[NOTE: I interrupt my posts about my trip to India with a tribute to Indian fried bread. As one does…]

As we were leaving our hotel in Gwalior to catch the train to Khajuraho, the incredibly kind concierge insisted on packing a lunch for us to take along. She asked if we wanted poori, and Jaya replied that three would be fine. 
I was worried – we love poori (especially Jaya’s) and one apiece seemed like it wouldn’t be enough. “No way,” I replied. “We’ll probably need at least five.”
Jaya just shook her head as the huge bag was handed over. Sure enough, when we unwrapped it on the train, there were fifteen pooris. (I’m ashamed to admit I ate three of them.) [image credit: pixabay]

More than fifty years ago Jaya went into the kitchen of our shared apartment in Chicago’s Hyde Park and made magic. At least, that’s what it seemed to me, not to mention Janine, our other roommates, and a generous selection of homesick Indian graduate students (all male).

Making puri back in the day. NOTE: This is not Jaya, Janine, and Barb. I don’t think we were ever that attractive, and I’m sure we were never that young. (Image credit: Canva AI. But to see real pooris cooking, check out the first few seconds of THIS video. Then go out to your favorite Indian restaurant, because honestly, you’ll just never make them as well.)

Jaya would take tiny balls of dough, flatten them into a perfect circle, and drop them into hot oil. Each poori would puff into a golden fried balloon, so delicious we had to eat them immediately instead of waiting for the dinner they were meant to accompany.To a bunch of poor starving students, this seemed miraculous. Janine and I watched Jaya cook and tried to write down her recipes (which tended toward, “Put enough of this thing in. Unless you don’t have it. Then put in some of that thing, but not too much.”) But try as we might, we could never quite duplicate the golden fried delight of Jaya’s poori making. And from this, I learned one of my two all-important life lessons:

There are some things that other people really can do better than you.*

*The other lesson is that when assembling your scone, the clotted cream goes first, with the jam on top. (If you put jam first and then clotted cream, the cream is reluctant to spread and achieve optimal scone coverage. You are at risk of bites that contain little or even no cream. An unacceptable risk.)

Just as french bread is never quite as good outside of France, the best fish and chips really have to come from a seaside town in the UK and not your air fryer, the best bagels are in New York, and the best hotdog* comes from Chicago, the best pooris come from India. So one of the things I most look forward to on our annual meetups in India is the chance to eat perfect pooris. This slight addiction is mostly manageable, which is good because our little island in Scotland doesn’t have a 12-step program for Indian fried bread addicts.

*NOTE: Chicago hot dogs properly prepared are called ‘dragged through the garden’ —all beef  on a sesame seed bun, topped with mustard, relish, celery salt, chopped onions, sliced tomatoes, kosher pickle, and sport peppers, and NEVER defiled with ketchup, thank you very much—