A Thousand-Year-Old Telugu Delicacy
“Vadalu, mandega laadwamulu penilu kadu mettanagu palagarelu
saaresattulu navugulu chimmitundalunu….”
These lines appear in the PrabhulingaLīlā, a fifteenth-century poetic work by Chamarasa, a Kannada–Telugu poet and a Veerashaivasaint, patronized by King Devaraya of the Vijayanagara Empire. Composed around 1430 CE, the poem celebrates the spiritual life and miracles of Allama Prabhu. Among its many evocative images is the reference to exceedingly soft milk-soaked vadas. What exactly were these delicacies?
Food historian K. T. Achaya noted that the Sanskrit text Apabhraṁśa-trayī (c. 1000 CE) contains one of the earliest references to vadas soaked in milk or curd. The twelfth-century encyclopaedic work Mānasollāsa names vadas soaked in milk as kṣīra-vaṭikā and those soaked in curd as dadhi-vaṭikā. The continued presence of Telugu surnames such as Pālagāri itself attests to the antiquity of this culinary tradition.
Another early practice involved soaking vadas in kāñjika—a mildly fermented liquid prepared from rice-wash water or gruel. Such vadas were known as kāñjī-vaṭakas. Together, these references clearly establish milk-soaked vadas as a South Indian preparation with a history of over a thousand years.
Method of Preparation
A detailed recipe appears in the fifteenth-century culinary treatise Kṣemakutūhalam by Kṣemaśarma, under the name kṣīra-vaṭaka-vaṭī. De-husked black gram is soaked in milk, ground into a smooth batter, lightly seasoned with crushed pepper, and shaped into vadas, which are fried in ghee. These are then immersed in either thickened, sweetened milk or a light sugar syrup until they become exceptionally soft and absorbent. In both texture and conception, this preparation may be seen as an early precursor to later syrup-soaked sweets such as jangri.
The text employs the term naṣṭa-dugdha, often mistranslated as “spoiled milk.” Such an interpretation is misleading. Here, the term denotes milk reduced by repeated boiling until most of its water content has evaporated, yielding a thick, concentrated form. In Telugu, this is known as ānāvālu. Repeated boiling and cooling of milk destroys harmful bacteria—a principle later formalised as pasteurisation. Kṣemaśarma’s insistence on using such milk reflects an early awareness of food safety and hygiene.
In contrast, many modern milk-based sweets, such as the Bengali rasmalai, are prepared from curdled milk solids—an ingredient explicitly discouraged in classical Ayurveda. Our growing fascination with regional and imported confections has gradually obscured the nutritional wisdom embedded in traditional foods.
Revisiting preparations such as milk-soaked vadas is not an exercise in nostalgia alone. It is an invitation to rediscover a culinary heritage where taste, health, and cultural memory coexisted in quiet harmony.
- Dr. G. V. Poornachand
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