Celebrate Dilwali with savory treats that are easy to make and to give

If you rolled a bit of Christmas, New Year's Eve and Thanksgiving into one, then catered the affair with heaps of sweets and savory snacks, you'd begin to get a taste for what it means to celebrate Diwali, India's best known festival.

The sugary treats known as "mithai" - thousands of tonnes are prepared for Diwali every year - tend to get most of the attention during this holiday that marks the victory of good over evil and light over darkness.

But Indian food is all about balance and contrasts. Salty, spicy snacks collectively referred to as "namkeen" or "karam" play an equally important role during Diwali, which this year falls on Oct. 17.

Piquant little diamonds called shankarpali; chili-spiked mixes of flaked rice and lentils called chivda; and crisp, golden noodles called ribbon pakoda serve as both munchies and gifts, the latter an element as critical to Diwali as to Christmas.

"It's a time when a lot of family connections and kinship ties are strengthened," says Sharmila Sen, a humanities editor at Harvard University Press and expert on Indian food. "For women, it's important that their families send these elaborate presentations of nuts and savories to their husband's family, thereby strengthening the ties."

The legends behind Diwali - a word taken from the Sanskrit word dipavali meaning "row of lights" - vary by region in India, but people of every faith line windows and doorways with small clay or silver oil lamps, and trim homes, shops and businesses with brightly coloured lights. Firecrackers pop and screech from early morning. Businesses close their fiscal year and open new books.

Diwali also is a time for visiting friends and family, and the delicate, time-consuming savories - which are easily made in large quantities - are exchanged between homes.

"In one neighbourhood you're going to have 50 or 60 families and you're going to feed all the immediate neighbours," says Abraham Varghese, executive chef at Washington's Indique Heights, who recalled rolling and cutting shankarpali with his brothers as a child. "We would go to all the homes we knew, and to the poor home."

The treats often are wrapped as colourfully as possible, baled in reds, golds, greens and marigold, the colours of happiness and auspicious beginnings, Sen says.

In times past, gifts would be placed on platters and draped in elaborate fabrics. Today, they are more likely to come in wrapping paper that mimics the patterns of those fabrics or in colourful cellophane.

Bright cardboard boxes, platters fashioned from dried palm or banana leaves, and clay pots also are used. Occasionally, a silver platter is used to deliver the savories to a very important client or hard-to-please in-laws.

The idea of giving savories - as well as sweets - is rooted in the principles of Indian cooking. Indian cuisine is about balancing taste elements, about playing hot, sour, sweet, salty, bitter, astringent and umami (savory) off one another, says Raghavan Iyer, an award-winning cookbook author and chef at Minneapolis restaurant Om.

"With Indian food you have to associate the word 'balance,"' he says. "So in addition to the sweets, savory does play a big role."

Crisp, spicy snacks serve another crucial function at Diwali. Because they are deep-fried, they keep for weeks in air-tight containers. Which means a host can always have a big stash on hand to accommodate hungry holiday visitors.