Recipe for Bhutwa from Dehradun

At Goya, celebrating home cooks and recipes have always been at the heart of our work. Through our series, #1000Kitchens, we document recipes from kitchens across the country, building a living library of heirloom recipes that have been in the family for 3 generations or more. In this edition, Sanskriti Bist visits her home in Dehradun to learn how to cook bhutwa (offal), from her mother, Meenu. The dish was a favourite during Holi and involved hours sauteeing the offal and spices till they coalesce to make a delicious dish.

This season’s stories are produced in partnership with the Samagata Foundation—a non-profit that champions meaningful projects.

“You can’t shoot me right now, I haven’t put on kajal or lipstick!” my mother exclaims as she runs in front of the mirror. It is an ordinary June summer morning in Dehradun; it has rained slightly and the sun was just brightening up again, bringing the humidity, or as we say chipchipahat, along with it. “When I was young, Dehradun wasn’t this hot at all. During this month, I would be putting on a sweater and getting ready for Hukkum Uncle and his white horse carriage to come and pick me up from school.” She carries her hanky in her purse and puts on shoes as we make our way to the butcher shop.

Meenu Bist, my mother, is a talkative woman. It was hard to shoot this video without her talking about every tiny personal detail of her life. There are complaints about the state of her beloved Dehradun: “The roads are just potholes now.” And: “Do you see that tree? You think we can ask them if we can cut down this rubber plant? It would look so nice in the corner of our terrace, na?” She actually has a knife handy.
A lot of people who have met her tell me I am exactly like her but honestly, I am just aspiring to be her.

As we reach the butcher shop, she asks for a kilo of bhutwa, the offal of mutton. I ask her, “Why one kilo? It’s just the three of us at home, and I’m just visiting for the week, and my brother lives on another continent.” “Your Uncle’s son loves it, I’ll make it for their family also.” How could I forget, my mother’s love language is sharing food. “You know my nani used to buy eight or nine kilos of bhutwa? It feels so bad buying such a small quantity. You kids don’t know what it’s like living with so many people, the amount of fun you have when you grow up in a large family with all of your cousins.”

When my grandparents got married, they had just shifted to Delhi. My grandfather worked for the central government and my grandmother had her own tailoring company. Within a year of their marriage, they had my mother and they realised it was difficult handling a child by themselves when they were both working, so they dropped my mother for a couple of months at my great-grandmother’s house in Dehradun. She and her husband loved my mom so much they refused to send her back, and that’s how my mom spent her entire 23 years of existence in Dehradun until she got married, travelled around the entire world and came back to her favourite town in India.

My great-grandmother, Chandrakala Chauhan, had 12 children, six were her own and six were from her husband’s previous marriage, but she raised them all like her own. And so my mom grew up in a lovely huge haveli, with acres of litchi trees in the back, cows grazing on hay, stretches of plums, chillies, mangoes being dried on top of the terrace to be pickled, random puppies and kittens running around that she used to bring home every other week, and all of her cousins playing cricket. She often says that T20 is nothing and they were the inventors of T10.

“Bhutwa was only made at Holi,” — the butcher uncle has chopped and cleaned all the innards, stomach and lungs and gives them to us in a plastic bag. We walk back home now. “Your great-grandmother was famous for her cooking, everyone from around Dehradun would come to our house to eat bhutwa and dahi vada.” (And of course bhang, stories I’ve heard of how much the family once drank and couldn’t stop laughing for hours.)

As we reach home, she gathers wood her neighbour has gotten from her village in Garhwal. She lights it with a matchstick under a steel choolah she had bought from a man travelling in a cart selling kitchen utensils. She cleans the bhutwa and gets an iron kadhai out from the kitchen and places it on top of the choolah that is now burning hot. “Did you know this kadhai is 60 years old? My father got it from Calcutta when he was visiting his sister. It’s the only thing I asked for when the house got destroyed.” Great grandmother's house had been sold two decades ago after she had passed away and had been replaced by a Bata store. One litchi tree remains, a small memory of what was once her childhood.

She adds the garlic and ginger paste in heaps to the hot mustard oil, slowly adding in the bhutwa, salt, turmeric, coriander and red chilli powder. “It’s honestly a very simple dish, the hard part is waiting for it to cook. My nani used to start this process at 7 am and ask all my uncles to bhuno it till 11 am before the guests arrived for Holi. There were so many of them, they used to make schedules for themselves on who would bhuno at what time. It was such a good childhood.” These days my mother also sometimes pressure cooks it for when she has to make it quickly but, of course, the taste isn’t the same.

The two of us go back inside, relieving ourselves from the heat, taking turns to move the bhutwa in the kadhai, occasionally adding water if it’s gotten too dry. “Dehradun isn’t the same as it was in my childhood. I miss those days and I miss the city it used to be,” she says, wiping the sweat off her forehead with her hanky. It’s almost time and we can smell the bhutwa wafting through the garden. My dad has poured beer; bhutwa is our family’s favourite chakna and a small ode to what Holi used to be back in my mother’s childhood. She places the dish in front of us, “Here you go, bhutwa is ready!”

MEENU BIST’S RECIPE FOR BHUTWA

Ingredients

1 kg mutton offal
7–8 tbsp mustard oil
30 g ginger
20 g garlic
1 tbsp red chilli powder
1 tbsp turmeric powder
1 tbsp coriander powder
Salt

Method

Heat mustard oil on medium-high heat until the oil starts smoking.
Add the ginger and garlic paste.
Add offal.
Add red chilli powder, turmeric, coriander powder, salt and a little water to make a thick paste.
If cooking on a chulha, mix for 3–4 hours; otherwise 35–40 minutes in a pressure cooker on low simmer after one whistle on high heat.

Words, photographs by Sanskriti Bist. Artwork by Shivam Choudhary.
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