R Kumari speaks of her not-so-sweet love-life as she rolls out dough to make thaen mittai. The sweet, ironically, translates to ‘honey candy’.
She’s 50 years old and has chosen to remain single. “I married off my siblings with the earnings I made from mittai,” she says, cutting out small cubes from a roll of bright orange dough that she chopped off from a big chunk.
“One man did ask for my hand though,” she smiles, pausing to look up from her wooden cutting board. Squatting in front of it, she slides the cut cubes onto a cane winnow placed next to her. “But I refused,” she sighs. “I had too many responsibilities.”
The thaen mittai has seen her through the best and worst times in life, which is perhaps why she is so loyal to it. “I’m happy making mittai,” she says.
The manufacturing unit of Udhayam Thaen Mittai on Solaiappan Street, Old Washermanpet, is replete with stories of men and women who grew up eating the sweet, and ended up making it for a living. But they seem happy in the rhythm of dark interiors that smell of sugar and flour.
Songs from a radio somewhere inside the building fill the air as Kumari and her colleague M Padmini are bent at work in front of the long cutting board. R Rani and P Rama are into packaging.
Rama takes me to a room in which sits a mammoth chunk of orange-coloured dough that’s been left to rise. “It consists of maida, curd, and food colour,” she explains. Once cut, the cubes of dough are deep-fried in a sawdust-fired stove and soaked in sugar syrup.
“The cubes gain a circular shape as they are fried,” she adds. The 29-year-old has worked for various companies that manufacture the sweet in the area. She’s been making it from the time she was 10 years old. “I loved these when I was in school,” she smiles. “I still do.”
Udhayam is famous for its thaen mittai. It supplies across the city, so the sweets from here can be found at supermarkets as well as the smaller bunk shops.
T Ganesan, the founder, is from Tirunelveli. “I started out by working at a barfi company,” says the 61-year-old.
Ganesan started his own company once he learned the craft. Today, his son G Balakrishnan runs the show. The 35-year-old has big plans for their future. “Our sweets became popular especially after the Jallikattu issue. People started supporting our traditional sweets and now, we’re trying to keep up with the trend by packaging our products better,” he says.
Looking back
Balakrishnan remembers when he was younger, they stored the sweet inside glass bottles. The bottles were displayed at shops and people could buy the sweet by piece. “Today, we pack the mittai in plastic wrappers. We even have a machine that does the counting and packaging automatically,” he explains.
In keeping with the plastic ban that’s to be enforced from the beginning of 2019, Balakrishnan plans to pack the sweet in paper.
Although places such as Koyambedu and Moolakadai have manufacturing units for thaen mittai, it’s Old Washermanpet that has a majority of them. Udhayam alone uses up to 400 kilograms of flour a day. “A lot has changed over the years,” says Balakrishnan. “But our recipe has remained the same for the past 25 years.”