Lassi jaisi koi nahin

This week’s edition is from the road, as I make my way from Bangalore to the lofty Himalayas.

All my Himalayan journeys from the south have involved a 3am alarm (courtesy, Bangalore’s airport being in another city), at least one connecting flight and 12 hours on the road. I write this in the 16th hour of my journey.

So, when we broke journey at Chandigarh for lunch, my tummy was rolling and rumbling with hunger, acidity and road sickness. The cure? A tall glass of thick, creamy, cool lassi,  the original version from the land of its birth.

Lassi is an ancient drink, a sweet-sour mix of yogurt, water and lots of sugar. It likely originated in the Punjab region out of necessity, to counter the unrelenting sweltering summer.

This ancient drink, the Original Smoothie, had to have originated in the Punjab region, where milk has always been an important staple drink.

“In the old days, when there were no refrigerators, the Punjabi farmer used to drink milk cooled in a clay pot and mixed with curd and sugar and stirred by a wooden stick,” a 1989 New York Times article quotes Arun Chopra, then the executive chef of the Taj Mahal Hotel, as saying.

Other written references of the lassi date back at least a century before that.

An 1866 dictionary defines lassi as a curdled sour milk. A few years later, in 1872, a British book called Hand-book of the Manufactures and Arts of the Punjab describes the process of making lassi, although this is less appealing and likely ill-informed and even offensive -

“All the winter,  the people crouch in their houses. They rarely, if ever, use fire  and get warm only by contiguity. They never change their thick and usually filthy woollen garments, so  that the odour of a house may be imagined. To add to this, the poorer people have to store up in the summer their whole winter supply of food…  for drinking they collect quantities of sour milk...the milk is kept for months, till covered with green mildew and full of maggots, the stench of it is indescribable...this 'lassi' or sour milk."

Umm, okay.

Nevertheless, lassi today is available freely across the country, even in ready-to-drink packaging, with a flavour range that puts ice cream brands to shame. It’s also easy to make and is my quick fix for when a sweet craving gets the better of me.

For now though, I’ve made the most of my pit stop in lassi land.

Next week, watch this space for some ancient recipes from the Spiti valley, and the secret to their very yum, very potent local brew Arak.