Ordering saffron gift boxes for a wedding or an office
How bulk gift boxes work, from a sample box to printed cards and delivery to every address on your list.
What Kashmiri homes keep for Chillai Kalan
Forty days of the hardest winter, from late December: the walnuts, dried vegetables and kahwa that see families through.
Chillai Kalan is the 40-day stretch of the coldest weather in Kashmir, from around 21 December to the end of January. Pipes freeze, the Dal Lake skins over with ice in places, and roads to the villages can close for days. Families prepare for it the way people elsewhere prepare for the monsoon.
Dry fruit comes first. Most homes keep a sack of paper-shell walnuts and several kilos of almonds and dried apricots. Walnuts are cracked in the evening by the kangri, the clay fire pot carried under the pheran, and eaten through the day. Kernels go into chutney with radish and curd, and into halwa.
Then the hokh syun, vegetables dried in the autumn sun: strings of brinjal, tomato, turnip, bottle gourd and dried greens, stored to cook through the winter when fresh vegetables are scarce. Lotus stem, dried fish and rice for the season are bought in bulk.
And kahwa, many times a day, made in a samovar with green tea, a few strands of saffron, cardamom, cinnamon and crushed almonds. For families outside the valley who want a little of that winter, our ₹1,850 wooden box holds saffron, kahwa, walnuts and almonds. Order by 10 December if you want it before the cold sets in, as couriers slow down when the highway to Jammu closes for snow.
