After a long layoff, I re-entered the kitchen recently and picked up the ladle and pan. Shamelessly speaking, I was truly delighted to find that I had not lost the touch. The golden touch for which I shall be ever grateful to my mother and grandmother. I had not forgotten those old lessons in cooking that my grandmother and mother had given me. But I will come back to those later. First, I must acknowledge and appreciate the women in my life who taught me the value of food. And at the same time, satisfy my urge to salivate at the thought of all the yummy food that I had grown up on.
Food for nostalgia
My grandmother was a fantastic cook. Even today, many years after her death, people talk of her cooking. I still remember some of those mouth-watering dishes I grew up on: the paruppu urundai rasam, vazhaipoo paruppu usli, vendha paruppu thuvail, the mysore rasam, the koottu, not to mention the melting mysore pak, buttery murukkus and cheedais. Oh, and I must not forget the red roast potato curry my grandmother used to make. I have never had anything the like of it, before or after her.
Let me not omit some of those fantabulous ‘tiffin’ items that I have not had elsewhere – that were so typically my family specialities – thavala vadai, thavala adai, thavala dosai, Kanchipuram idli, rava pongal…
Mother was - and is – a great experimenter. She served up slurpy kurmas and chole and spongy puddings, feathery cakes and whatnot. We grew up on delicious fare, my brother and I. Syrups and squashes, jams and pies and cookies – nothing daunted or flummoxed her.
Even father cooked – he would add a dash of jaggery to his rasam and sambhar that would give an indescribable zing to the dishes.
Fattened to be slaughtered at the altar of life – that was what we were - no, just joking. (Actually, we weren't fat. Both of us were fairly thin.)
And I haven’t yet paid homage to the payasams, the halwas, the burfis and the podis and pickles, the bajjis and bondas, the kozhukottais and polis.
And of course, the most amazing decoction coffee ever.
But I guess the drift is clear. We were a ‘food’ family, I mean a FOOD family.
My first lessons
So how could I go wrong? When I was in Class 8 or 9 – I can’t remember rightly – my mother took it upon her to teach me to cook. It started with making tea. And I still remember the unfortunate afternoon when I first lit the gas stove. I used about eight matchsticks to get that right. Mother was gnashing her teeth at me by the time the gas was lit. (In spite of all the gnashing she did when my brother and I were growing up, I must say her teeth have kept well: at 67, she has not lost a single one, nor seems likely to for the next two decades. Needless to say, she is still gnashing them.)
And then slowly we proceeded. Tea, then rice, then vegetables and other everyday dishes - and varieties in each.
What cooking meant to grandmother
I don't recall lessons from my grandmother - but she had set the bars - and pretty high at that. In fact, years later, I recall mother telling me that grandmother had never overtly taught her her secret recipes. That indeed she would shoo every one off before she settled in front of the stove to prepare the hot favourites like polis, kozhukottai, or the bakshanam because she felt that the magic would not work when many prying eyes were on her.
Perhaps it was just that old evil eye superstition. Perhaps there was an unwillingness to share a precious skill - one of the few things she could call her own, one of the few things that established her identity in her society, and gave her a sense of self-pride and self-esteem.Perhaps she had not wanted her daughter-in-law to learn and do better and eclipse her. We shall never know. Mother learnt her secrets by observing grandmother discreetly and from the background, whenever she was called to help with the preparations or the packing and clearing up.
Cooking is not just about cooking
To come back to my cooking lessons. They went way beyond learning to identify ingredients, following the cooking process, getting the proportion and mix of ingredients right, or recognising when a dish was done.
I learnt to tell just by looking whether the boiling rasam lacked salt. I learnt to tell just by the aroma filling the kitchen while cooking whether the proportion of spices blended into a dish was correct. I learnt to estimate just by looking whether the quantity of salt that I held in my hand was right for the dish that was waiting for it.
Looking at and smelling food while it cooked played a more important role than tasting because traditionally food had to be offered to the family deities before it touched our lips. This meant that while cooking I was using every one of my senses keenly and also that I had to be on red alert all the time to find the false note before others sat to eat.
But by far the most important lesson I learnt in the kitchen was that to be acknowledged a good cook one had to do more than just cook well. To be called a good cook by the seasoned ladies, one needed to be efficient and not only effective.
In my early days of cooking, while I was still in school and college, we did not use gas lighters. The good old match stick ruled the kitchen. My sage mentors taught me that real cooking was all about efficient fuel consumption. Could I complete the entire cooking session by striking just one match stick? That meant a minimum of four dishes and a maximum of god knows how many (during festivals and feasts).
According to the women in my life, the number of match sticks I used was a sure fire indicator of my kitchen skills.It was not just about spending match sticks, it was also about how well one planned and prepared for the cooking session. It was about paying attention to details and to the actual process.
The number of vessels used in cooking was also an indicator of kitchen skills. Using fewer vessels on the stove meant effective planning, and less time and energy spent on post-cooking clean up. Spillage,wastage, energy consumption, cutting down the steps in cooking - were all considered very important for the good cook. So also the introduction of ingredients in just the right stages in the process: the garnish on the rasam was done differently and at a different stage in the cooking than the garnish on the sambhar - though the ingredients of both were the same. And if you got it wrong, your error would be sniffed out by disdainful mentors.
Decades after those first lessons in kitchen skills were creased into my brain, today when I look at them in the light of global concerns of sustainable lifestyles and consumption patterns, I am tempted to ask myself: were those ladies in my life fiendishly rigid and conservative old fuddy-duddies or wise and visionary management gurus?
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