Newcomer gets a taste of Canada

By Mohan Rawat

Image credit: Sanju M Gurung on Unsplash

I love salty and spicy snacks, stuff that I refer to as kachra. The word means junk in Hindi, but is often used to denote stuff that we know is not good for us but is oh-so-delicious!

I am a teetotaler, but I know my friends who enjoy a drink or two also call munchies chakhna.

So as you can see, I had three words in my vocabulary for my guilty pleasure – munchies, kachra and chakhna. But I had never heard of something called beer nuts.

Until one evening my neighbour and new friend Steve dropped in for a chat. It was a cold winter evening and we were enjoying mugs of coffee. I said to him that this was the weather in which I longed for pakoras. He wanted to know just what that was and I explained the concept to him.

“Oh, so like fritters, then!” he said. “I love those too! And those samosas you introduced me to!

But beer nuts are so much simpler to organize – you wouldn’t happen to have any, would you?’

I had no idea what those were. Were they nuts soaked in beer? Or nuts that were enjoyed with beer?

Before I could explain that I don’t drink and therefore didn’t have any beer-related snacks, Steve realized I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“They have nothing to do with beer,” he said. “They are just sweet and salty nuts that are so called because they were originally sold in pubs and liquor stores.”

And that’s how I discovered a popular snack that quickly became a favourite. So much so that the next time I called home and my mother in India asked what I was eating while talking to her, I said, “Beer nuts”. Which, of course, led to an explanatory note!