TT Jagannathan and how an adapted pasta maker made fryums generic

Indian cooking often uses dried products that are deep-fried before eating. They are the best known, but there’s a wide range of pulse or grain pastes, as well as dried vegetables, which are sometimes also coated in these pastes and fried into crunchy, tasty additions to meals. They have many names, like boris, badis, and vathals, but lack a clear English name, possibly because they are rarely featured outside regional meals.

Recently, as cookbooks and chefs showcase regional foods, a name has emerged for them — fryums. You now routinely see recipes for fryums or descriptions of meals referring to fryums eaten on the side. The term does convey the essential cooking feature of such snacks, while still sounding silly. It sounds more like a brand name, because that’s exactly what it is, originally introduced by TTK in 1990.

Sandhya Mendonca). The chairman of the TTK group recalled a time when homes would make their annual stock of fryums during the summer: “Back-breaking work; we had to push the dough manually through perforated plates before spreading the papads out to dry on the rooftop and guard them against birds and the rain.” He realised that the process could be done with pasta machines and went to Italy to buy one.

It needed an additional step of gelatinisation, to create a stiff, sticky dough, but then it worked and, under the name Fryums, became a big success. Soon they realised the brand had become generic, “even finding mention in the sales tax schedule as ‘Fryums-type products.’”

While companies like TTK make mainstream versions from a variety of starchy pastes, the more regional versions are now increasingly produced by local self-help groups who, as they started selling commercially, picked up the ‘fryums’ term from the sales-tax schedule.

Jagannathan’s book has interesting insights like this. India’s pressure cooker market was long divided between Hawkins in the north and TTK’s Prestige brand in the south. This wasn’t just a matter of history but also design. Prestige primarily made cookers where the lid locked down from outside the pot, while Hawkins pioneered a model where the lid closed upwards, from inside the pot. Jagannathan says the outer-lid model was British, while the inner-lid one was Brazilian.

An outer-lid model is easier to use when containers are being put inside the pot. One of the main British uses for pressure cookers was hygienically sealing preserves in jars that go inside, and this suited the South Indian use of the cooker as a steamer (with sealing weight removed), with idli pans placed inside. The Brazilian design was ideal for cooking beans, and the main North Indian use of cookers was making dals. In time, both brands would make both models, but this is a reminder of how pressure cookers became essential products because Indians figured out how to adapt them to local food traditions.

But local adaptations can also cause problems. When Jagannathan took over Prestige in 1975, he was faced with a crisis of exploding cookers. The key safety feature was a plug made of tin bismuth that melts when the cooker overheats, allowing steam to escape safely. As the company spread cookers beyond the metros, people were taking cookers to local repairmen who didn’t use expensive tin bismuth but plugs made of metals that didn’t melt at low temperatures, increasing the risks of overheating and explosions. Jagannathan got Prestige to create a second safety outlet through the sealing gasket, which released steam, even with badly plugged cookers.

It obviously helped that Jagannathan was an enthusiastic cook himself, learning while he was a student at Cornell University. According to his family, his specialty was a chocolate cake made with Bournvita! And whenever he travelled with his wife, they preferred to stay in an apartment, not a hotel, always cooking locally.