Breads

For us, there are two kinds of bread: leavened bread and rotlis, the Gujarati word for the almost universal Indian flat bread, the chapati. In some households, the family expects to see both types at every meal. In my mother’s house, rotlis appeared almost every night, but rarely in the afternoon; in her mother’s house, I suppose they must have appeared on demand. Rotlis can be made with a variety of flours—rice, millet, whole wheat—but the only ones I ever saw in my mother’s house were made of whole wheat; many Parsis dismiss robust grains such as millet and barley as being too coarse or heavy.