61. The Kitchen of Lord Jagannath

The Kitchen of Lord Jagannath:

The kitchen compound which is located several feet above and to the left of the Simha-dvara (the eastern gateway or entrance) covers roughly one acre.

The kitchen compound includes 9 kitchens. Two of them are more than 2,500 square feet each, and seven are slightly smaller.

Every day, a fire sacrifice is performed in the temple kitchen. Afterwards, the cooks take embers from that sacrificial fire to ignite their individual stoves for cooking each day. All the food is cooked in earthen pots.

The cutting, chopping, grinding, and so on, are done just in front of the kitchens, in an open area called the "agana". (With binoculars you can get a partial bird's- eye view of the agana from atop the Puri Library, just across the street.) Numerous small storage areas make up the rest of the kitchen compound.

The kitchens house an astounding 752 wood-burning clay stoves, called "chulas", each about 3 feet square and 4 feet high. To accommodate various sizes of pots, small clay knobs, called "jhinkas", are judiciously placed at intervals on the stove's surface for support. A circle of 5 jug-shaped earthen pots rest directly on the stove's surface, kept in place with jhinkas. 3 more pots go in the open spaces above the pots to form a second layer, and one more pot goes in the centre on top, forming a nine-pot pyramid. In this way all 9 pots receive lickings of heat and smoke from the wood fires below.

"The new earthen cooking pots are called "kudias". Most are jug-shaped (for the nine-pot pyramid), though some are shallow and wide, resembling Spanish paella pans or French saute pans without handles. As the food cooks in these unglazed pots, their thick walls become very hot. The pots provide amazing heat retention. Food stored in them stays piping hot up to 4 or 5 hours. 

"Without electricity or machines, skilled chefs work under oil lamps over open wood fires. More than 5,000 cooks are engaged in preparing at least 56 different types of pure vegetarian dishes daily. These cooks work in daily rotations, preparing enough food each day to feed an average of 10,000 people. During festivals the number easily climbs to over 25,000. Further, given only one day's notice the chefs can prepare a full meal for up to 10000 guests at a sitting.

Every day they prepare more than 100 different dishes and offer them to the deities.

The Jagannath temple kitchens are exemplary in many ways, but three are of special significance:

1. The preservation of ancient cooking standards

2. The training program for temple priests

3. The highly efficient system for distribution of temple prasadam