Mysore Pak on TasteAtlas best street-food sweets list; 2 more from India among 50

In some very sweet news for Karnataka, its favourite Mysore Pak has gone world-famous now. Croatia-based travel-food magazine TasteAtlas has placed the state’s famed sweet dish 14th on its list of 50 best street-food sweets. Only two other Indian desserts have made it to the list — kulfi in the 18th spot and kulfi falooda in 32nd.

Mysore Pak, said to be an impromptu innovation in the kitchens of Mysore Palace in the mid-1930s, is a simple dish made with besan (gram flour), ghee, and sugar. The story goes that Kakasura Madappa, the chief chef of Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV, the 24th Maharaja of Mysore, discovered the dish during an experimentation session in the royal kitchen.

Origin of Mysore Pak

Apparently, Madappa was asked to rustle up various sweets for some royal guests. One of the various items he made was a concoction of besan, ghee, and sugar. By the time the king tasted it, the besan and sugar had hardened enough for the dish to turn into a cake, softened by the ghee.

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While some accounts suggest it was Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV who named the new dish Mysore Pak, others claim that was the name Madappa offered when a highly impressed king asked him what this new dessert was called. Madappa’s descendants, who still run Mysore’s highly popular Guru Sweets, known for its Mysore Pak, reportedly claim the king himself asked his chef to open a confectionary so that commoners could also get a taste of the royal dessert.

An iconic dish

However, as with many such regional dishes, some theories give the credit for the birth of the dessert to Tamil Nadu, from where it reportedly travelled to Mysore. However, today, the Mysore Pak is indisputably an iconic dish of Karnataka though the product has no Geographical Indication (GI) tag yet. It is available in several versions, too, such as the Ghee Mysore Pak or Milk Mysore Pak, and other innovative avatars.

The first five sweets on the TasteAtlas list are Pastel De Nata from Portugal, Serabi from Indonesia, Dondurma from Turkey, Hotteok from South Korea, and Pa Thong Ko from Thailand. However, the TasteAtlas page on the 50 tope street-food dishes seems to have changed since the list was published on social media on July 14.

Kulfi falooda is now placed 50th on the list, kulfi on 24th, and Mysore Pak on 19th. While many on social media cheered on finding the three Indian desserts on the list many questioned how Mysore Pak could be termed as “street food” when it is only available in shops.