My Nani's Nankhatai

I am the first to admit that my baking skills are sort of hopeless. Still, though, I keep trying out new recipes in hopes that they will click. Somewhere in the midst of all the temperature changes and the eggs, I seem to get a bit lost. Eventually, after one such experience, after my mom mentioning a kind of cookie called nankhatai from her childhood, I finally decided to call my grandmother for a recipe.

Nankhatai is a kind of cardamom shortbread. The process is simple: combine six parts flour (preferably with some of the flour being besan, or chickpea flour) with one part sugar (I use one of the steel bowls called “katori” around my house to measure these proportions out), a few pods of cardamom that you grind right before mixing it in, some baking powder, some salt, and enough ghee (clarified butter), whipped with the sugar, to make everything into a crumbly dough. It’s deliciously buttery, sweet yet a little more savory than expected, and complex in flavor despite the ease of its making.

My parents flitted in and out of the kitchen as I worked, my mom with increasing frequency. She told me how when she was my age, her mother—my grandmother—would make these cookies all the time. That delightful scent of buttery cardamom would fill the whole kitchen, and then my mom and her brother would have to ration the cookies out between themselves. Of course, now that I, her daughter, was making them, my mom could gorge herself of as many as she pleased.

I also learned that my grandma had come up with the recipe on her own by just experimenting when she herself was a teenage girl. She’d loved baking and coming up with new recipes. A lot of the shiny kitchen appliances that regularly frequent granite countertops in countless American homes weren’t available to my grandmother; she didn’t even have an oven. Without all those fancy hand blenders and food processors, she was able to come up with simple, reliable recipes that turn out delicious every single time.

On that first day I baked nankhatai, three generations were joined together, all suddenly the same age: my grandmother advising me on the phone, my mother watching and assisting and telling stories, and me venturing into this recipe for the first time, hoping that this one would break my baking curse. We had different relationships to what we were making—wisdom, nostalgia, excitement at something new—and vastly different levels of experience, yet this one batch of cookies united us all.

My very first attempt turned out delicious; the cookies were all gone within just a couple days. By now, I’ve made countless batches and added some of my own variations to the recipe. Every time I grind the cardamom into the mix, every time the warm, sweet scent wafts out the oven, every time I take a bite out of one of the results, I feel the presence of my family with me.

Here's the recipe, if anyone is inclined to try it!

Ingredients:

1½ cups all-purpose flour
½ cup besan/chickpea flour/gram flour/whatever name you know it by
⅓ cup sugar
4-8 tablespoons** ghee (clarified butter) or butter
2 green cardamom pods
One pinch salt
¼ teaspoon baking powder

*Note: You need ⅙ as much sugar as flour, no matter what ratio you use.
**Another note: the amount of ghee I’ve added has fluctuated depending on the weather. When it’s colder, there’s more ghee heaped onto each tablespoon because ghee is more solid when cold. When the weather is warmer, I need to add more spoonfuls of ghee because it’s more liquid and runny.

Steps:

Mix the flour, salt, and baking powder in a bowl.
Open up the cardamom pods. Grind up the seeds. (You can use a rolling pin to crush them, that’s fun! Or just use a grinder.) Add them to the bowl and mix well again.
Add the sugar to a different bowl.
Add the ghee to the same bowl as the sugar and mix until it’s fluffier and a lighter color. If you’re unsure of the quantity of ghee you need to add because of the subjectiveness I explained above, err on the side of caution; it’s easier to add more ghee later on if the dough isn’t what it’s supposed to look like.
Add the butter/sugar mix slowly to the flour mix. I recommend using your hands! The dough should be a little crumbly, but it should easily hold shape when you roll it up into small balls in your hand. (See the pics below for a reference!) If you’ve added all the ghee and the dough is too dry, just add more ghee a little at a time. If the dough is the right consistency but you still have more ghee+sugar mix to add, stop and throw in a bit more sugar, then mix.
Once you’ve got the right consistency, roll up small balls and flatten a bit between your palms.
Bake how you would usually bake shortbread. I think it’s like. 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes? If you’re using a toaster oven, probably go for around 250-300 degrees Fahrenheit and maybe a bit longer. There should be little cracks on top, and they should be a little brown.
The hardest part: wait for them to cool. Enjoy!

I took the following images as I baked to help with the process.