee. My parents once guessed that it is because ghee was often overused as medication for me as a child.   

Anyways, a good chef must stay neutral towards one’s ingredients. So, every five minutes with trembling hands, I would slowly lift up the packet of clarified butter, and let a small chunk fall into the hot pan, while carefully avoiding contact with the beastly substance. Then I would add a slice of bread and watch its color gradually change from white to a beautiful golden brown. I would then hand over the slice to my father, who would press it down in the dark, boiling sugar syrup, laced with strands of saffron. 

We placed the breads in a lovely white piece of china – one of the very few at my home. Such plates were reserved for special meals like this, and my mother would love to remind me about how this was her only set of china, and how I would be finished if anything were to happen to it. 

Finally, we put a layer of the cold, spiced milk on the crunchy, syrup-y, hot bread, and drizzled it with more chopped nuts. This provided an opportune time for the hidden, talentless artist in me to come out, and attempt to decorate the plate. I do not think the carefully placed strands of saffron and pistachio skin could do much to elevate the already royal-looking dessert. I then declared to my parents, that it was time to eat. I cannot say for sure whether my parents liked it. They have always been too nice to criticize the horrendous concoctions I have occasionally prepared. However, I sure did like it – I wolfed down no less than eight triangular slices of the dessert. My pompous self would love to claim that adding star anise was a stroke of absolute genius, but because I am very humble, I will not say so.  

In the following months, I made the dessert four more times, on each occasion adding larger and larger quantities of Star Anise. Gradually, making this dish had become a regular weekend activity: the end of a long week was marked by the three of us, my parents and me, coming together to make the dish. I also unilaterally declared the Star-anise-Shahi Tukda the official dish of our home. My parents approved enthusiastically. 

The following month was a special one. I was now moving to attend college in the United States, and would be away for almost a year. I had never been away from my parents, and they had never been away from me for such a

substantial interval; needless to say, emotions were running high. There was always loud banter, with my mom telling me to pack my toothbrush, and to not forget the handkerchiefs, and the umbrella. Yet beneath her words I could sense growing anxiety and sadness. When I shouted back saying that I already had put in the damned handkerchiefs, I think she could sense my anxiety as well. 

On the second to last day, my mother and I spent two hours packing spices. She had purchased plastic pouches of chili powder, cardamom, coriander powder and cloves from the local kirana dukaan³. Packing spices was important; I had been abroad a few times in the past couple of years, and I had realized that, without sufficient Indian spices, it would be difficult for me to adjust to an entirely new cuisine in an entirely new country. I already had two huge bags to carry books, clothes, bedsheets and other things. The big yellow box filled with packed spices would only add to the weight, and I expressed my utmost displeasure to the parents regarding this. The first time I landed in the new country, I did not want to be seen as the small clumsy kid struggling to move with three gigantic suitcases. The very last thing my mom gave me was a plastic pouch with three Star Anise. I stuffed it into the box, placed the box carefully in the last suitcase, and zipped it shut. 

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1. Roti-sabzi: Indian staple food, consisting of a thin flat bread and vegetable curry.
2. Masala : A powder made with predefined fixed proportions of various ground spices. It is what adds most of the flavor to Indian savory dishes. 
3. Kirana Dukaan: A small family-run shop that sells grains, spices, dry fruits and other supplies. 

Works Cited: 

Ghosh, Kasturi. “The Brief History of the Mughal Culinary Art That Was ‘Shahi Tukra,’” The Heritage Times: Exploring Lesser Known History, June 24, 2024. <https://www.heritagetimes.in/the-brief-history-of-the-mughal-culinary-art-that-was-shahi-tukra> 

“Saffron, The Red Gold” <https://indianculture.gov.in/food-and-culture/spices-herbs/saffron-red-gold> 

 

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