Roti and Farata: Mauritian Flatbreads Filled with Curry
Guidebooks to Mauritius have a simple rule for the island's two most common flatbreads: round is roti, square is farata. At the counter it holds up, but the shape is only a clue to what happened to the dough beforehand. The cook folds a farata several times before it goes on the griddle, and a folded sheet has corners; a roti is only rolled out, and a rolling pin makes circles.
Roti and farata are Mauritian wheat flatbreads cooked on a griddle, wrapped around a curry, rolled up, wrapped in paper and eaten straight out of your hand - the most widespread fast food in Mauritian cuisine. Roti is smooth and thin, farata layered and greasier; ask a Mauritian which one is better and you'll be told it makes no difference.
What Farata Means and Why Nobody in India Will Know the Word
Nobody in India would recognize the word farata, and yet that is where it came from. The Indian layered flatbread is called paratha (पराठा in Hindi), and Mauritian Creole reshaped it into something that comes out more easily on the island: paratha turned into farata. Roti, on the other hand, is a word India knows all too well - there it simply means a flatbread, thin, dry, with nothing inside - and that's the trap: order a roti in Mauritius with an Indian restaurant in mind and you'll get a roll full of curry. On the island it's a national dish, even though it was invented somewhere else: one strand of the Indian legacy that every diaspora reworked in its own way. In Trinidad a similar flatbread is torn up once it's cooked and eaten off a plate alongside the curry, in Malaysia roti canai isn't rolled out with a pin but stretched by hand into a translucent sheet, and at home in Mauritius farata has a cousin in dholl puri, which has the yellow split peas worked into the dough itself and is cooked dry.
Who Brought the Flatbread to the Island
When the British abolished slavery in Mauritius in 1834, the sugar plantations needed new hands and found them in India. By 1920 more than 450,000 indentured laborers had landed on the island, most of them from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh - and with them came everything you can make out of flour, water and a little oil. The workers brought the flatbread from home; the roll was the island's own doing: in India a paratha is eaten at home off a plate, in Mauritius they wrapped a curry in it and it went to work with you. Nobody has ever pinned down the first farata, and no legend has grown up around it. In Durban in South Africa, another place Indian laborers headed for, roti fell apart on the way, so traders started spooning the curry into a hollowed-out loaf of bread - and out of the flatbread's defeat came the famous bunny chow. Mauritius had nothing to hollow out. Paper was enough.
How Many Layers a Farata Has and What Goes Inside
The dough is the simplest thing you can make out of flour: flour, salt, oil and hot water, which is crepe batter minus the eggs and milk. The difference between roti and farata only shows up once the dough hits the board. A roti is rolled out and goes on the griddle. A farata is rolled thin, brushed with oil, folded, rolled out again and folded again, so what lands on the griddle is a flatbread with layers that separate and crisp up as it cooks; the moment it's done it gets clapped between the cook's palms while it's still hot to break the layers apart - you can tell a kitchen that makes farata by the sound. Then comes the counter with the pots: chicken, beef or goat curry, fish, shrimp, vegetables and especially cari gros pois, a curry of large beans, the cheapest filling on the island and the one that tastes most like home. On top, if you want it, achard, the island's pickled vegetables, coconut chatini and a spoonful of the red chili paste mazavaroo, which tells you who asked for heat and who didn't.
Roti is sold from morning to night at stalls and from the takeaway windows of bistros, and there's no right time of day for it: it's food for the moment when you're hungry and have no table. The cook fills the flatbread in front of you, rolls it up and wraps it in paper that serves as both plate and napkin; you eat your way in from one end. If you don't know where to start, get a farata with gros pois: the beans have been on the island the longest, and they cost the least.
Rolling Farata in a Kitchen the Size of a Pantry
I ate roti and farata in Flic en Flac, where the beach bistros specialize in them, most often at the Kot Ti Baz bistro and at Farata Aka Vinoda (see Where to Eat in Flic en Flac). At Kot Ti Baz the farata was rolled out on a granite slab in a kitchen the size of a pantry, between the pots and a bottle of oil, and it went on the griddle as square as the rolling pin had left it. The roti was thin and pliable and, more to the point, held the curry together; the farata had dry, crisp layers when I bit into it and under them a greasier, softer dough that soaked up more of the curry than I expected; the vegetable curry was richer than you'd expect from a flatbread that costs twenty rupees. The one with the vegetarian filling cost 20 MUR (0.40 EUR), with meat, fish or shrimp 50-70 MUR (1-1.40 EUR). After that I kept moving from one bistro to another in Flic en Flac, and the shapes changed with them. I stopped worrying about the guidebook rule the moment the flatbread went into the paper - inside it, a circle and a square are both a cylinder.
