Just Ghee

                                                          Ma's Home Made Ghee

My grandmother made fantastic ghee.  There was always a very large bottle in her meat safe and sometimes when she had extra we would be the lucky recipients.  She would collect the butter from the milk from her buffaloes and cows and make it into delicious ghee that we would pour over rice and dhal or ganji (rice porridge) or payasam blissfully ignorant of the calories it contained.  My Mum also made delicious ghee.  She would get some local milkman to deliver milk, collect the cream that rose to the top the next day after boiling and cooling the milk and when she had enough of cream, she would make it into the rich, creamy, golden yellow, buttery, rich concoction we all loved.  As a special treat both she and my Grandmother would boil a few betel leaves along with the cream and we would greedily wait for them to be shared out to us once the ghee was done.  Just looking at this photograph evokes the most heavenly smells and scrumptious tastes.  Food eaten with a dollop of ghee is like none other.

4 to 6 cups of cream collected over a period of three to four weeks.  Store it in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator till required; 4 betel leaves (The betel (Piper betle) is the leaf of a vine belonging to the Piperaceae 

Bring the cream to room temperature.  Pour it into a large, heavy bottomed pan.  Place the pan on the fire at medium heat.  Throw in the washed and dried betel leaves.  Bring to the boil and then simmer until the solids sink to the bottom.  Skim off the foam from the top. Simmer for 10 to 15 minutes.  Cool and strain with a fine wire mesh strainer into a glass bottle so that the beautiful colour can be seen.  You can either eat the milk solids with a little bit of sugar or add it to your puri or chappathi dough and enjoy that one in a million taste and sensational aroma.

                                                   

  

Ruth Isaac

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