Little balls of goodness

When I was very young, a baby perhaps, Mother would make something special for me to eat. It was sago pudding of a sort, plain boiled stuff, almost like a congee, with mustard seeds sputtered into it, mixed with yoghurt to form a wonderful, gooey porridge. I ate it just like that for years and then, as I got older, experimented with additions – from spice-touched potato crisps to tangy mango chutney to, only once and never again, a dribble of honey. As a family, we also ate a sweet version of this in javarshee (as I called it) payasam, with thickened milk being home to soft, soft, soft sago, swimming in the saffron and cardamom-flavoured pool with bits of cashewnuts and raisins fried in fresh home-made ghee. I loved it all, from the small while balls of dried sago to the tiny cooked morsels that eluded the teeth as you tried to bite into each one on its slithery way down into your stomach. And whenever I had a sore throat or an iffy tummy, I would crave the gruel with dahi, since it soothed, cooled and somehow felt like it was a warm and comforting blanket that you could snuggle into. (I sound dreadfully like Nigella Lawson on her television cooking show with my descriptives, don’t I? Sorry!)

As I grew up and associated with more people outside the house and immediate circle of family and close friends, I met more sago…or sago in more avatars, at least. In school, someone once brought sago fritters, sabudana vada, and I loved every bite, even the green chillies that I soon learned to look for and avoid like the proverbial plague. We ate it often at home as chips or papads, frying up a stiff plastic-like fragment into a gloriously puffy, crunchy, light snack. And there was, as always, the pudding. But I also found, to my teenage horror and almost-betrayal of my nutritional self-righteousness, that the sabudana I so loved and enjoyed eating was actually just pure starch, with little natural goodness to recommend it except for its soothe value. It was also notoriously difficult to deal with in almost any version of its cooked self, that for a long time it was sent into exile in our house.

Then I went to live in Delhi and struggled womanfully to handle sabudana. I bought the large kind, in the futile hope that at least if it didn’t do what I wanted it to, I could find something else to do with it, or to it. All I discovered was that the bigger it was, the more of a mess you had to deal with when it went wrong. When I made kheer and brought the cooked sabudana and thickened milk together into a sweet porridge with all the accoutrements I knew, it was fabulous, warm. Once it was put into the refrigerator, it came out with the milk still thick and sweet, the nuts and dried fruit adding a delightful punctuation, but the sago was hard, almost bullet-like in its determination to break at least one of my teeth. I did find out what the science behind that disaster was, but decided to forget about it and not play with the stuff any more than I had to.

But after moving back home and taking over the housekeeping, I felt bravely adventurous enough to battle sabudana again. So I went out and bought the largest I could find and cooked it into gruel. It worked. I tried it in payasam – hmm….not bad at all, I was complimented. And then I made the mistake of overreaching my confidence levels. I attempted to make sabudana khichdi, the food of the days of the local fasts. I did everything I had been instructed to do, from gently soaking the sago to getting ready the prodigious amounts of oil I was told I would need to make the dish. I heated the aforementioned oil, sputtered some asafoetida, mustard seeds, kadipatta and a few pieces of kaju – I do not eat peanuts, which is the norm here – and then, with fingers crossed, eyes semi-shut and a muttered incantation (or was it imprecation?) threw in the soaked sago. Voila! In one small moment, it was done, or so I fondly hoped. Instead, it turned into a greasy block of reinforced concrete, delicately patterned in tiny spheres, some transparent, some opaque, all rock hard.

Since then, I have mumbled darkly under my breath every time anyone mentioned sabudana. I pass the bags of the stuff at the grocery store and glower. And I glare at anyone who tells me just how easy it is to handle sago. But all the while something inside me whispers in two voices, one telling me that of course I can do it, the other saying that it is wonderfully delicious food that I am missing out on. I know I will succumb one day. Until then, I prefer to eat someone else’s version of anything to do with this small, round, white food.