At the peak of winter, Jangpura residents who care about good food stop ordering naans from the local Afghan bakery. In the extreme cold, those large, sturdy flatbreads will lose their savour, unlike the butter-spiked naans more commonly available across Delhi, and become less toothsome. They can be reheated, but the correct etiquette for eating Afghan naans in cold weather is to brave the bylanes of Bhogal, stand there at the shop, and scarf down your outsize, tablecloth of a naan with a handful of kababs and rough-chopped onions.
The flatbread family — naans, sheermal, rotis, taftoon — predate the invention of the croissant by several centuries (early versions of naan are mentioned in ancient Egyptian papyri) but these two forms of bread, like most of the world’s truly great breads, have one thing in common: they are best eaten fresh. Most croissants in India, as food critic Vikram Doctor laments, don’t taste right, in part because unless bakeries are working with imported flour, they may not have the right measure of gluten in the flour.
Croissants, which became popular in 1889 at the Paris World Fair where these crescent-shaped rolls caught the fancy of the French gourmanderie, must also be eaten fresh. I’m a fan of some of my neighbourhood bakeries: the old-fashioned Defence Bakery in Defence Colony Market, the new Ploof Deli in Lodi Colony Market and the bakeries at the Oberoi and the Claridges. But it’s hard to find a really great croissant; and when you do, bear in mind that croissants and baguettes in particular are not breads built to last.
The magic of the perfect croissant, baguette or naan lies in its freshness: just-out-of-the-oven baguettes with a soft cheese and coffee, steaming croissants with a cup of hot chocolate, naan studded with caraway seeds right out of the oven… At the risk of offending Italian friends, I would suggest that many of the great Italian breads — focaccia especially — are built to last, as are sourdough loaves; bagels can hold their own and can even be frozen and toasted later. For those of us who were born with an instinctive hunger for good bread — the plain crumb, the pleasures of a browned crust, with just butter leavening the loaf — the greatest breads are by definition the ones you cannot lure too far away from the bakery.
The Indian cities that have the best bread are not always the most obvious ones. Delhi and Lucknow, for instance, specialise in great rotis and naans, with Old Delhi eating houses competing fiercely to produce the most carefully layered paranthas, the thinnest rumalis; but Delhi was never a city for great bread, and even now, many of its bakeries get away with shoddy ciabatta, oily rather than flaky croissants, and hard wholewheat loaves. Calcutta had a golden age of bakeries when the Jewish-Armenian population flourished; Bombay had the Irani influence spreading out into bruns and paus. But some of the best bakeries are the “German” or Israeli ones dotted across towns like Leh, Manali and found almost everywhere in Goa.
The passion for good bread, I’m reminded by the great food writer Howard McGee, is not limited to our century. In AD 300, Shu Xi wrote of the perfect dumpling: “Perfectly lined up, of great beauty/ Without breaking, the dough is fine and thin./ It swells so that one can guess at the stuffing below,/ Soft as silk floss in the springtime,/ White as autumn silk, cooked just in time.” Next week, I’m in Goa, where I hope to do a tour of the state’s tiny bakeries, especially the specialist ones that do only a few, toothsome items at a time. That bread fix will have to last me through summer, or until the budget allows for more travelling in quest of the perfect loaf.
Nilanjana S Roy is a Delhi-based writer