Moped Candyman

This afternoon when I walked out of college, I saw a peculiar sight… a large, decorative, kitschy doll tied on a pole. It stood above the masses of people streaming out of the college, to catch the attention of people in the crowd. The doll was attached to a pole on a moped bike, next to which stood an enthusiastic man making some sort of colourful craft.

At first I walked right past it. But after a few steps I stopped, turned around and went back. It looked too fascinating and too unusual for me to not find out more.

So I went back, and asked some bystanders, “What is that?” and the craftsman said, “chocolate - sugar candy!”

Being the curious, compulsive question-asker that I am, I waited till he was a little less busy so I could find out everything.

Turns out, Mr. Murugesh is a craftsman of pulled sugar. He is one in a long line of sugar craftsmen in his family, and he has been performing this “service”, as he proudly called it, for the last 24 years!

Every morning he cooks the sugar for over an hour until it loses its crystalline form and reaches this soft, malleable consistency. He then sets out from Chamrajpet market of Bangalore and goes to a different area each day to sell his craft. He prepares 6-7 kilos of sugar a day, and claims that not a morsel is left by evening.

I watched him effortlessly pull the sugar and twist it into various shapes and patterns with such dexterity, wearing such an enthusiastic smile. There were points when he wasn’t even looking down at his hands while he formed shapes of birds or flowers with the pliable ribbons of sugar. As he worked, he broke off pieces of the sugar ribbon and gave it to intrigued bystanders to taste.

(View in full screen mode for full enjoyment!)

As I watched him work, I was reminded of a film we were shown in our Baking Science class last week at college, called “Kings of Pastry”.

The film documents the preparation of a few contestants of France’s prestigious Meilleurs Ouvriers de France compitition. Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (MOF) translates to “best craftsman in France”. It is a highly prestigious competition, in which the President of France awards the winners a special collar. Winning this is like to being granted Patissers’ or Confectioners’ Knighthood!

One of the challenges in the contest is to build a sugar sculpture, and at one point the film shows a confectioner puling sugar into shiny ribbons.

The confectioner in the film was one who had been formally trained for years, and had spent dedicated time studying sugar behavior.

And in contrast, here was this man, Mr. Murugesh, working off of a moped bike on a crowded street, who has been taught the craft by his father, and who may not even have been using a candy thermometer in his daily routine of making 6 kilos of pulled sugar. He pulled and twisted the sugar into shapes with similar dexterity as the confectioner in the film (albeit without the same finesse). It was a fascinating parallel to me!

I tried to tell him about how the very craft he works with is exhibited at such a high and prestigious level in France, the culinary and confectionery capital of the world! He grinned at me enthusiastically, but still, he seemed blissfully unaware of the implications of what I was so excitedly yakking on about...