What’s for tiffin today?

School kids are meant to ask questions — and they do so. What’s the speed of light? How many continents are there? Is there life on Mars? And so on. But the question, I think, that concerns them the most is a simple one: what’s for tiffin?

If there is one word that instantly evokes nostalgia, it is tiffin. It is so much a part of everyone’s lexicon that it’s difficult to believe that it emerged from the old English word ‘tiffing’, which meant sipping. In colonial India, tiffin came to denote a small meal taken between meals by the Englishman who would have a lavish dinner, and then, to cope with the heaviness of the food and the heat, a light lunch the next day. So, tiffin became his small meal. The word first appeared in 1807 in Anglo-Indian writing, says food historian KT Achaya. “The word tiff… was to eat a midday meal,” he writes.

The word is no longer confined to light meals. For a student, it signifies the time for a school break or recess. Tiffin boxes, which were small metal boxes with clasps (and now come in all shapes and sizes), carried what was going to be the student’s snack or lunch: sandwiches, noodles, puris, upma, chila, French toast and so on.

The tiffin concept caught on in India because there is no dearth of snacky items in the country. Every region has a trove of in-between-meal snacks. Apart from the usual dishes we are familiar with, like kebabs, samosas, dosas, kachoris, vadas and pakoras, there are hundreds of other droolworthy snacks. Sweet snacks are a part of our diets too: think of halwa, malpuas and jalebis. And sometimes, tiffin can consist of something sweet and savoury — like Kerala’s ripe banana fritters, often served with a thick and spicy meat dish.

You get to know quite a lot about regional tiffin items from Sonal Ved’s heavy tome, ‘Tiffin: 500 Authentic Recipes Celebrating India’s Regional Cuisine’. It tells you about all kinds of regional delights — from the hot Kanchipuram idli and Bengal’s mutton ghugni (dried yellow peas cooked with minced meat) to Varanasi’s tamatar chaat, Indore’s sev-sprinkled poha and Jabalpur’s chicken samosa. The tiffin table includes Kutchi kadak toast — toast with vegetables topped with a tamarind and mint relish — and Sikkim’s peanut sadeko — a salad of roasted peanuts with chopped tomatoes, spring onions, coriander leaves, red chilli powder, minced ginger and garlic, chaat masala and lemon juice.

An interesting tiffin item is bhutte ki kees — a speciality from Madhya Pradesh in which corn is cooked with milk, coconut, ginger, garlic, cumin seeds and red chillies and then topped with pomegranate seeds. For Gujarat’s khaman, chickpea flour and semolina are mixed with a bit of sugar, salt and lemon juice, steamed, and then tempered with mustard seeds, sesame seeds, curry leaves, asafoetida and green chillies.

A lot of food outlets serve tiffin meals or mini-meals. I have had a Parsi tiffin of pulao, dhansak and kurkuri bhindi, and a southern Indian tiffin thali of a miniature dosa, tiny idlis in a bowl of sambar, a small helping of upma and kesari baat. There was even a food delivery outlet called Tiffin Kaku (Uncle Tiffin!) in East Delhi that served various kinds of Bengali dishes, including snacks. Dhaba, the upmarket restaurant which first opened at The Claridges in New Delhi, used to serve North Indian delicacies in one of those old-style tiffin carriers with metal containers stacked one on top of another.

I suppose the word tiffin appeals to me in particular because it was not a part of my childhood. I studied in a village school near my house, and had a heavy breakfast before leaving for school, and then gorged on something at home (usually a glass of lassi or milk) after school hours. The concept wielded its magic later when I started experimenting with regional food.

It does not surprise me that people still remember their friends’ tiffin items — years after leaving school. Curiously, almost everybody I know enjoyed their friends’ home food more than their own. Recently, we were talking about someone’s outstanding professional achievements. Everybody had something good to say about her. “She also brought the best tiffin,” one of her old school friends remarked, summing it all up.

— The writer is a food critic

Kerala-style ripe banana fritters

Ingredients Ripe banana 1

Flour 3/4 cup

Rice flour 1/4 cup

Cardamom (ground) 1/4 tsp

Turmeric A pinch

Sugar (powdered) 1 tbsp

Oil For frying

Water For a smooth batter

Method

In a bowl, mix the two kinds of flours. Add cardamom powder, sugar and turmeric. Add water to make batter. Mix well so that there are no lumps. Cut the plantain into six pieces. Heat oil in a pan. Dip the pieces in the batter and fry them. Take them out with a slotted spoon. Serve hot — as a snack, or with a meat dish.