The sweet heart of Diwali
For Vijaya Selvaraju, Diwali celebrations while growing up in the suburbs of Toronto centered around her mother’s home cooking — namely, the sweets.
“My mom has a South Indian catering business, and she’s had it ever since I was a little kid,” the recipe developer and online cooking personality tells me. “I grew up in that business and would help my mom make and pack her sweets and snacks. All of the sweets that we would have around our table for Diwali would come straight from her business. We would be very much enthralled in the weeks leading up to Diwali, prepping everything. And then on the day of Diwali, our [celebration] would typically start a little later, because my mom would still be at the store, helping everyone get their last-minute treats. And then she would come home with a bounty — a good selection of pretty much every South Indian sweet under the sky.”
They included boxes of Gulab Jamun — plump, syrup-soaked dough balls perfumed with saffron, cardamom and rose — alongside stacks of Puran Poli and trays of golden, ghee-rich Mysore Pak, its spongy, honeycomb texture melting on the tongue.
Such good food — brimming with fresh ingredients, vibrant spices and, most importantly, love — was commonplace in Selvaraju’s household, both during the holidays and outside of them. One of her earliest memories of food dates back to her infancy spent in Cameroon, when her mother fed her bowls of dal chawal, or lentils and rice. “I remember the aroma,” she says. “I know people say that you can’t have memories from when you’re that young, but for some reason, that really sticks with me. The aroma and taste of the ghee.”
Then came the Arisi Paruppu Sadam, a one-pot dish of parboiled rice and lentils that feels like a warm hug; fish kebabs laced with a chock full of green chillies, which her mother made for her second birthday; and barbecue hut-inspired spatchcocked chicken, slathered in a green marinade and grilled over charcoal (the recipe remains “a highly guarded secret” that her mother won’t dare share,” Selvaraju cheekily states).
Expectedly, when one grows up indulging in delicious home-cooked meals, they’re instilled with a passion for all things food. That early intimacy with flavor — the perfume of ghee, the rhythm of her mother’s kitchen — would eventually lead Selvaraju to a career celebrating Indian home cooking.
“This love of cooking has spanned generations in my family. My great-grandmother, an excellent cook herself, was once taken to a market where she encountered a man carrying a green snake. It was said that if she ran her right hand down the length of the snake that she would be an amazing cook for life, and she was!” Selvaraju writes in her recent cookbook, “Indian Food Is Easy: Vibrant, Comforting Recipes for Every Day of the Week.” Selvaraju’s mother, at the age of seven, was taken to that same market and, similarly, bestowed with the gift of becoming an exceptional cook.
“Thankfully, I did not have to face this initiation. However, that family trait for preparing delicious, wholesome meals runs deep in my veins.”
Selvaraju’s cookbook hopes to dispel the idea that Indian food is inherently difficult to prepare. Inside is an array of simple yet comforting recipes, ranging from appetizers and drinks to non-veg (poultry, mutton, lamb, seafood and eggs) and veg entrees. There’s also a section dedicated to desserts, which especially shines during this festive month. Confections — puddings, custards, fried pastries and milk cake galore — are a key, rather necessary, part of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.
In her recipe for classic Gulab Jamun, Selvaraju starts with whole milk, ghee and milk powder, which are mixed and combined in a heated nonstick pan to create a thick paste. Once cooled, the paste is incorporated with flour, baking powder and salt to make a dough. The dough is then rolled into small balls, fried and soaked immediately in a warm syrup made from saffron threads and rose water. The finished Gulab Jamun can be garnished with pistachios and rose petals — or scoops of vanilla and pistachio-flavored ice cream.
According to Selvaraju, “the key to victory” when making Gulab Jamun is taking your time to fry each dough ball and making sure it has plenty of time to soak in the syrup. “Gulab Jamun is very temperamental,” she explains. “For me, the best type of Gulab Jamun gives way without any sort of resistance when you press down on it with a spoon. The inside is nice and tender and fully soaked through the middle.”
“One of the things that I do in this recipe is rehydrate milk powder. That sort of simulates khoa without all the effort, which I feel makes a huge difference,” Selvaraju adds. “Also, it’s true, you have to go low and slow with Gulab Jamun to make sure that it gets cooked all the way to the center. It’s very tempting to put it in very hot oil because you get that beautiful, deep, golden brown color pretty quickly. But it does require a bit of patience. Let the Gulab Jamun soak in that oil like they’re at the spa. Take your time, don’t rush the process.”
The Gulab Jamun will initially be pale golden, but slowly deepen in color. “Once you drop it into the syrup, it’s magic,” Selvaraju says. “It sort of lightens up in color again once it plumps up with all that syrup.”
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Alongside traditional recipes are a few modern spins, which Selvaraju credits to her mom. “I feel like I grew up with my mom sort of inadvertently doing mashups, like, ‘Oh, we’re going to do a pasta, but it’ll have an Indian flair,’” she says. “I’ve grown an appreciation for that.”
Selvaraju’s Cardamom Orange Tiramisu does exactly that: adds an “Indian flair” to classic tiramisu. It’s essentially layers of ladyfinger biscuits soaked in Darjeeling tea, covered in a cardamom orange cream and topped with fresh orange segments and slivered pistachios.
“Cardamom itself is beautiful, floral, delicate,” she explains. “Then, to pair it with oranges, it’s just a match made in heaven. That citrusy note with the beautiful perfume of cardamom.”
Her favorite recipe, however, is an Easy Rasmalai Ice Cream, which uses store-bought ricotta in lieu of homemade rasmalai, an Indian dessert of soft cheese immersed in a sweet-spiced milk: “I just had this random epiphany one day, saying, ‘I love Rasmalai, but how do I bring that to ice cream form without having to make the paneer and go through that process?’”
“I realized that not a lot of people have ice cream machines at home, which is fair,” she explains. “I wanted to make a no-churn ice cream, which incorporates whipped cream with condensed milk and flavorings to your liking. In Rasmalai, you have the flavors of cardamom, saffron and pistachios, but the missing element was the cheese.
“So, I was thinking to myself, ‘How do I get this cheese in here?’ Ricotta has that beautiful, milky richness to it with that grainy texture, which is very reminiscent of Rasmalai. That’s when I started playing around with the proportions, trying to get the right amount of ricotta with the right amount of sweetness, to give you the feel of that beloved dessert but in ice cream form.”
When it comes to Diwali sweets, there’s no “right” or “wrong” way to enjoy them. Store-bought and catering are more than viable options. But if you’re looking to indulge in traditional, homemade Diwali sweets, Selvaraju’s tried-and-trusted recipes are guaranteed to make this year’s celebrations all the more memorable.
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