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Whenever we enter a Bengali sweet shop, the most common expectation is to find huge, spherical whitebeauties dunked in dollops of sugar syrup aka chashni. Then there are those soft and melt-in-your-mouth chenna (paneer) sandesh. While these commercial sweets are famous worldwide and people keeping hunting for that authentic taste from one shop to another, there is another side of this coin too.
Flipping the coin, you would realize that apart from those mithais available in the markets, there are homemade specialities too. That’s how the Bengali mishthan culture works (if that’s a thing). They’ve got a list of professional sweets that you can get from outside and then the ghar ki mithai, which often neglected or unknown to rest of the cultures. How did I discover this?
Well, I had a Bengali friend once, back in my college days. This one time that my friends and I hung out at her place, her mother brought a tray full of snacks. A glass of sherbet along with a bowl of small, white, spherical things which looked familiar to me. I said to her, “Shouldn’t you be serving us rasgullas (in my usual dialect)” to which she responded, “that’s for special festivities, this is our homemade Nadu”. I became quite curious about this differentiation and just popped on in my mouth. Suddenly, it struck me, this is like our ladoo. She just chuckled and left.
Nadus or narus are nothing but a Bengali version of homemade ladoos. The most popular ones being narkel nadu (coconut ladoos) and til’er nadu (sesame ladoos). Most of these homemade mithais are made using puffed rice, coconut, sesame, sugar and lots of ghee.
If this is making you drool, I wonder what will happen once you try this Narkel Nadu recipe by Better Butter.
