Food talk
A cup of sweetness

Pyaala means a cup. Mira’s bhajans refer to the poison-laced drink served in a cup and Persian and Urdu poets go into raptures when mentioning it in a couplet in the hands of the saki (the beloved cup bearer). In idiomatic parlance hum pyaala-hum niwala refers to your closest friend. To cut a long story short, the cup aka pyaala belongs to the realm of drinks. Imagine our surprise when we were offered a cup to eat out of! Our hostess innovated an amazing dessert, displaying its charms in a transparent glass cup. She called it meetha pyaala — a name we thought didn’t do justice to its seductive beauty but as she served us one for the road our lips remain sealed.

Meetha pyaala 

Ingredients

Sponge cake 200 g

Pureed stewed fruit of choice 100 g

(apricots, peaches, figs)

Vanilla Ice cream 1 scoop

(Can substitute this with hung
yogurt, srikhand, mishti doi)

Fresh mint leaves 1 small sprig

Method

Crumble the cake. Put a large scoop of ice cream or a large dollop of shrikhand or mishti doi in a large glass cup or goblet. Place a portion of the crumbled cake in it by its side. Top with a heaped spoon of stewed fruit. Put some mint leaves between layers of cake and ice cream hung yogurt/shrikhand or mishti doi. Place the cup on a shallow bowl partly filled with hot water. Eat to your heart’s content out of this cup of many delights. Resist the temptation to substitute stewed fruit with jam or fresh fruit. The idea is not to serve fruit salad in different style but to create a colourful m`E9lange of textures that allows you to enjoy different layers of sweetness.

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