Note 3 — Halwai

The ingredients of a Halwai’s sweets are wheat and gram-flour, milk and country sugar. Those called batāshas consist merely of syrup of sugar boiled with a little flour, which is taken out in spoonfuls and allowed to cool. They are very easy to make and are commonly distributed to schoolboys on any occasion of importance, and are something like a meringue in composition. The kind called barafi or ice is made from thick boiled milk mixed with sugar, and is more expensive and considered more of a treat than batāshas. Laddus are made from gram-flour which is mixed with water and dropped into boiling butter, when it hardens into lumps. These are taken out and dipped in syrup of sugar and allowed to cool. Pheni is a thin strip of dough of fine wheat-flour fried in butter and then dipped in syrup of sugar. Other sweets are made from the flour of singāra or water-nut and from chironji, the kernel of the achār3 nut, coated with sugar. Of ordinary sweets the cheaper kinds cost 8 annas a seer of 2 lb. and the more expensive ones 10 or 12 annas. Sweets prepared by Bengali confectioners are considered the best of all. The Halwai sits on a board in his shop surrounded by wooden trays of the different kinds of sweets. These are often covered with crowds of flies and in some places with a variety of formidable-looking hornets. The latter do not appear to be vicious, however, and when he wishes to take sweets off a tray the Halwai whisks them off with a palm-leaf brush. Only if one of them gets into his cloth, or he unguardedly pushes his hand down into a heap of sweets and encounters a hornet, he may receive a sting of which the mark remains for some time. The better-class confectioners now imitate English sweets, and at fairs when they retail boiled grain and ghī they provide spoons and little basins for their customers.