English Literature – Articles ☆ The Accidental Cook and the Birth of Chikki Halwa 🤩 ☆ Shri Jagat Singh Bisht ☆

I have never tried my hand at cooking. In fact, my culinary achievements begin and end with tea. I can make tea with reasonable confidence, provided nobody asks me to explain the process scientifically.

But life, as Mark Twain might have observed, is full of surprises—and occasionally of kitchen emergencies.

The other day, I ordered some chikki online. When it arrived, I opened the packet with the anticipation of a man about to enjoy a perfectly respectable piece of childhood nostalgia. Alas! The monsoon had been at work. The chikki had become moist and lost its crispness. It was no longer quite chikki; it was a victim of the weather.

Most people would have sighed and abandoned it.

I saw what everyone was seeing—but thought something else.

Why not turn this moist chikki into something delicious?

That was the moment an accidental cook was born.

I entered the kitchen with the quiet confidence of a scientist whose experiment had not yet gone wrong.

I poured some ghee into a kadhai, lit the flame and added a few teaspoons of sooji. A little cardamom powder followed. I stirred the mixture patiently until the sooji turned golden and the kitchen began to smell suspiciously like a place where someone actually knew how to cook.

Meanwhile, I crushed the unfortunate chikki and soaked it in warm milk. Once suitably softened, I tipped the whole thing into the kadhai.

There was stirring.

There was cooking.

There was concentration.

There may even have been a moment when I looked like a professional chef.

I kept cooking until the mixture began leaving the edges of the kadhai. I added another little dash of cardamom powder and, lo and behold—

Chikki Halwa was born!

Not planned. Not inherited from a grandmother. Not downloaded from YouTube.

Entirely accidental.

I served my creation to the family and a few neighbours with the unmistakable pride of a man presenting his first invention to the world. I made sure everyone knew that this was my maiden venture into the noble profession of cooking.

They ate it.

They smiled.

They praised it.

They even asked for more.

Now comes the only unresolved scientific question in this entire experiment:

Did they genuinely love the Chikki Halwa—or were they merely trying not to discourage the newly discovered cook?

I shall never know.

But I have learnt something important.

Sometimes creativity begins when things don’t turn out the way they were supposed to.

A moist chikki may look like a culinary failure to one person. To another, it may simply be an invitation from the universe:

“Come on, chef. Do something with this.”

And so, after all these years, I finally cooked.

Accidentally.

And, quite accidentally, I discovered that every kitchen has a little bit of creativity waiting to happen. 😄