At my previous job, every week was punctuated by a Chandni Chowk expedition, sometimes not entirely voluntary. “But I don’t want to eat aloe vera halwa!” I’d wail to my editor, who’d been told about this peculiar dessert by a friend at a party (you can find it at Shireen Bhavan, in case you’re interested).

I don’t return on a weekly basis anymore, but I always like to go back for a kebab-punctuated wander through the lanes. The walled city in the daytime is quite different from its night-time avatar. During the day, only the chaat shops, Marwari bhojanalayas and khomchawalas (itinerant peddlers) are around. By the evening though, the kebab-sellers arrive with their skewers, ready for business.

On this particular day, however, I had lured two friends into coming along by saying “kebabs” repeatedly. Now, it was 40ºC, and I was feeling the pressure, like a guide on a safari when neither the tourists nor the tigers will cooperate.

“And here,” I beamed, like a magician, “is a great kachoriwala!”

Everyone looked alarmed, and mumbled sheepishly that they didn’t really want a kachori or a korma or a jalebi, and could we get some cold drinks, please?

To make matters worse, the Naughara golgappawala, with his pink and green golgappas, wasn’t at his usual spot; daulat ki chaat (a dewy, milky confection) isn’t available in the summer; and my favourite kebabwalas, in Ballimaran and Suiwalan, hadn’t arrived yet. And even though Paranthewali Gali was open, its ghee-fried paranthas doing brisk business, no one really felt up to eating a deep-fried frisbee of dough either.

In the gali, a man was delivering blocks of ice by cycle, unconcerned that half his shipment was melting in the sun. He entered a shop, and the three of us watched, like fans staring at an ephemeral art installation, as every single passerby snaked a hand over the remaining ice, and then over their foreheads, eager to sneak a little bit of cool for themselves.

We trailed after him to the khurchanwalas in Kinari Bazaar. In comparison to the paranthawalas, who have been around since the 1850s, Hazari Lal Jain Khurchanwale is the new kid on the block here, only about a 100 years old. The owner once tricked me into eating a piece of parwal (pointed gourd) mithai, but I decided to let that pass, since I could see that the counter was piled with fresh khurchan.

Sometimes at Hazari Lal’s you see two men inside the shop stirring boiling milk around fat kadhais and scraping the top off to the side. Khurchan means ‘scrapings’: full-fat buffalo milk is boiled down for hours until only the thickened scrapings are left at the bottom. They’re gathered up, pressed into a slab and sprinkled with pista and sugar to make one of the simplest, gentlest desserts around, cold and creamy.

Re-enthused, I tried to think of more summery things to eat. We took a cycle-rickshaw to Lal Kuan, where we fell upon Bade Mian’s caramel-brown kheer. At Ashok Chaat Bhandar, next to Chawri Bazaar metro, we shared a plate of paapri chaat, and then walked towards Sitaram Bazaar. I was looking for Kuremal Mohanlal Kulfiwale and its neighbour Lala Dulli Chand Naresh Gupta Kulfiwale, both of whom make some of the area’s most expensive, but best kulfi. I led the way down Kucha Pati Ram with its curly wooden balconies and stopped short in front of the shuttered Kuremal’s shop. “No!” I squeaked, stricken, like a sherpa who has miscalculated a step. I rang the shop; the man on the other end laughed at my panic. “Come to the Sunehri mandir, we have another dukaan.”

Next to the Sunehri mandir, swathed in tinsel and marigolds for Janmashtami, we came to a shopfront devoid of any signs of kulfi save an unplugged steel freezer and a mortar and pestle. A man sitting on a plastic chair looked knowingly at us. “So you want kulfi?” he said, as if he was conducting a drug deal. “Phalsa, one, stuffed mango, one?”

“How did you know?” I said, astonished.

He smiled, rolled up his sleeves, and walked away, whistling. Five minutes later, a little boy appeared, with two plates of kulfi, and four waxed paper napkins.

The stuffed mango kulfi at Kuremal’s is a work of art, based perhaps on the best idea in the world — replace the seed of a mango with ice cream. It comes quartered on a leaf dona, the centre a solid mass of condensed, cold rabri kulfi, encircled by frozen Alphonso mango flesh. You almost can’t tell where the ice cream ends and the mango starts: everything is dense, creamy, icy and voluptuous at once. I looked at my friends, standing sweatily and rapturously around a leaf plate like a Nativity scene, and I felt like a successful sherpa after all.

( Naintara Maya Oberoiis a food writer based in Paris )

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