Multani sohan halwa
The famous sweet of Multan: a dense, brittle toffee of wheat, milk, sugar and ghee, studded with nuts.
Sohan halwa is made by slowly cooking sprouted wheat flour, milk, sugar and ghee for hours until it becomes a dark, chewy, brittle sweet, topped with almonds, pistachios and walnuts. Multan has made it for centuries, and its tins are the gift every visitor takes home.
It is one of many local sweets of the Punjab: the pateesa of Amritsar, the gajar halwa of winter and the barfi of every halwai's shop.
More the table
The free kitchen where everyone sits on the floor in a line and eats the same food.
Mustard greens slow-cooked with butter and eaten with flatbread of maize: the taste of a Punjabi winter.
The warm sweet of flour, sugar and ghee given to everyone at the end of Sikh worship.
Nihari and paye for breakfast, halwa puri on Sundays, and the food streets of the old city by night.
Stuffed tandoor bread with chole, thick lassi in steel glasses, and fried fish: the dhaba food of Amritsar.
The Punjabi breakfast of stuffed paratha and white butter, and the winter and festival sweets of the halwai's shop.
The clay oven sunk in the ground, and the shared village oven where women baked their rotis together.
A dish born of Partition: refugees from Peshawar reinventing tandoori chicken in Delhi.
Spiced chickpeas with puffed, deep-fried bread: the Sunday breakfast of Amritsar, Lahore and Delhi.
The comfort food of every Punjabi home: red kidney beans with rice, and yoghurt curry with fritters.
The winter season when sugarcane is crushed and its juice boiled in great pans into golden gur.