As the leaders of the world’s largest economies descended on Delhi this weekend, there were two things on the menu: geopolitics and millet.
India is seeking to use its G20 presidency to push a narrative of the country as an economic powerhouse and leader of the global south, but also as a platform to elevate humble millet, a long-neglected but environmentally sustainable cereal that the country’s government is on a campaign to promote. Having already persuaded the UN General Assembly to declare this year as “international year of millet”, on Saturday the foreign leaders were treated to a specially curated summit lunch designed to show that millet is undeserving of its lowly reputation.
Starters served to the guests included crispy millet leaves topped with yogurt and chutney, and the main course was jackfruit galette with glazed forest mushroom, millet and Kerala red rice. Millet even made it into the dessert in the form of a cardamom-scented barnyard millet pudding. Meanwhile, among the activities lined up for the spouses of the G20 leaders, including Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata Murty, was “a visit to a farm-to-fork millet experience”.
India is the world’s largest producer of millet, and it once represented a third of the country’s food basket, but in recent decades it has all but vanished from the national cuisine. Yet it is one of the hardier crops and can be grown in tough, hot environments, and doesn’t require vast amounts of water as does rice, making it a much more environmentally friendly and profitable crop for farmers.
The Indian government has been hoping that it can stir up a global millet craze akin to the sudden resurgence of quinoa after the grain was hailed as a “superfood” and became extremely popular in the west.
Hotels across Delhi hosting the world leaders also embraced the millet memo with gusto. Deepak Rana, head chef at the Roseate Ganges hotel, designed an entire millet-based thali, including millet pancakes. Refuting the millet’s reputation as being somewhat bland, he described the taste as “very subtle, like avocado. You have to add some spices to enhance its taste, which is not very difficult to do.”
“This is the first time we are cooking millet-based cuisines at such a large scale,” said Rana. “Personally, I belong to the Garhwal area of Uttarakhand where we have been using millets for quite a long time. We have now done lots of experiments on how to put it on the menu.”
Ankur Gulati, executive chef at the Claridges hotel in Delhi, where Emmanuel Macron was staying, said that millet had been adapted into almost every element of its menu for the G20 summit guests, making the cereal difficult to avoid. Not only have the chefs made Indian breakfast specialities such as idli, dosa, poha and puris out of ragi (finger millet), they have also cooked up millet pasta, millet risotto, millet ravioli, millet noodles, millet fried rice and millet pad thai.
“People have this wrong notion that millets are not tasty,” said Gulati. “It is tasty but it is about how you make it.
“Yes, millet is a little difficult to digest, but if cooked in the right way, the flavours come out really great.”
At the Taj Palace, where the Chinese premier, Li Qiang, was staying, chef Mohd Mushtaq said that he had been surprised how well his millet experiments had gone.
His favourite invention now on the menu was a variant of khichdi, an Indian dish traditionally made with rice and lentils, using millet instead. “It has come out really well – I have not tasted such delicious khichdi in my entire life,” he said.
“Every meal has got millet in it in one or other way,” he added, predicting a big future for the grain: “The way millet-based dishes are turning out, I think it will soon be a mainstream thing in the restaurants of India and abroad.”
