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EveryCow

Milk sweets

Mysore pak

Gram flour cooked in a great deal of ghee and sugar syrup until it sets into porous, melting squares.

Mysore pak is a sweet of gram flour, sugar and ghee from the city of Mysuru in Karnataka. Hot ghee is poured into a sugar syrup and gram flour mixture a ladle at a time, so the mass froths and turns porous. It is poured into a tray and cut while warm. The older style is firm and crumbly; a newer soft style uses even more ghee.

What goes in

Ghee: 42%42%Sugar: 32%32%Gram flour: 16%16%Water: 11%11%4parts
  • Ghee842%, Kept hot and added a ladle at a time.
  • Sugar632%, Made into a one-string syrup.
  • Gram flour316%, Sifted, sometimes lightly roasted.
  • Water211%, For the syrup.

Rough parts by weight. The ring shows each input's share of the product.

Made step by step

Each drawing shows the operation for that step. Quantities and timings differ from house to house and herd to herd; this is one traditional way, in outline.

  1. Step 1: Cook Keep the ghee hot in a separate pan.
  2. Step 2: Boil Boil sugar and water to a syrup that forms a single thread.
  3. Step 3: Cook Whisk in the gram flour a little at a time so no lumps form.
  4. Step 4: Cook Add hot ghee a ladle at a time, stirring as it froths and turns porous.
  5. Step 5: Shape Pour into a greased tray when it pulls from the pan and smells nutty.
  6. Step 6: Set Cut into squares while still warm and leave to set.
  7. Ghee: 42%42%Sugar: 32%32%Gram flour: 16%16%Water: 11%11%
    Finished Mysore pak, by share.

The palace kitchen

The usual story credits Kakasura Madappa, a cook in the kitchens of Mysore Palace during the reign of Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV in the early twentieth century, with making it first. Asked its name, he called it Mysore paka, paka meaning a sweet syrup in Kannada. Members of his family went on to run sweet shops in Mysuru.

Ghee and festivals

Ghee is the whole character of Mysore pak, and shops advertise its quality above all. It is made in large quantities for Deepavali and for weddings across South India, and boxes of it are a usual gift. The crumbly kind has a honeycomb inside; the soft kind, popular in Tamil Nadu, is closer to fudge.

Where it is used

Deepavali boxesWedding sweetsGifts

The breeds behind it

HallikarKarnataka breed of the old Mysore country.Amrit MahalBred in the Mysore royal herds.Malnad GiddaSmall hill cow of the Karnataka Malnad.DeoniDual-purpose breed of north Karnataka and Marathwada.

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Sources and further reading

About this page

Original text and drawings by the EveryCow desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. The shares are a rough, illustrative ratio, not a recipe: every family and dairy makes it differently. If we have something wrong, tell us.

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

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