Bakrid is just around the corner

After the weekend actually. ONE more long weekend and I will scream. My body’s internal clock has completely gone awry. I was thinking that today was Saturday because it was a holiday again.

So, as I was saying, Bakrid is around the corner and I don’t know whether to be glad we’re no longer in the olden days or sad that I’m glad about it. I considered describing how we would watch the goats get sacrificed and then decided against it. For a number of reasons which I won’t outline here. Suffice it to say that it would make the readers want to head for the nearest exit.

Instead, since this is a food blog, I thought I could talk about the different food that we end up eating during Bakrid. Then I realised I had already done a post on that some eons ago called Bakrid Blues on my other blog. I don’t know how many readers would have read it but since there’s very little to change, I’m just re-posting it here.

Also as I said before, I’m lazy.

Bakrid Blues

It goes to show a lot about how different my husband and I are. Bakrid is one of his favourite festivals. And why shouldnt it be? He gets to eat fried chops, kidneys in gravy, fried liver , paaya(trotters) and the famous dish from our family which is called awakery. Its nothing but meat cooked with minimum masalas, but meat with a lot of gristle and fat and it is cooked entirely in its own fat, with hardly any water. The result is a stringy yet tender meat preparation that never tastes the same apart from the time it is cooked at Bakrid.

Bakrid for me gives me horrors. It is at this time that I wonder, why oh why hadnt I been born in a Brahmin family? I would have been SO happy eating dal and poriyal and other such stuff and would never have wanted to look at a goat ever again. And all this, with my mother and mother in law being the people who sit down among mounds of meat, dividing it into polythene packets for distribution. Imagine if I had to do it??!!

When I was small, Bakrid was exciting. All the families would congregate in Vellore.All those goats lined up in the house a day before, and we children would vie with each other to feed it leaves and all that. The next day, we would wait excitedly for the maulvi and watch the slaughter with a lot of relish. Yes. Relish. I think all children have the stomach for the macabre.

Its the stomach to actually eat all this stuff is what I don't possess. The one Bakrid that really put me off was a year that most of the children(now young adults like moi) remember very well. We were together in our misery here.

The adults ( and a few kids of our family) go berserk during bakrid. My aunts cooked ‘sutriyan’(its like biryani, but without rice. In stead theres rice flour dough shaped into long fingers or balls and its cooked in the biriyani masala) with the head meat. I distinctly remember us sitting down for lunch and all of us were totally grossed out when Jun(my bro) dished out an eye. Yes. An eye. AARRRRGHH! There was the smell of blood in the air, the sickening sweet smell that seems to seep into your pores and whichever way you turn, it is all that you smell. The water in Vellore, tepid already with heat, smelt of blood and meat and it turned our stomachs each time we took a sip. Someone had kept a vessel full of water in the fridge to cool. I distinctly remember dipping a glass in the water and drinking it, only to find it smelt of meat, blood and even mogra flowers! Courtesy, one of my aunts who had kept a bunch of mogra flowers in the fridge to prevent them from getting stale.:-|

As if this isnt enough, what is worse is facing the accusing looks from the elders. They are shocked that we cannot stomach the idea of eating boti(intestines) or sira(head meat). And we have to listen to taunts from the elders, who shake their heads at us and tch tch among themselves, and talk of how they used to fight with each other when they were small, to get the best pieces or whatever.

For me, it is worse. My father was exactly like my husband. He loved everything about bakrid. And naturally, I get to hear a lot of this….’How did she turn out like this?’

One would wonder why I’m cribbing so much about this now. From the past few years my mother and mother in law have been giving the qurbani in the market itself and they bring only the meat at home. So, we are not witness to skinning and loops of intestines trailing on the ground. But somehow the meat during qurbani just has this smell, this awful warmth in it, that I cannot eat it without forcing myself.

At home, everyone is quiet when I mop up bread with gajar ka halwa and eat it wishing I could become invisible. I dont want them to stare at me, and wonder what is wrong with me…while they eat rotis in awakery with relish. All I can say..thank goodness bakrid is over!

Bakrid is yet to come now but I'm not that worried any more. Each year the processes become lesser and somehow more sterile, which kind of makes me sad also in a weird sort of way.

But of all the food that Bakrid results in, I can't imagine how I forgot to write about kabab. It's difficult to describe kabab because the name immediately brings to mind either seekh kababs or chicken tikka kababs which this is definitely not. What it is, is boneless pieces of meat, coated with masalas and strung together on twine. The twine is then hung up and left to dry in the sun until it becomes small and dried out. When it's completely dried, we take it down and for days or weeks after Bakrid we can take a piece, pound it on stone, break it into pieces and then deep fry it till it's crisp. It immediately makes even the most boring dish more palatable. This little almost charred piece of dried meat is almost the best part about Bakrid. Well almost.