The importance (and baggage) of ghee

It is something that we in South Asia use daily in our lives: Ghee. Few of us can deny the pleasure and delight at feeling the soft texture of ghee whether it is poured over our rice / khichdi, roti / chapati, daal or vegetables. Its very taste acts as an appetiser.

Little surprise then that culinary website Taste Atlas ranked ghee along with keema or minced meat (sorry, greens) as two of the best food items in Indian cuisine.

The website annually comes out with rankings of best global cuisines. In December 2022, it ranked Indian cuisine as the fifth-best cuisine globally.

Predictably, the website gets brickbats and bouquets in equal measure each year, upon the release of its list. This year, it tweeted that some embassies had contacted it after the list was tweeted from its handle.

The website said it was merely ‘counting figures’. It maintains databases where people rank dishes and cuisines through the year. The website counts the votes and decides the rankings at year-end.

It made me wonder: If people abroad recognise the value of ghee, why do we in India, especially elite urban upwardly mobile folk think it is bad or unhealthy?

A conversation with well-known food critic Vikram Doctor, however, cleared some of my doubts.

“The theory about ghee being responsible for bad cholesterol came in the 1970s and 1980s and has now been reversed. Vegetable ghee is now seen as unhealthy. Even that is no longer true since the Vanaspati available in the market is no longer what was sold once,” Doctor told me.

“There are many people who now eat ghee for health reasons. The thing is one should not overuse it,” he added.

Okay. Point taken. However, Doctor also pointed out the historical baggage that ghee carries.

“Ghee is butter that has been cooked to remove liquids. The reason this is done is that it stays much better. This was useful in the days without refrigeration. Butter without refrigeration can go rancid. Ghee can stay good for a long time,” he said.

Ghee thus is a way of preserving butter fats. When you preserve fat, you can also trade in it. This is important because fats are the sources of many of our earlier sources of wealth globally.

“Making fats such as ghee and oil is complicated. Making and preserving fats is a source of wealth. Consuming fats is also a source of wealth and luxury and power which is partly why we have lots of fats in our festive sweets,” said Doctor.

No wonder, ghee held an esteemed position in ancient India.

Here is what NM Kansara wrote in his essay Animal husbandry in the Vedas in the book History of agriculture in India (up to c1200 AD) Volume V Part 1:

Ghee was required in large quantities, both for the sacred fire in the house and in sacrificial hall and this was one of its main utilities…The lore of the cow forms a frequent feature in the imagery of the Vedic hymns and similies as well as illustrations referring to their nature and ways abound, in as much as cow was a symbol of wealth and prosperity while milk, butter and ghee were the symbols of fertility and abundance.

According to A historical dictionary of Indian Food by the late food historian KT Acharya, “Ghee in India has always been regarded as the supreme cooking fat. The Aryans would countenance no other fat than ghrta (another name was sarpi) though numerous vegetable oils were in use by other strata of the populace. Two highly auspicious ritual beverages had ghee as a component, madhuparka and panchagavya.”

He also notes that “cooking with ghee and cooking without ghee, are major subdivisions of cooking with fire. Ghee is itself already cooked and ritually pure, and cooking with it is a ritually superior act”.

Acharya’s book also informs us that Ghee was exported “as butyron to Rome for use by the wealthy in cooking and domestic sacrifices” in the first two centuries of the Christian Era.

“Around AD 1680 Fryer remarks that in Bengal ‘butter (almost certainly ghee is meant) is in such plenty that although it be a bulky article to export, yet it is sent by sea to numberless places’,” Acharya adds further.

And this is perhaps the argument against ghee, not the health one. “There is no problem with ghee itself. But its association with cows, the hard work required in making it mean it has always been associated with those higher up in the caste order and thus with privilege,” says Doctor.

Food for thought?

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