This blog will be a bit different due to the Hindu festival Diwali coming up in a few weeks. I decided to focus more on Ganesh Chaturthi as a build up to talking about Diwali. While I will still be talking about the sweet it will more of a build up talking about what types of sweets are offered at festivals and some of the mythology behind the festivals.
The Hindu god Ganesh is said to have had the head of and Elephant, although he was not always this way. He is the son of the Shiva, the destroyer(also a Hindu god), and Parvathi, the mother goddess. He was not born to Parvati as humans are. It is said that she was lonely. Shiva was away as was often the case. In her loneliness it appears she decided to create a child by forming him, Ganesh, through molding a substantial accumulation of her body dirt. And so Ganesh was born and Parvati was happy and occupied. The story goes that one day, while Parvati was having a bath, Shiva came home. When he attempted to enter the house though, he was met with resistance in the form of the boy Ganesh. Neither of them knew they were related. Shiva got angry at not being allowed in and dealt with the situation by chopping off Ganesh’s head. It was at this moment that Parvati came out to find what Shiva had done. She was inconsolable but managed to tell Shiva that the boy whose head he had cut off was in fact his son. Angry at the situation, Shiva decided to fix it. He went out and hunted the first animal he saw, the elephant, and brought back its head to replace the boy’s. That day on the Hindu lunar calendar is known as Ganesh Chaturthi, the birthday of Ganesh, and is celebrated with parades and festivals lasting for weeks. On that day there are two types of sweets offered to Ganesh, laddu and peda. Those two sweets are offered to him because they are the sweets that humans have noticed that Elephants like eating, and thus over the years they became known as Ganesh’s favorite.
Peda or pera is a sweet dish hailing from the Indian subcontinent. It originated from Mathura, Uttar Pradesh, India. Usually prepared in thick, semi-soft pieces, its main ingredients are khoa, sugar and traditional flavorings including cardamom seeds, pistachio nuts and saffron. There are many types of Peda, but the one that Ganesh likes is known as kesar modak peda, and is made of Mawa (milk solids) and sugar, flavored with cardamom and kesar (saffron) and shaped in to modak (dumplings). A recipe can be found here. No offering to Ganesh would be complete without the sweet and it is given to those who go to temples all over the world as a sweet to eat. There is a lot of cultural significance to the peda and no Ganesh Chaturthi would be complete without it.
Next week will be the beginning of talking about diwali and the foods involved.