A ‘paan' for all seasons: Chewing on India's favourite leaf

Indian Express

02-05-2025

Paan is an acquired taste. I've seen many foreign visitors to India, enthusiastic about Indian food generally, choke and splutter after biting into one. Paan is a betel leaf wrap containing betel nuts, cardamom, fennel seeds, lime paste, and sometimes tobacco. It's chewed after meals as a digestive and palate cleanser. It is something Ibn Battuta and Amir Khusro wrote paeans to. Even Marco Polo mentioned it after arriving on the Coromandel Coast of southern India in 1292, noting how many locals avoided alcohol but were addicted to chewing tambur, a leaf sometimes mixed with camphor, spices and lime. Battuta documented that palace meals in the Delhi Sultanate always ended with paan, and that the exchange of betel leaf/tambulam finalised pacts between kingdoms. In Kerala, still, dakshina — the honorarium you offer to gurus and elders during occasions — is kept in a betel leaf, along with nutmeg.
In Bengal, paan plays a different role. A Bengali bride covers her eyes with betel leaves before she glimpses her groom, arguably, a royal pact of its own. I am going to focus on the Bengali paan. Many upper-class Bengali homes once prepared paan at home before street-side paan stalls became ubiquitous.
Making paan was a craft: Paan leaves are typically stored in copper paan daans, or containers that resemble mini trunks but are made of copper. When you open the clasp and lift the top, you see compartments holding different ingredients. Under this is another layer holding washed green paan leaves. To make the paan, each heart-shaped paan leaf is split down the middle and the two halves are placed together. You would usually dip your fingers into a copper urn containing a thick white lime and water solution (choon), with which the top leaf would be coated. The alkaline in this choon is supposed to protect the mouth from the sharp pungency of the paan leaf's juice. Then, a brown liquid made by grinding the resinous substance from a tree – I've forgotten which – mixed with water, goes over the white paste. Finally, chopped supuri/supari (betel nuts), were followed by a few cardamom seeds and sometimes cardamom coated with silver foil. Saunf/fennel seeds and a little spot of keora water completed the paan. This was then rolled into a cone, held together by a clove. The cloves, cardamom, and saunf act as cooling agents after a heavy Bengali meal, and paan is always served after lunch and dinner.
But it's not all kosher in Bengali paan. Many chew paan wrapped around perfumed tobacco called jarda. The terrible practice of spitting out paan – usually when wrapped around tobacco – is considered to have started around the 16th century when tobacco was introduced into India by the Portuguese. The name 'betel' was also first used in the 16th century by the Portuguese, and is possibly derived from vetila—the Malay word for leaf. The Malayalam and Tamil names for betel leaf are also similar-sounding, vettila and vettilai, respectively. In Kannada, betel is taamboola, kwa in Manipuri and naagavaela in Marathi. Today, there are 32 varieties of the leaf, cultivated across India and Bangladesh, from Benarasi to Calcutta to Magai.
If you want to feel virtuous, according to Ayurveda, paan has medicinal properties and health benefits. Paan leaves are high in carotenes, calcium and Vitamin B3, B2, B1 and C. Paan is often given to new mothers as it is said to stimulate the salivary glands and gastric juices, reducing bloating in the stomach and boosting calcium production. Indian classical singers are known to eat paan to train their voices as it helps with throat infections. For babies with colic, betel leaves coated with castor oil are heated and placed on the baby's stomach to alleviate their pain. In Sushruta Samhita, an Indian text on medicine and surgery dating to the sixth century, it says that meals should be chased with paan. Ancient texts also mention how different parts of the betel leaf represent different Hindu gods: the front is Lakshmi, Shiva around the edges, and Yama – the Lord of death – residing in the stalk, which is to be cut off.
I'm not much of a fan of today's paan stall concoctions. If you're not careful, you will find your meetha paan/ sweet paan full of coconut flakes and gulkand, a rose petal jam. Now that no one has the time or interest to make paan for you from a copper box with freshly washed paan leaves from Bengal or Benaras, I would still recommend that you hotfoot it to the neighbourhood paanstall and try a meetha paan and a saada paan. My tip – ask for geeli supari, which are softened betel nuts. Having paan is an experience that everyone should have at least once.
Author of The Sweet Kitchen, and chef-owner of Food For Thought Catering ... Read More