DOT Desk
With the winter setting in, roadside shops in city’s footpaths and busy crossings started selling traditional pitha (rice cakes) to cater to the crowds the local delicacies in both taste and texture, reports The Daily Sun.
As the making of traditional winter cakes at home has become rare in cities, footpath shops are now the first choice for many for easy availability of a wide range of mouth-watering pithas.
The seasonal pitha business has brought smiles to small vendors as they set up makeshift shops on footpaths to earn some extra money during the winter season.
Sales of winter pithas usually start in the afternoon and continue till late night.
Vendors usually sell two most popular items — ‘bhapa’ and ‘chitoi’. Bhapa is a steamed flour sweetened with jaggery and desiccated coconut while chitoi is a runny mixture made with flour and salt and then cooked on iron cooking pots to be served with mustard paste or chilli chutney.
Meat, eggs and vegetables are also used in preparing some pithas such as vegetable pitha, jhal patishapta and mangsha (meat) patishapta.
In most cities, commercially made pithas are gradually replacing home-made ones and many large food shops and restaurants now sell traditional pithas.
Every winter, only a few items like bhapa or chitoi are available on the footpath. For more varieties, a trip to the restaurants and fast food shops is a must.
Winter pithas like dudh chitoi, dudh puli, jhal bou, calcutta puli, kheer puli, narkel puli, chandra puli, chitoi, jamai pitha, jhal jamai pitha, kola bora, patishapta, malpoa, bhapa pitha, bhapa puli, shahi puli, phool pakon, nokshi pitha, surjomukhi, chicken pitha, jhal chingri pitha and vapa are sold at some
restaurants in the capital at prices as low as Tk 5 per piece and up to Tk 500 per kg.
During a visit to a pitha shop at Karwan Bazar on Saturday, two youths were seen preparing scrumptious bhapa on their roadside shop. “We sell pitha in very winter to earn some extra money,” pitha vendor Dulal Hossain said, adding that they sell chitoi pitha at Tk 5 and ‘Bhapa’ at Tk 10 per piece.
Talking to the correspondent, Ibrahim, who works at a private bank in Karwan Bazar, said, “I become nostalgic whenever I try pitha on footpath during winter. It takes me a flight back to my childhood when my grandma used to prepare pitha at dusk. We used to gather around the fire and chatted for hours.”
Bodi Alam, a seasonal pitha vendor at Rampura Bazar, said he usually sells fruits in the city in other seasons of the year. “It is a good business in winter but the profits from pitha sales are poor now compared to the previous years because of the rising prices of ingredients.”
Like Bodi Alam, many others have turned into seasonal pitha trade this winter in the capital. Vendors said they usually earn around Tk 40,000 to Tk 50,000 every winter by selling cakes at roadside shops.