Page:Indian Cookery and Confectionery.djvu/154

130 15 minutes. Boil it and stir continuously till the paste is very thick. Then place the paste on an wooden plate and stir till stirring is quite difficult. Press the paste flat about ½ inch thick. Cut it in cubes with a knife when cold. Fry the cubes with sufficient ghee and immerse in a syrup of sugar.

Mix ¼ tola of powdered garam-masalla, ¼ tola of powdered pepper and a little salt with about 1½ powa of curd and heat. Drop the cubes in the curd when it is warm, continue heating and take down when the curd is thick and sticks to the sides of the cubes.

Prepare a syrup of one seer of brownish powder-like sugar (kasir chini) and cool it. Drive out the whey from chhana keeping it under high pressure for a few hours. Make a fine paste of one seer of hard chhana without whey. Note that chhana is always pasted with the hands on an wooden plate.

Now heat the syrup in a thick iron pot and when it is warm add the pasted chhana. Stir constantly and vigorously with an wooden ladle for the whole sandesh will taste bitter if only slightly burned. When the mass is sticky, take the pot off fire, place on a circular stand of straw and stir as before, adding cardamom-seeds, pieces of almonds and pistachios if desired, till cold.

Then smear the interior of a mango-shaped cast with the juice of a kind of ginger scented like green mangoes