A burnt cake and a celebration of menstruation
A glimpse of the culinary highlights of the Odia festival, Raja Parba
It’s a festival that celebrates girls.
At the onset of the monsoons, for three days, girls in Odisha have a party. They wear new clothes, adorn themselves with jewellery and make up, visit their friends and play games, sing songs and ride on flower-bedecked swings, and indulge in a feast of sweets and cakes.
This annual festival (typically held between June 14 and 18) is Raja Parba or Raja. It’s a monsoon festival that celebrates the earth’s fertility, and by extension, that of unmarried girls who will go on to bear children.
Raja (pronounced raw-jaw) marks the beginning of the monsoon and the agricultural season. It is believed that Mother Earth or Bhumi Devi is menstruating and needs rest. In agricultural terms, it means the land has to heal from the summer heat and prepare itself for the wet season. On these three days, the soil isn’t touched or disturbed, and no tools are used, and girls aren’t allowed to walk barefoot.
As with every other Indian festival, food is an important part of Raja.
Especially pitha.
The star of the Raja celebrations is a burnt cake. Well, not exactly.
Pithas are typical cakes produced for various Odia festivals. For Raja, the main item is the poda pitha, a cake of rice powder, jaggery, coconut and ghee. Being the favourite, it understandably has a more laborious cooking process. “You start by washing rice — any fragrant rice — drying it and pounding it into a powder. Mix this with water, jaggery, peppercorn, bay leaf, cardamom, a little bit of camphor, sliced and grated coconut. Cook everything for 15 to 20 minutes on a low flame till it becomes a loose dough. Remove, wrap it in sal (teak) or banana leaf and then steam it,” says Sweta Biswal, home chef and recipe curator. Traditionally, she adds, poda pitha was slow-cooked in an earthen vessel on a wooden chulha. The dough was wrapped in the leaves and ‘stitched’ using twigs and greased with ghee. Embers were placed on top. This would cook slowly for hours, sometimes overnight, creating an intense caramelisation on the bottom. This ‘burnt’ part is what earned this pitha its name. Thee dough can be made with urad dal or biri, or a mixture of urad dal and rice flour.
As is befitting such an elaborate festival, poda pitha isn’t the only treat.
“We make a variety of pithas. You can’t just eat poda pitha every day,” says Usharani Tripathi, food historian and author of My Odia Kitchen. She elaborates on these varieties. There’s manda pitha, which is similar to a modak — it has dough of rice flour or rava, stuffed with coconut, jaggery, camphor, and spices like pepper, clove, cardamom and rolled into a ball. It is steamed or fried. Kakara pitha is similar except for its shape, flat and thick like a kachori. Arisa pitha uses a syrup of melted jaggery to cook the rice flour. The resulting dough is shaped like a kachori, sprinkled with sesame seeds and deep fried. Muan pitha has alternate layers of the batter (rice and urad dal) and stuffing (coconut, jaggery, dried fruits); it is steamed. Chakuli pitha is like a thick dosa or pancake, made plain or ‘namkeen’ with ginger, coriander, chillies or vegetables.
Other variations have to do with seasonality. “The end of summer means an abundance of fruits like mangoes (amba poda pitha) and jackfruit (panasa poda pitha) and even the juice of palmyra palm (tala podo pitha). Some even use pumpkin and bottle gourd,” adds Avinash Patnaik, home chef and food stylist.
In the olden days, says Biswal, cooking during Raja was limited. The prep done the day before involved cutting vegetables and grinding spices because people couldn’t use grinding stones or chulhas; the earth couldn’t be disturbed. Pithas, with their long cooking process, got prepared a day earlier, on Saja Baja. These cakes stayed fresh through the festival.
Urban living has changed the preparation of these cakes. Biswal makes her poda pitha in a cooker or in the oven, by lining her baking tray with sal leaves. There’s added luxury in the recipe too, in the form of khoya, cashew nuts, raisins and almonds, used for decoration. Sometimes people add chhena (cheese curd), whey, or khoya (dried milk solids) to make it richer.
Poda pitha seems like the perfect representation of the festival celebrating the earth: its ingredients are used in their pure form, and they symbolize the abundance of nature.
There’s more to Raja than just pitha.
There’s also paan.
“It is inseparable from the festival. Paan is traditionally associated with Mother Earth, fertility and shringar (loosely: decoration or accessory), so the connection,” says Tanushree Bhowmik, a food historian who runs the pop up, Fork Tales with her husband. The Raja Panna is a sweet paan with dried coconut, cardamom, clove, areca nut, fennel, candied fruits, with cherry and varq (silver leaf) for decoration. “Girls generally have a competition among themselves to see who can make the best designs. There are many ways of folding the betel leaf prepared with spices, competition among the girls to make it in different designs like flowers, stars, triangles, boats etc,” says Tripathi. Even paanwallahs get into the action, creating new shapes and variants with orange jelly, rasmalai, and even setting them on fire.
People relish paan, just like pitha, throughout the festival.
The other meals are simple. There’s chakuli pitha eaten with a manso jhola (a simple mutton curry) or mansa tarkari (mutton with vegetables). There’s the mixed vegetable, ghanta tarkari and the white pea ghuguni. Raw mangoes are dried, salted and cooked with a mustard paste in the ambula rai. There’s idli preferred for breakfasts, paired with ghuguni instead of chutney. Another preferred sweet dish is khiri or rice kheer.
On the last day, Basumati Snana, people bathe and worship the grinding stone — believed to represent Bhumi Devi, and some farming tools. The agricultural season has now begun.
“This is a festival that teaches us to be grateful for our food and how it appears on our plate,” says Patnaik.
