Golden Temple langar still lingers in the mind

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: 

• Measure all the ingredients properly. 
• Add sugar to water and set it in a pot to boil. 
• Melt ghee or unsalted butter in a pan. To clarify unsalted butter heat and skim off foamy curds and spoon out solids from bottom of pan.
• Add whole grain flour ( atta ) to melted butter. 
• Stir the mixture continuously to lightly roast the flour.
• Continue stirring flour and butter mixture while the sugar and water boils together to make a light syrup. Butter will separate from roasted flour and turns a deep golden colour with a nutty aroma. 
• Pour boiling sugar syrup into the roasted flour and clarified butter mixture. Mixture will sputter. Take care not to be scalded. Stir rapidly until all the water is absorbed. 
• Keep stirring prasad as it thickens into a firm pudding. Completely cooked prasad slides easily from pan into a steel bowl or iron bowl. Sprinkle nuts from top. 
• Make an offering of this prasad to god and serve.

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