The paper sweet of Andhra

Puneetinder Kaur Sidhu

Last month, fellow foodie and Hyderabad-based food critic, Sankalp Vishnu, came a-calling up north. I caught up with him over dinner at the end of his gluttonous marathon to Amritsar. Much as he’d relished it all — and god knows there is a whole lot of ‘all’ in there — he laughingly admitted to having overindulged, especially in matters wheat-y. His palate-comforting order of rice, dal and dahi that evening was an unambiguous indication of an overdose of Punjab’s favourite grain. No surprise there because that’s how staple foods mark their presence in our daily diets. One person’s wheat is another’s rice. Even an unabashed rice lover like me needs that one desi ghee-smeared phulka to mop up the plate after heaped helpings already demolished.

Before we wound up for the day, Sankalp handed me a box of sweets from Almond House, one of Hyderabad’s popular mithai shops. I was intrigued at the contents, which, at the first glance looked like closely packed portions of butter paper-wrapped panjeeri. A closer bespectacled inspection, followed by a gingerly attempt at unwrapping one, brought me closer to an aromatic waft of gur and green cardamom, not enlightenment. Besides, I appeared to have unknowingly deconstructed the mithai itself. The day was eventually saved by a trawl through Almond House’s list of South Indian sweets. Turns out I’d been gifted an abiding Andhra tradition called bellam pootharekulu. Coarsely pounded jaggery sandwiched between ghee-drizzled rice-paper and folded into neat rectangles. Sort of a rice-eater’s version of ghee-shakkar-phulka!

Also known as paper sweet, it is believed to have originated in the coastal rice-producing regions of East and West Godavari some 200 years ago. The dessert celebrates a bountiful rice harvest, shared Vishnu over a phone call. Recalling how his grandmother used to artfully smear a fine cloth dipped in watery rice batter across an inverted earthen pitcher, hot from being placed over an open fire. This near-invisible daub quickly dries into a wafer-thin translucent leaf, the defining feature of pootharekulu, Telugu for sheet-like coatings. A gentle application of ghee softens the paper to allow folding in the fillings that range from traditional ones like gur and dry fruits to imaginative ones like dates and gajrela.

A culinary creativity that found the spotlight trained firmly on Atreyapuram, a village in East Godavari, where the paper sweet tasted its first commercial success. Rice paper production is a cottage industry here, and has long been a source of sustainable livelihood for the dexterous women of the region. The men folk generally step in for the filling, folding, marketing and selling of the sweet. Given that pootharekulu is being exported around the world, they appear to be doing a pretty fine job. Atreyapuram is also the largest supplier of rice paper, accounting for almost a hundred per cent of the stock available to mithai manufacturers in Andhra Pradesh.

It’s interesting to note that despite being the third largest producer of rice in India — two spots ahead of Andhra Pradesh — Punjab has no widely consumed rice-based mithais to its name. They are mostly prepared with atta or besan or by reducing milk to khoya, desserts like kheer and phirni notwithstanding. A probe of the octogenarian mother’s sharpened long-term memory threw up recollections of a hitherto unheard of one called kachhi pinni. Made of rice flour, ghee and sugar (possibly bura), it was once an essential part of traditional wedding mithai, but is missing from the fare as we know it. As I chew on this bit of information, and my nth poothareku, I mentally thank Vishnu for introducing me to a very tasty tradition from his home state. And to a long-forgotten one from my own.