How Vadapav was invented
Did you know the vada pav you ate recently has a link to politics? Here’s the tea.
Both the main ingredients of this dish, potato & pav, were brought to us by the Portuguese sailors who had found the potato in Peru & had turned traditional bread into fluffy “pao” to pair with their stews & curries.
Vada as a standalone item started cropping first in the rich palaces of Peshwas & princes or Maharashtrian kings.
After Independence, in the 1960s, South Indians started to urban hubs like Mumbai & set up their Udupi stalls selling idli & vada, which was considered a bit expensive but also time-consuming as well for the busy man.
So Shri Balasaheb Thackeray, who led the political party Shiv Sena, asked his local Maharashtrian people to become entrepreneurs, too, and start their businesses & said he’d back them up.
One of the first people to commercialize local food was Ashok Vaidya, who used to sell vadas & poha separately at a snack near Dadar Station since they were cheap & easy to make.
His customer base was the hard-working cotton mill workers in nearby areas like Girgaon & Parel, who were also starting to take a liking to a dish called pav bhaji by then.
Probably since vadas were piping hot, Ashok was experimenting with putting the vada in the middle of the famous pav to make it easier to carry in the hand & eat on the go.
One theory also suggests he was out of plates one day & he saw a pav seller passing by so he called him to replace the plates with the bread.
Whatever the case, this small twist to the vada went viral & even Balasaheb loved it.
In the 1970s & 80s, when there were strikes in the factory mills, all the folks who were out of jobs joined Ashok in selling their versions of his dish. In fact, some people even credit a guy named Sudhakar Mhatre for the dish so it’s possible many people had invented it at the same time.
While Ashok passed away in 1998, today his family still makes his legacy outside Kirti College at the shop named Ashok Vadapav … which frankly I felt is overrated, no offence.
So if you want to know the best places to try it out as of today, read the caption!