The Milk Alchemist

Manick boils the fresh buffalo milk in a wok over an open flame. He stirs, thoughtful, coaxing his father’s dessert out of the thickening liquid.

I ask him how he will know when the milk has boiled enough.

“The milk will tell me.”

His laughter, made gravelly by the smoke of biddies, spills from the tea stall, into the chaos of Sudder Street. Manick grins at his own magic.

Chai on the Sidewalk

Helene and I met Manick when we sat on the tired wooden bench of his streetside tea stall, inches away from the endless parade of honking taxi cabs, hawkers, beggars, motorcycles, musical instrument peddlers, rickshaw pullers and the occasional goat herd. Manick’s place stood as an oasis amidst the chaos, and his masala chai – milk tea boiled with cardamom, sugar, cinnamon, ginger, and a few other spices – quickly marked the pace of our days.

At any time between 6 AM and 11 PM, walk west on Sudder Street from Mirza Ghalib Street, and you’ll find Manick busy at his stall, a little distance away from the statue of Indira Gandhi. Tall and narrow, Manick stands straight and firm, a biddie at his fingertips. Although he was born in the Indian state of Bihar, he and his wife raised their five daughters and two sons in Kolkata.

Manick is one of thousands of street food vendors and entrepreneurs in Kolkata, providing for his family through hard, unrelenting work, every single day of the year. Manick exhudes quiet strength, dignity, and pride in his work.

One taste of his yogurt, and you understand why. “This is the best yogurt I’ve tasted,” I told Helene the first time I tried it. “Like, ever.”

I told Manick. His eyes lit up.

Making Ghee

Turns out my appreciation of Manick’s yogurt was no coincidence. Manick makes his own yogurt daily from fresh buffalo milk, delivered straight from the countryside. “One hundred percent original,” he said.

To illustrate the quality of his yogurt, Manick set a curd to cook in a wok over coals. While the curd itself turned dark over the flames, a light green layer of fat began to float to the top. This is ghee, used ubiquitously in Indian cooking, and the byproduct of a long chain of transformations of fresh milk. The product is an allegedly healthier form of animal fat that has more in common with the lightness and color of olive oil than butter.

From a seemingly useless blob of yogurt curd, Manick had extracted a vital and healthy ingredient of Indian cooking. But the man was not done yet; he scraped the blackened bottom of his wok, threw in a pinch of cane sugar, and handed this to me on a plate. I tasted milk, and its caramelized sugar content.

Manick grinned. “This is called India!”

Here, nothing goes to waste. People make use of anything, from plastic bags to the mud on the streets. Manick, himself, keeps a bag of dried mud in his stand, from which he bakes his own charcoal ovens. By the time he’s done with them, they have turned red, baked for thousands of hours into the color of bricks.

Buffalo Milk Magic

Not content with making ghee, Manick makes a deal with us. I pay him in advance for two liters of buffalo milk, and return in the evening.

Manick’s father was a sweets maker, and knew no less than fifty-six sweets recipes. This recipe is one of them: with just two liters of buffalo milk, and a few spoonfuls of sugar, Manick sets about invoking some of his father’s magic. He sets the milk to boil slowly over coals.

After an hour of diligent stirring from Manick, his wife and two of his daughters, the milk acquires a shade of yellow. As the water boils away from the milk, the fat, sweet content begins to thicken. When the mixture reaches the consistency of cooking dough, I’m staring in amazement and disbelief.

After spreading it carefully about the wok until it looks like maple sugar, Manick throws in a few tablespoons of cane sugar, and forms the condensed buffalo milk into small, yellow balls.

He calls them amrit laddu, sweets made of amrit. The ambrosial substance is the antithesis of poison: whereas poison kills all those who ingest it, amrit nourishes anyone who feeds from it. Manick is right to call it thus: with a refreshingly low amount of unrefined sugar, even diabetics can enjoy the amazingly complex, delicate and fabulous concoction he has coaxed out of a simple jug of milk.

Sharing the Magic

I can see in his eyes that Manick is proud of his accomplishment. When he shares some with his daughters, they exclaim their enthusiasm. “Mind-blowing! You should be called Sweets-Maker.”

I joke to Manick that he will now have to bake amrit laddu every day for his children. Manick smiles, but shakes his head: he doesn’t have the money to make the sweets his father made on a regular basis. At $2 per pound, and two hours of preparation, they are too costly for him, both in terms of cost and time. And without a restaurant of his own, Manick cannot easily bake the recipe, which he could hope to sell for $8 at the market with some effort. So he goes on making tea, yogurt, chapati, rice and curry on the side of the street, day in and day out.

By financing the milk, I’ve given Manick a rare chance to practice his alchemy of milk. But sitting at his stall, watching his tired but shining eyes, sharing sweets and smiles with Manick and his family, I have no illusion about which of us was the most generous.

“Every man should know everything,” says Manick, who can bake his own ovens, prepare Ayurvedic medicine for his children, and coax amazing sweets out of milk. Watching him sift another pot of chai, I have to agree: my existence is richer for knowing him.