Modak

Modak holds a settled place in Hindu tradition as Ganesha's favorite food, a status repeated often enough in popular story and temple practice that the sweet and the deity are rarely pictured apart, Ganesha's own images frequently show him holding a modak in one hand or with a plate of them set before him. One widely told story has Ganesha's mother, Parvati, or in some versions the sage Kubera, offering him modak as a reward, and Ganesha eating so many that he can barely move afterward, and then, in the best known version of the tale, mounting his vahana, the mouse Mushika, to travel home only for the mouse to stumble on a passing snake, spilling Ganesha onto the ground; the moon, seeing this and laughing, is cursed by Ganesha for its mockery, an episode some traditions use to explain the practice of avoiding looking at the moon on Ganesh Chaturthi night.

The sweet itself is made by steaming or, in a variant called fried modak, deep frying a dumpling of rice or wheat flour dough filled with grated coconut, jaggery and sometimes cardamom or nuts, shaped into a distinctive rounded point at the top that has become as recognizable a symbol of the festival as Ganesha's own image. Some regional variants use semolina or khoya, a dried milk solid, instead of a plain rice or wheat flour dough, though the coconut and jaggery filling stays constant across nearly all of them.

During Ganesh Chaturthi, the ten day festival marking Ganesha's birth celebrated most elaborately in Maharashtra and across much of western and southern India, households and community pandals that install a clay image of Ganesha include modak among the offerings made to the deity each day, alongside flowers, incense and other sweets, following the same naivedya and prasadam structure recorded generally under Prasadam: the modak is offered first, understood to be accepted by the deity, and only then distributed and eaten. Twenty-one modak in particular is a customary number for a single day's offering in many households, tied to a story in which Ganesha is offered twenty-one modak by the sage Kubera and manages to eat nearly all of them before turning to a final one meant for himself.

Family kitchens in Maharashtra and Goa in particular treat the steaming and shaping of modak by hand as a skilled, valued kitchen task in its own right during the festival, and demonstrations of modak making skill have become part of the wider festival culture in some cities, alongside the immersion of the clay Ganesha image, visarjan, that closes the ten days; the sweet made for the god at the festival's opening and the sweet shared among family and neighbors afterward are, in both cases, the same modak.