The Family of Falooda

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This is the culminating step 3 of falooda-making. Step 1 involved making your own rose syrup and Step 2 was about making rose petal ice cream. Now for the falooda–its layers and its genealogy, reaching all over India and Asia & the recipe itself.

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Falooda. A rich drink, of perhaps Turkish or Persian origin, a favourite of Emperor Jahangir, and described as a jelly made from the strainings of boiled wheat, mixed with fruit juices and cream. A simpler form of falooda, with a body of softboiled sago granules (replacing a type of soft seed that swelled in water), with added cream, fruit, jam and ice, was once an item served by Irani restaurants in India.
–K. T. Achaya, “falooda,” in A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food, 1998, p.65

Falooda or, more properly, faloodeh makes me realize that there is a whole family of layered, multi-textured sweet beverages sold mainly by street vendors from the Indian subcontinent and throughout South East Asia. Think of it, tracing an arc from the Indian subcontinent and then further east through to the Philippines:

• Falooda
• Sugandhi Katora [and multiple variations of katire ka sharbath; literally, Indian sarsaparilla/nannari + badam pisini/gond katira]
• Jil-jil Jigarthanda [literally, the cold-cold which cools the heart]
• Chè Ba Màu [literally, 3-colored dessert]
• Ais kacang [literally, red azuki beans+ice]
• Eis cendol or es cendol [literally, ice+cendol]
• Boba tea [literally, milk tea with boba]
• Halo-Halo [literally, “mix-mix”]
• Hawaiian shave ice [literally that & not “shaved” ice]

A whole family of chilled summer drinks that need always to be served with a spoon–and which were always, if nothing else, sweet.

Intoxicating Sweetness & Medicine

Via one route or other, each of these drinks track a lineage back to the originary sharbat, an icy liquid whose name “derives from the medieval Arabic sharāb,” which produced two distinct but related meanings: a drink or water dosed with medicinal herbs and other potions, and alcohol [Weir & Quinzio 608]. Early sharbats were regarded as intoxicants and love potions from the Middle East all the way to India; one didn’t have them in the presence of a would-be mother-in-law, lest she worry about what such habits would then demand of her precious daughter [Hospodar 21].

But the intoxication of the sharbat was its sweetness, and that sweetness came from honey, sugar, a variety of fruits or scented flowers or roots and particularly their syrups. Sugar, it must be said, was thought to possess medicinal properties. The first European confectioners were the apothecaries and their ideas about sugar and the conveyance of good health came from the Arabs, who had gleaned the insight from none other than the Indians. For it was in India that sugar cane was first refined into sugar, and where the association of sugar with wellness was established. The Caraka Samhita “offers one of the earliest references to sugar’s medicinal value: ‘The juice of the sugarcane, if the stalk is chewed with the aid of the teeth, increases the semen, is cool, purges the intestines, is oily, promotes nutrition and corpulency and excites the phlegm'” [quoted in Albala, 439]. Taken to China by the Buddhists, sugar was thought to nourish the spleen, strengthen the qi, and generate bodily fluids.

To boot, sugar was a conveyance for other medicines, and could be mixed with gum Arabic or gum tragacanth to make a malleable paste that resembles today’s pastillage [the harder-drying equivalent of fondant], cut into tablets and so on. It is perhaps this history that has led to the use of badam pisini or gond katira, which is none other than gum tragacanth, in sharbats such as sugandhi katora and jil-jil jigarthanda themselves, otherwise their use there is just much too much of a coincidence, even though the gums in Indian use are thought to possess their own body-cooling properties. More on that later.

So sugar was the medicine, or sugar conveyed the medicine. Centuries on, rooh afza was formulated for the purpose of body-cooling in summers, based on Unani medicinal insights, and those who served water to travelers [in days before the pyau became a common urban feature] would invariably offer things medicinal.

Sweetness, medicinal properties, and then there is ice.

Ais, Eis, Ice, Baby

Ice was central to it all. The way K.T. Achaya tells it, ice was once brought down from the Himalayan heights, by land or by river; then there is a record in the Ain-i-Akbari of at least one boat arriving at Lahore (then the capital) daily. Abdul Fazl notes that Akbar introduced saltpeter for cooling water, though in Allahabad other techniques made use of buried porous vessels to conduce ice-formation in months when temperatures were close to freezing, but never below it [Achaya, “Ice,” 1998: 102]. On September 6, 1833, the Tuscany arrived at the Calcutta port carrying a cargo of American ice–and so began the Indo-American ice trade through the “zenithal years” of 1840-1870, the venture of one “Frederic Tudor, the 21-year-old scion of a poor but ‘brahminical’ Boston family” [Dickason, 56]. Thoreau would muse that soon “the waters of my beloved Walden will blend with the sacred waters of the Ganges,” and the first American Consul-General would be appointed in Bombay in 1838 as a result of this trade. But then the Tudor Ice Company’s costs rose and manufactural ice started to become available, and the Bengal Ice Company and the Crystal Ice company commenced to compete for control of Calcutta’s ice markets. By the time of Indian Independence, block ice was manufactured in major cities had become a commodity that could be ordered for anything from packing perishables or for train journeys, to keep certain train compartments cool.

