Chennai
Open 24 hours, 365 days, this langar (a term used in a gurdwara for serving food to the devotees prepared in community kitchen) is named after the fourth guru of the Sikh community and welcomes everybody without any discrimination based on caste, creed or religion. The best part of the whole langar is that the people who cook it are not chefs or trained cooks but volunteers who do it for the love of serving humanity.
The cooking, serving and cleaning work is well delegated across well-formed teams. Hundreds of women, mainly housewives, roll out chapattis every day and night. A separate team deals with cleaning up. Almost 80,000 people eat the langar every day. While the women make the chapattis , the men toss them on fire for the final cooking and stack it in baskets ready to serve. Dal, vegetables (sabzi), chapattis rice and a milky sweet is the standard food, with kadha prasad (wheat halwa) as sweet on special occasions. The food is not complete without a cup of tea, which is served at the end of meal.
There is no fixed time for lunch and dinner as the langar is open all the time for everyone – from beggars to the richest of rich – who eat, pray and learn to live together.
The writer is a chef and author of Festive Offerings to the Gods
Recipe: Kadha Prasad – Wheat halwa
Prep Time: 3 minutes
Cooking Time: 15 minutes
Total Time: 18 minutes
Yields: About 20 servings
Ingredients
1 cup ghee, or 1/2 lb. unsalted butter (2 cubes)
1 cup wholegrain wheat flour
1 cup sugar
3 cups water
20 grams cashew nuts, broken into pieces
Method:
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