The Accidental Sweet: How India's Favourite Mithai Began as a Medicine
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Sweet Talks - by Kaashi Foods | 7 min read
Long before it became the star of wedding trays, festive thalis, and celebratory occasions, India's plump little ball of joy was essentially Ayurveda's answer to a protein bar - a ghee-soaked, herb-packed, jaggery-laced health booster. The Federal
The laddu was not invented by a halwai. It was invented by a surgeon.
And if eastern folklore is to be believed, even that was an accident.
The man behind the medicine
Somewhere along the banks of the Ganges, in what is now Varanasi, there lived a physician whose name was not actually Sushruta. That was a title - Sanskrit for "renowned" or "well-heard." Sushruta, who lived around the 7th or 6th century BCE, is known today as the Father of Indian Medicine and the Father of Plastic Surgery. World History Encyclopedia
He was, by any measure, an extraordinary figure. His teaching methods included using clay, wax, and ghee to simulate human tissues, enabling students to practice surgical techniques in a controlled setting before performing them on real patients. PubMed Central He performed rhinoplasty. He removed cataracts. He described, in careful detail, over a hundred surgical instruments and the specific vegetables a student should practice on before being allowed near a human body.
His text, the Sushruta Samhita, is one of the foundational documents of Ayurveda - and it is in this text that the laddu makes its first appearance in recorded history.
Not as a sweet. As a dose.
Medicine in a ball
The problem Sushruta was solving was a very practical one. Medicinal herbs are bitter. Patients, then as now, are resistant to taking things that taste terrible. And precise dosing - getting the right amount of a substance into a patient consistently - is genuinely difficult when you are working with loose powders and liquids.
Sushruta created small edible balls that had ingredients like sesame seeds, jaggery, and peanuts along with dosages of medicine so that the drug would be easier to consume by patients. The Laddu House The jaggery masked the bitterness of the herbs. The sesame and peanuts added nutrition. The ball shape made it easy to measure - one ball, one dose.
Sushruta the physician himself used laddus as an antiseptic to treat patients of surgery. The Federal Sesame in particular has antimicrobial properties that ancient Ayurvedic practitioners understood long before modern science confirmed them.
What Sushruta had essentially created was the world's first medicated sweet. A pill that did not taste like a pill. The round shape - which would go on to carry such auspicious meaning in Indian culture - began as nothing more than the most efficient way to roll a medicinal paste.
The assistant who spilled the ghee
Alongside Sushruta's documented medical laddus, there is another origin story - less scientific, more human, and somehow more believable for it.
Eastern folklore often talks about the accidental invention of the laddu: a vaid's assistant, to cover up the extra ghee he had accidentally poured into a medicinal mix, turned the excess into tiny roundels that eventually took the form of the smooth, round balls we know today. The Laddu House
The assistant - nameless, presumably anxious - had made an error. Too much ghee in the preparation. Rather than report his mistake or discard the batch, he did what cooks have done throughout history when things go unexpectedly well: he shaped it, presented it, and said nothing.
We do not know if he was found out. We do not know if the vaid ever realised what had happened. What we do know is that the result was something people wanted to eat again.
There is a pleasing symmetry in this story. The laddu - India's most deliberate, most carefully crafted, most ceremonially important sweet - may have begun as an act of improvisation. Someone covering their tracks. The oldest human instinct in any kitchen.
From mortar to mandir
The laddu, from the Sanskrit ladduka meaning "small ball," ditched its medicinal straightjacket, moving from mortar and pestle to temple altar, and medicine cabinet to celebration table. The Federal
The transition was gradual and makes a certain cultural sense. In Ayurveda, the boundary between food and medicine was never as sharp as it is in modern thinking. What nourishes the body is also what heals it. What heals it can also be offered to the gods. The laddu's journey from surgical ward to prayer plate was not a rupture - it was a natural progression along a continuum that Indian thought had always accepted.
By the time the Rigveda was composed, sweet balls made from flour and ghee were already being offered during yajnas - sacred fire rituals. By the medieval period, temple kitchens across the subcontinent had developed their own specific laddu traditions, each one a local interpretation of the same ancient idea. Iconic among temple laddus is the Srivari laddu, first offered to the deity at Tirumala Venkateswara Temple in Andhra Pradesh in 1715 - a tradition that continues today with over 800,000 laddus made every single day. The Federal
The Mahakaleshwar Temple in Ujjain - in Madhya Pradesh, not far from Indore - has earned a five-star FSSAI rating for the hygiene and taste of its gram flour laddus. The same FSSAI whose license number appears on every Kaashi Foods box.
The line from Sushruta's surgical theatre to a box of fresh besan laddus made in Indore in 2023 is longer than it looks. But it is unbroken.
What changed - and what didn't
As centuries passed and trade routes shifted, the laddu's ingredients evolved. Refined sugar arrived in India via Persian and later British influence and began to replace jaggery in many recipes. Dry fruits came in from Central Asia. Rose water appeared. Cardamom, already present in Ayurvedic preparations, became standard. The medicinal herbs gradually disappeared, leaving behind the flavour architecture they had helped build.
What did not change was the form. Round, hand-rolled, made fresh, consumed with intention. The same shape that made it easy to dose medicine in the 6th century BCE makes it easy to hand to someone at a wedding in 2025. The palm-sized sphere fits perfectly in an outstretched hand - which is, when you think about it, exactly what both a physician and a host need it to do.
The ingredient that connects it all
Through every version of this story - the surgeon's dose, the assistant's improvisation, the temple kitchen's offering - one ingredient appears consistently.
Ghee.
Sushruta's own teaching methods used ghee to simulate human tissues. PubMed Central His medicinal laddus used ghee as the binding agent. The Rigveda poured ghee into sacred fires. Every temple laddu from Tirupati to Ujjain is made with it.
Ghee is not just fat. In the laddu's history, it is the constant - the ingredient that bridges medicine and ritual, ancient and modern, a physician's preparation and a mother's kitchen.
At Kaashi Foods, every besan laddu and every til laddu we make uses pure desi ghee. No substitutes, no vegetable fat, no cutting corners. We are not making a conscious historical reference when we do this - we are simply making the thing correctly.
But the history is there, whether we reference it or not. Every fresh laddu carries it.
The sweet that was never just a sweet
Sushruta's patient probably had no idea they were eating something that would, over two and a half millennia, become the most widely consumed sweet in India. They just knew it tasted better than the alternative.
That impulse - to make the medicine feel like a gift, to put care into the thing you are asking someone to accept, to shape something ordinary into something round and whole and worth receiving - is still exactly what a good laddu does.
The form changed. The intention did not.
Curious about what goes into a Kaashi Foods laddu? Read our story here, or explore our range - made fresh, no preservatives, shipped pan-India. Use code NEW10 for 10% off your first order.