Bikaner Food Trail

Two things carry the eating here, and both come out of hot oil or hot milk. Mornings are kachori, a fried pastry with a spiced pulse filling, split and flooded with sabji at a counter on Station Road. Evenings belong to chhena and mawa. In between sits the thing the town is famous for, and the honest advice about it is not the advice you expect: Bikaneri bhujia is sold in packets in every grocery in India by companies that grew out of this town, and buying that packet here is a wasted errand. What is worth walking into Bhujia Bazaar for is the batch pressed through a sieve into oil that morning — the local convention is that day-old bhujia does not sell, so freshness is a question you are allowed to ask. None of this is heat food. Bikaner in May is a furnace, and the season that works runs roughly October to March.

Kachori first, and early. The counters on and around Station Road near the railway station do kachori with sabji, aloo puri and dana methi sabji, and fried food is only ever as good as how recently it was fried. Two is a portion. Four is a mistake you will feel all day. The middle of the day is not a meal here, it is a gap. Spend it on Junagarh Fort or the drive out to the Karni Mata temple at Deshnok, and come back to the counters when the light goes soft. For bhujia, walk into Bhujia Bazaar, the lane off Bara Bazaar given over to it, instead of buying the branded packet stacked at the front of a shop. Ask which batch is today's. In a town where nobody buys yesterday's, the question lands as ordinary rather than rude. Papad is the underrated buy. Bikaner's are moong and urad dal, spiced with black pepper and hing and the mineral salt called sajji khar, rolled thin and dried. They pack flat and survive a suitcase, which milk sweets emphatically do not. If the day turns hot, the sharbat counters are the answer. Chunnilal Tanwar on Old Jail Road, opposite the Elgin school, has been pouring flower and fruit concentrates into clay kulhads since 1939 — gulab, khus, kesar, paan, and bela in summer.

In 1877, under Maharaja Dungar Singh, the palace kitchens at Bikaner were asked for a new savoury to put in front of guests. What came back was a fine fried noodle, and it was named Dungarshahi bhujia after the man who ordered it. For decades it stayed a Bikaner thing. What made it national was one man and one substitution. Ganga Bishan Agarwal — known everywhere as Haldiram Ji — took bhujia commercial from his own shop in Bikaner and replaced much of the chickpea besan with flour ground from moth beans, which thinned the strands and gave them the flavour people now expect. Published accounts put that shop anywhere between 1918 and 1946, so treat any single date you are handed with suspicion. His business became Haldiram's. Bikaji, the other Bikaner name on supermarket shelves, is a separate and much later company: Shiv Ratan Agarwal, Ganga Bishan's grandson, started it in 1986 as Shivdeep Food Products and took the Bikaji name in 1993. Bikaneri bhujia now carries a Geographical Indication tag, which reserves the name for registered producers inside the protected territory — the word travels, the licence does not. Making it is still largely a cottage industry spread through the villages around the city, and much of that work is done by women. The sweets need less explaining. This is a milk-and-ghee town on old desert trading routes, and the rasgulla, the milk cake and the morning kachori counters all sit on that.