It was then a matter of time before shaved ice would become a regular sharbat or other summer cooling feature. “Ice laddoos” were once peddled by push-cart vendors in the early decades of the 20th century and all the way into the 50s and 60s: erragaa, thellagaa, ice laddoo, ice laddoo [in red, in white, ice laddoo, ice laddoo] was a common Telugu call for a simple ball of shaved ice, hand-shaped and dressed with syrups and milks in bright, attractive colors.

Here is one account from Singapore, which followed a trajectory almost identical to India’s in this regard, and which will no doubt have resonance for many Indians with memories of the same historical period:

“In my early schooldays (the mid-1930s), the ‘ice seller’ was a familiar sight on Singapore roads… he was usually a South Indian Muslim, perhaps Malayalee Kaka, with the push-cart that was common to hawkers of those days. It had a galvanized zinc top, on which were placed his ‘stock-in-trade’ – transparent glass containers of various cold sweetened drinks. As well as bottled fizzy drinks on the ‘shelves’.

Solid blocks of ice with saw-dust for insulation were kept in a small box – usually on the ground below. A wooden block in the middle of which was a sharp knifeblade jutting out slightly was placed handily on the zinc, and when required, the ice-block would be slid over it to produce ice-shavings, which would be expertly moulded into balls, and sugary-syrup of choice poured over it. I think the ‘kachang’ was added to be in the centre, with more ice-shavings to cover it – this on request. This anyway is my earliest recollection of ‘kachang ice-ball’/’ice-kachang’. The finished product cost a cent, or at most two. (N. Narayanan, in correspondence with authors, 6 Nov 2019)” [Pakiam & others, 28].

Ais kachang is quite literally azuki beans and ice, which, by the 1940s had evolved into a dish that layered ice over a small pile of red beans, a grape-like fruit, syrup, and tinned milk [Pakiam & others, 27]. It was special because ice desserts were special, a middling middle-class treat.

The chewy-jelly layer

Sweetness, medicinal properties, ice, and now red or azuki beans–but red beans are typically a South East Asian addition, never featuring in any sharbat this side of Malaysia. Early faloodas, on the other hand, made use of “the strainings (gluten) of boiled wheat, gelatinous seed granules (for which a later substitute was sago)” and were sometimes described more as a jelly than as a drink (Achaya, 25). There was even a drink called the “fuqqa, served at the court of the Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was based on barley” (Achaya, 25).

So it would appear that the ais kachang’s red beans stand in for the chewy, gelatinous layer of these various iced beverages. But that layer can be produced by any number of other, comparable things. Eis Cendol makes use of green, pandan-flavored rice jellies; the word “cendol” derives from jendol which means “bulging” or “swollen” or even “bumping”–a reference to the swelling in size of these jellies when immersed in liquid. Cendol varieties are many, depending on the combinations of ingredients used, but their common feature is the green worm-like jelly:

• Cendol biasa uses just coconut milk and green jellies;
• cendol pulut uses glutinous rice;
• cendol kachang uses the red beans and so on.

And these regional variants:

• mont let saung in Myanmar,
• lot chong in Thailand, and
• bánh lọt in Cambodia …

all are essentially cendol-like green jellies, coconut milk, and palm sugar syrup. The Vietnamese chè ba màu adds an additional layer of mung beans for the three layers of its name: red beans, mung beans, cendol. The famed and beloved Filipino halo-halo uses red beans and often nata de coco or a coconut gel made by fermenting coconut water.

Even boba tea or bubble tea or pearl milk tea which has been all the rage the world over from the 1980s on bears an uncanny resemblance to cendol–even though the master story told about boba tea’s invention is one of entrepreneurial flashes of inspiration that catapulted one Tu Tsung-ho of the Hanlin Tea Room to global fame. Of course, his claim to inventor status did not go uncontested. A competitor tea house Chun Shui Tang counter-claims that a young female employee, Lin Hsiu-hui, was really this drink’s inventor and the tea houses went to court over their boba dispute. Whoever did or did not improve on the existing sharbats and cendols with the addition of black tea, the idea of such a drink itself was not unfamiliar in the region. No surprise then that many bubble tea houses expand their chewy additive options to grass jelly, almond jelly, and red beans. And, true to its origins in the lineage of some old sharbat, boba tea is nothing if not intensely sweet.

