India, Oct. 6 -- For Bhubaneswar, particularly its Old Town and the sacred world surrounding the Lingaraj Temple, Kora-Khai is more than a traditional sweet. It is a precious fragment of the city's cultural memory. Yet, remarkably, a delicacy with such a long lineage is slowly disappearing from public view.

That deserves our attention.

The preparation of Kora-Khai is believed to be more than a thousand years old, while its established commercial lineage in Bhubaneswar goes back about three centuries. The commercial preparation and naming of Baiya Kora-Khai began in the early eighteenth century, when Bairagi Sahu, affectionately known as "Baiya" for his perfectionist approach to cooking, established a shop in Old Town. His fifth-generati...