Milk-rice

Last week started with Bodhi Day on Monday - the day when Buddha (Gautama Siddhartha) reached enlightenment after meditating under the bodhi tree for 49 days. This came after many years of asceticism, including severely limiting how much he ate, so much that he was emaciated, and when he decided that the 'Middle Way' between extreme self-indulgence and self-mortification was the path to enlightenment. It is said that he ended his se⁹ven years of asceticism by accepting  milk-rice from a farmer's wife, Sujarta, when he started meditating under the Bodhi tree, and in some versions that this gave him the strength to achieve enlightenment.

So it seemed clear we should be breaking our fast with milk-rice too. But what was, or is, milk-rice, and what is the history of this food? This took a bunch of reading up on, and as always I'd be glad to be put right. With a wide range of subcontinental variants on cooking rice in milk, broadly speaking it seemed that most interpret Sujarta's milk-rice as the more soupy rice-pudding kheer, from the mainland, but in Sri Lanka it is the more cake-like kiribath. Milk and rice both come with huge symbolism in the subcontinent, and the more I read, the more I learnt that both these milk-rice dishes come with national and religious overtones, ritual importance across all the region's religions, and more.

 

Kheer is believed to be an ancient dish as it is mentioned in Ayurvedic texts and is an importat Hindu temple food, or prasadam, coming in a huge range of regional variants, and kiribath is practically synonymous with Sri Lanka, also with a host of associations. Another, more elaborate Sri Lankan/Tamil version of milk-rice, pongal, actually gives its name to the festival which is the regional version of Makar Sakranti, of which more later. Both kheer and kiribath are, in their regions, the first food offered to babies at weaning, the first food eaten at New Year, and at many other important occasions. Of course this is both sensible and symbolic - being plain, nutritious and highly digestible as well as using staple ingredients. Kheer is often elevated with the addition of rose water or other flavourings, slivered nuts and dried fruits as well as coming in more savoury versions involving different dals. 

 

I realised this is the same principle as the kutia that we made for Orthodox Christmas a couple of weeks ago - a basic grain soup, one of the oldest and easiest dishes to cook, with deep-rooted symbolic value to go with its nutritional importance. And of course milk-rice puddings are common from China through central Asia to Iran, Turkey and across to north Africa, through to the arroz con leche of Spain, and - of course - the English rice pudding. Each place uses flavourings that reflect local ingredients - Claudia Roden's Book of Middle Eastern Food has recipes for mastic-flavoured rice pudding from Greece, saffron-flavoured version from Iran, Egyptian Ashura made with wheat or barley, as well as a vermicelli-milk pudding which can also be found in Indian cookery, known there as sheer korma, according to my Madhur Jaffrey book. Next week we'll be making a pongal which is another

On Monday we broke our fast with the Sri Lankan kiribath, which I had made the night before and left to cool and set. It was soothing and delicious, at least for all the members of the family who like rice puddings. There is, unfortunately, one for whom rice puddings are near to the devil incarnate, and I'm going to blame school dinners for that. They valiantly tasted but even the cake-like, cooling kiribath was not going to find favour. I have begged for their patience, as we cook our way through many variants of milk-rice for festivals this year.