Fruits are another chewy addition: chopped jackfruit, chopped nungu or ice apples are preferable to softer fruits like mango or banana. Some cendol variations use many fruits, others not at all, though halo halo produces a virtual riot of flavors and textures by using azuki beans and several fruits in its mix-mix.

Now, the Javanese claim cendol as their own citing its appearance as “dawet” in the Kresnayana manuscript which tells the stories of Krishna’s love for Rukmini, and dates back to the 12th century Javanese Kediri Kingdom. Eis Dawet is synonymous with Eis Cendol. If this is the case, then the Persian origin theory for all the layered drinks of this region goes out because there have possibly been indigenous counterparts that are, indeed, very similar. It’s possible therefore that there are two families of drinks in the region, the one South Asian coming from Persian influences far west, and the other South East Asian coming from Javanese influences far east.

The only thing that’s incontrovertible and unites them all is the fact that the Brits brought manufactural ice into all these many layered sweet drinks and chilled from without what was all presumably already cooling from within.

Indian texture

If the gummy cendol of Indonesia takes the form of red beans in ais kachang, in India this chewy element enters in the forms of edible gums and/or jellies set with agar agar (“Chinagrass”).

Typically the gum added to summer drinks is gond katira, gum tragacanth, secreted by the Astragalus gummifer shrubs, and known in Tamil Nadu as badam pisin, even though it isn’t at all from any sort of almond tree. This is the base ingredient for the Madurai famous Jil-jil Jigarthanda, and the “katora” of the Andhra sugandhi katora, no doubt a local cousin to the katire ka sharbat of Pakistan’s hakimi street food traditions which have come into Punjab, Rajasthan, and much further south from there. These are cooling drinks, summer street food specials which essentially top a fragrant, flavored syrup with bloomed badam pisini and then milk. The syrups provide both sweetness and flavor, and the usual suspects are sugandhi (Indian sarsaparilla, or nannari) or something rose-based: a rooh afza (made from rose and kewra or screw pine flowers) or some thing similar. Gond katira sharbats can be made with just about anything (lime juice is another favorite addition), but these colored rosy versions are often the street cart vendors’ eye-catching offerings. [My thanks to Sangeeta Khanna, some of whose insights recorded here & also later in this section].

ASIDE 1: It’s a mystery how the name “badam” attaches to this form of pisini or gum. The word itself is a loanword from the Hindi बदाम (badām), which is a loanword from the Persian بادام‎ (bâdâm), which derives from Middle Persian wʾtʾm (wādām). Its foreign-ness and even its Persian-ness is contained in the word, but it’s often mistaken for naatuvadumai tree gum as a result, which it is not.

ASIDE 2: Gum acacia, gum arabica or the gond used to make gond ki ladooos in Rajasthan where the gum can be found and sothoura in Eastern UP, so named for its use of sounth or dry ginger, and gond ki halva is entirely different: it is warming, given to new mothers to help them regain strength post-delivery, and considered good for bones, joints, gut health and immunity boosting. It’s a winter food, much like sesame.

Falooda’s chewy layer is actually three. There is a jelly set with agar-agar, there are sabja seeds, basil seeds, or Turkmaria–which are inedible dry but which swell into a slippery and texturally intriguing granule in water, and finally there is the signature falooda sev.

Falooda sev calls to mind both the historical use of “the strainings (gluten) of boiled wheat” which Achaya mentions, as much as the stringy worms that are cendol. These days, falooda sev is made with corn starch, cooked to translucency, pressed into vermicelli-like noodles, stored in ice water, and then layered onto the emerging falooda. The use of falooda sev then makes thickened milk or cream and then even ice cream very logical additions, reminiscent of “seviyan kheer” that was also brought to India from Persian lands further West.

Creams and Ice creams

So, sweetness, medicinal properties, ice, a chewy layer that is anything from azuki beans and rice-based cendol to tapioca pearls to jellies and nata de coco, fruits and sabja seeds–and then there are the creams and ice creams.

Milks and creams or thickened/evaporated milk, on the one hand, and coconut milk on the other, seem interchangeable in these layered formulations, which invariably draw on one or the other. Royal faloodas use chilled kheer and extra nuts and raisins, all of which are a step away from ice creams themselves as the final topping. Kulfis were likely the original toppings; ice creams are the commercially available modern short-cut. If these drink recipes don’t call for cream in them, they may well call for ice cream on them. Sometimes they do both. Halo Halo needs a good ube ice cream, the jigarthanda’s ice cream gets called Bhai ice cream after the Madurai Muslim “Bhai” who first made it famous, and falooda, although less particular than its counterparts, does really well with rose, almond or pistachio ice creams (or kulfis) in keeping with its own riotous play of textures, flavors, and color.

