Fourteen attempts and it is still not her dhuar ka raita
People assume the old kitchens ran on andaaza. Dadi's ran on measurement. Every ingredient weighed out in the same small katori she had used for forty years — nothing was ever a guess. Which is exactly why I believed I could reproduce it.
Dhuar ka raita is a Mathura thing. Half the people I say it to have never heard of it. You smoke the curd — ghee onto a live coal, the coal in a little bowl set down into the raita, and everything covered fast so the smoke goes into the food instead of into the room.
Same curd. Same method. I asked two of my buas and wrote down what they said.
It is close. Anybody else would call it the same. My sister called it the same and I watched her decide to.
Something is missing and I cannot name it — which means I cannot ask for it, which means I will be making it slightly wrong for the rest of my life.
I have stopped believing the missing thing is in the raita.
Her generation in Braj made things that took an afternoon and three pairs of hands, on an ordinary Tuesday, and nobody wrote any of it down because nobody thought of it as knowledge. It was simply how food was made. When she went, that went with her.
And then the smaller thing, which is the one that actually undoes me. Somebody else used to hand me the bowl.