Made for snacking

“The taste of England.” That’s the slogan of Pooja Sweets & Savories in Anaheim, a great little place for shrikhand (a yogurt pudding), kachori (vegetable croquettes) and other snacks native to the western Indian state of Gujarat.

The England referred to is the Indian community of Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, where the family of owner Raj Modha owns a respected Gujarati sweets business.

“Customers from the States would buy boxes and boxes of them to take home,” says Modha. So he decided to use the Pooja name when he opened a business in the U.S. After investigating cities from Houston to San Jose, he selected Anaheim for its large Indian community and lack of a good Gujarati snack shop.

Pooja’s sweets include nut, fruit and yogurt dishes; its savories are vegetarian snacks, some mild and salty, others spicy, based on fritters and steamed cakes. In India, the savories can be street food, available at modest stalls as well as at fancy shops, but they’re more than that. Many Indian families keep a supply of sweets and savory snacks on hand for guests.

It’s not surprising, then, that a good deal of Pooja’s business is takeout. The stark room has only a few spartan tables; the decor is limited to a menu board written in bright red and a long glass case filled with intriguing goodies.

Occasionally, a young man or a grandmotherly looking woman emerges from the kitchen bearing a steaming, fragrant treat. It might be a big pan of khaman, which looks like cornbread sprinkled with fresh shredded coconut and black kalonji seeds. Actually, it’s made from garbanzo flour, and it has an almost souffle-like lightness. Pour on the sweetened yogurt sauce that accompanies it and it takes on a pudding-like quality.

The basic savory snacks are puffed rice or crunchy tidbits of wheat or garbanzo flour formed into various shapes, which are displayed in bins stacked around the room. When mixed with spices or other flavorings, they’re known as chevdas. Packaged chevdas are available in Indian markets, but there’s nothing like the fresh kind, and Pooja makes them daily. Customers often buy bags of chevdas for parties.

A lot of them will also be buying farsan, the larger, sculpted, cracker-like crunchies kept in the display case. One is farsi puri, a semolina disk studded with pepper, cumin and sesame seeds. Chakri, a fragile spiral of rice-flour dough, is freckled with sesame seeds and fresh jalapeno.

With the addition of a sauce or fresh herb, a chevda becomes a chat, such as bhel puri, a salad-like melange of puffed rice, fragile fried garbanzo noodles and several sorts of beans, all tossed with bits of bean cake and showered with a fine dice of onion and cilantro. The delicious multi-textured jumble is drizzled with yogurt and a zingy green chutney.

Batata bonda and kachori are more like finger food. They’re golf ball-sized globes of potatoes or vegetables; you crunch through a paper-thin coating of batter to a slightly creamy interior. A more substantial snack is puri bhaji: two curries eaten by scooping them up with fried breads puffed up to the size of apples.

Pau bhaji offers a bit of cultural fusion. It’s a mound of slowly caramelized onions, deeply infused with curry spices. With it come two toasted, buttered hamburger buns. Go figure.

The sweets include shrikhand, Gujarat’s famous pudding of sweetened yogurt thickened to the consistency of cheesecake and colored persimmon with saffron. Rasmalai, a dainty dish of cheese balls in sweet milk sauce, is done to perfection here.

Indian sweets are, generally speaking, an acquired taste, but Pooja’s are less sweet than most, and several may strike your fancy. I like kaju katri (crushed cashews and a touch of syrup) and anjir (a cake of compressed figs and nuts).

Chat devotees say you can judge a chat shop by its vada, spongy little fried cakes made of the Indian legume urad. Dahi vada, a breakfast favorite (but eaten anytime), truly tests this shop’s mettle. The cakes and their slightly sweetened yogurt sauce taste exquisitely fresh and are clearly made with attention to detail.

Dahi vadas are best freshly made, but I’d gladly take them home to eat. For that matter, I wouldn’t pass up a chance to take home a few orders of almost any chat that Pooja makes.

*Pooja Sweets & Savories

Location: 2751-2755 W. Lincoln Ave., Anaheim, (714) 527-3800.

Price: Main dishes, $2.50 to $5; chevda and sweets, $3.50 to $6 a pound.

Best dishes: Dahi vada, khaman, kachori, batata bonda, puri bhaji, farsan.

Details: Open 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. No alcohol. Parking lot. Visa and MasterCard.