Some sprinkled chopped nuts and finely shredded rose petals perhaps. A little crushed rock candy, if you like the texture. But that’s really it.

The Colors

Sweetness, medicinal properties, ice, a chewy layer, creams, ice creams (or kulfis)–and what of color? Color is not an ingredient per se, but an all-important aesthetic element that also distinguishes this whole family of chilled drinks. They’re not just layered, they’re brightly and exuberantly layered in living color. They’re not just a riot of taste and texture, they’re a riot of color.

Purple ube ice cream, red beans, yellow jackfruit and mango. The charm of the ice laddo was its coloring. Cendols are nothing without that radioactive green. Faloodas must be red-pink. And Hawaiian shave ice, a treat brought half-way-stateside by Japanese immigrants, must have a dozen colors even as it’s topped with mochi (that chewy layer) and, for that island fruity tang, li hing powder. 

Color must at some time have been only natural and therefore muted; color at some point became the artificial, exaggerated signature mark of the sharbat itself. Rose had to be an unbelievable pink. Bright greens and blues on ice had to catch eyes and fancies both. Color is the least important and the most important part of the falooda–to the point where a falooda isn’t a falooda if it isn’t intensely sweet, multiply textured, and riotously colored.

Though the Mangalorean favorite gudbud ice cream–from the Kannada “gadibidi,” or something a bit messy done in a hurry–has I think a different lineage and counts more as a sundae than a sharbat, it nonetheless exemplifies this penchant for color riots in cold Indian desserts. It’s a whole mess of variously colored ice creams, red jellies and fruits and nuts, all served together in a pile.

A Naturalist’s Falooda

The real charm of this drink gets lost, however, if it’s simply being bludgeoned like that with artificial over-the-top everything, flavor and color included. So, with a deep bow to all the amazing falooda wallahs who have brought this dish to each of our doorsteps, I offer here a version no falooda wallah can make, because truly it’s a long process with multiple steps. But all flavor and all color comes from flowers, leaves and the natural ingredients of falooda itself, with not a single artificial anything added in. To boot, although this dessert uses milk and cream (and honey in the making of rose syrup), it’s done sans gelatine and eggs, so it’s wholly vegetarian.

What the falooda needs are the following, to be prepared in this order:

1. Rose syrup
2. Rose-flavored ice cream
3. Pandan and rose jellies
4. Falooda sev
5. Sabja seeds

1. Rose Syrup

The rose syrup takes the longest, because it involves fermenting fresh, scented roses for a week or more and then extracting and sweetening the syrup for storage and use. There’s no heat applied to preserve the strongest and most intense of rose fragrance, so the whole process takes time.

A bonus is that the fermented rose petals become a home-made gulkand or “rose petal jam” that can be used in other desserts (such as this cardamom rose cake) or just on betel leaves for an after-heavy-meal-digestive. And the syrup can be used to make much more than just falooda: paneer soda, rose milk, ice creams, lemon sharbats and more.

I’ve detailed the syrup-making process in a separate post, so please head there first and then return here. If you really must, you can buy a bottle of Rooh Afza instead.

2. Rose Ice Cream

Rose ice cream makes use of fresh scented flowers, so the first step is to find good quality, organic/chemical-free edible scented roses. Here in the market we get desi gulab [Gruß an Teplitz] in abundance. These pass for the exquisite paneer rose/ பன்னீர் ரோஜா and maybe they’re a variety of it–and they give me both the color and fragrance I want, so they’re my choice. I don’t know for sure if they’re organic, so all I can do is wash-wash-wash them very well before I use them in my syrups and then in ice cream.

I’ve detailed the ice cream-making process in a separate post, so (again) please head there first and then return here. If you really must, you can use some good quality store-bought almond, pistachio or vanilla ice cream instead. Or, even better, some locally made kulfi.

3. Pandan and Rose Jellies

These are two jellies whose tastes complement well those of the other falooda layers though pandan is not traditional. Its bright green is a nice addition of color though. Making them is a cinch: get a syrup ready, set it with agar agar or chinagrass. You have the rose syrup already, so all you need is to juice a few pandan leaves for both color and flavor, sweeten the juice, and set with agar agar.

