Why the name
The cloth behind the deity
Pichwai are the painted cloths that hang behind the deity at Nathdwara, changed with the season and the festival. Hand painted, layered, lotus and cow and monsoon.
Older than the name
The recipes are older than the name.
The spices a household keeps for the night-time cup, the after-meal pinch, the Sunday hair mask. We ground them and put them in a jar.
How it started
Two sisters and one steel dabba
Our grandmother kept a steel dabba on the second shelf, above the rice. Turmeric, dried ginger, a nutmeg worn down to the size of a marble. Nobody in that house called it wellness. It was the box you reached for on an ordinary evening, and again on the morning of a wedding.
We are two sisters, eleven months apart, which our mother says is why we still finish each other's sentences and still argue about salt. One of us moved to Bangalore and called home every week asking how to make the night-time milk. The other wrote it down properly for the first time, because saying a little of this down a phone line was getting nobody anywhere.
That written-down version is the Golden Moon Latte. We ground the first batch in our mother's kitchen on a Sunday, filled eleven jars and gave ten of them away. The eleventh sat on the counter for a month while we worked out what to call ourselves.
Small batches in Bangalore
Made often, because it does not keep
Roasted, ground and packed the same week, in batches you could count. Nothing is added to make it last.
The maker's note
We are still two people and it is still a small kitchen.
I make the latte the way I made it for my sister down the phone. A heaped spoon, milk that is hot but not boiling, and a minute of stirring I refuse to shorten. We work in small batches because that is the only amount two people can grind in a morning, and nothing in our jars is there to make them keep longer. So we grind more often, and a pouch you open in March was ground in March. If something arrives wrong, message us on WhatsApp and one of us will answer. Not a team. One of us.