You can layer the jellies as you go. In fact, if you really wanted to, you could create very elaborate layered jellies with any number of edible flower colors as in the image below: hibiscus, parijat, pandan, shanku pushpam, and coconut white in between. But that’s maybe a separate dessert in its own right, with rather too many tastes to add to even the multiplicity of the falooda.

4. Falooda sev

After having made a big virtue out of not seeking coloration in rose ice cream, now I’m here to tell you how to get a perfectly rose pink falooda sev. The funny thing about the taste and color industries is of course that what we taste in a good blueberry ice cream may not be blueberry at all, but a hundred different tastes blended together by someone with incredible olfactory powers to produce “blueberry.” Same-same with rose. While my rose ice cream was indeed made with steeped rose petals, in the end I needed cardamom and vanilla to be convincing. It’s not rose, but “rose”—a scent evoked and enlarged not on the plate but in your perception.

And now with falooda sev, the color comes not from rose … but from hibiscus and shanku pushpam. Go figure? Rose by itself will make for a nice red syrup, but its color dissipates as quickly with heat as does its scent, and falooda sev-making takes heat. Hibiscus is hardier, so is called in to serve.

The process is very simple. A handful of hibiscus and shanku pushpam petals in hot water for 5 minutes gets you a magenta. Add lime (acid) and it becomes bright rooh afza red. When this is added to cornstarch of course it becomes at first salmon and then just pink—rose pink, blush pink. Add more sugar than you might have for regular falooda sev to counter the slight sourness of lime, and cook and press away for the loveliest of floral colors in your baby pink noodles.

Now I know that falooda sev and even cendol further east is made by dropping this hot roux into iced water—this keeps the noodles from sticking and preserves them for use later. The trouble with this method is it makes the noodles rather too delicate plus it takes away the color: hibiscus is water-soluble, even after heating. So I pressed wee pink idiappams onto a well-oiled banana leaf and covered them to set—that worked really well, even stored for a few days in the fridge, and you have the falooda sev pre-apportioned, ready-to-serve. I’m skipping the ice water method from here on.

Here’s the whole sev-making process in images:

Collect the flowers…

Extract color by steeping in hot water for a few minutes…

Mix with 1 cup of cornflour, 2-3 tablespoons sugar, and 3 cups of liquid (the color extract + water if needed) …

Heat this over a low flame, whisking constantly. It will thicken very quickly, so don’t leave it unattended even for a moment. Keep a little water handy in case it thickens too fast; the mixture is forgiving & will tolerate water additions mid-stream, provided you keep whisking vigorously. Once the paste is turning translucent, stop. Transfer to an idiappam press or sevai nazhi and press while hot into fine noodles, into an awaiting ice bath like so….

Or just on well oiled surfaces like so…

I prefer this method–you can store these, covered, in the fridge for a few days and use as needed.

5. Sabja Seeds

This last is the easiest–use a teaspoon of basil seeds for every 2 falooda servings or so. Keep this in a bottle which you can then store, refrigerated. Fill with water, just a little more than the level of the seeds. Let them bloom.

Assembling the Falooda

There is no right way to do this, so whatever works to get you the display you want is right. Ice creams and kulfis come last, jellies are usually tucked below, along with the falooda sev. Shaved ice is preferable texturally to whole ice, but it’s too hot for shaved ice to last but a few minutes here, so we just deal with the ice cubes being somewhat in the way.

Here’s the ordering I followed.

Jellies at the bottom, plus rose syrup (which was still runny and not treacle-like), then ice…

… then the sabja seeds, which trickle into nooks in interesting formations…

… then the falooda sev …

& finally a couple of good scoops of the rose ice cream. All this finished with shredded rose petals and some chopped nuts. A little powdered palm sugar rock candy for crunch.

And that is it really. The falooda in all its glorious layers of taste, texture, history, and inter-connectivity.

Sources

Achaya, K. T. 1998. A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Albala, Ken. 2015. “Medicinal Uses of Sugar.” In In The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets. Ed. Darra Goldstein. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 449-440.

Dickason, David G.. 1991. “The Nineteenth-Century Indo-American Ice Trade: An Hyperborean Epic.” Modern Asian Studies 25/1: 53-89.

Hospodar, Miriam Kasin. 2015. “Aphrodisiacs” In The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets. Ed. Darra Goldstein. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 20-22.

Pakiam, Geoffrey Kevin, Michael Yeo Chai Ming & others. 2020. “Culinary Biographies: Charting Singapore’s History Through Cooking and Consumption.” NHB HRG-024 Final Report.

Weir, Robin and Jeri Quinzio. 2015. “Sherbet” In The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets. Ed. Darra Goldstein. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 608-610.