C for Cooking
Pineapple upside down cake: The result of one successful baking experiment in 2012
It is interesting how the
latest blogging experience has for me become a ticket to travel to my own past
to secure material for the daily entries. It’s great to recognize at
times how one’s past shapes a person’s present state. In the sweet and salty
waters of the past we ceaselessly float with childlike abandon, savoring its
taste and regaling in the changes the waters has brought in our system., and I
feel absolutely fabulous when I go back in time and see how I have over the
years become the person I am now. Today I wish to talk about my own past, my
journey along the thoroughfare of life through the medium of food preparation.
Before I write my entry I
head to my kitchen. Its elongated interior, its blue tiles, its shelves stacked
with colorful Indian spices, and the little chalkboard abaft the oven wherein I
write my random thoughts, my occasional love notes to my husband and menus
from to time, have so many stories to tell. Indeed, I feel that the kitchens I
have had at my disposal since the time I stepped into one (for indulging in the
serious business of cooking) will effortlessly narrate the story of a
struggling cook, an amateur chef, an inchoate person getting to know her skills
in the cooking department, which can also be seen as a metaphor for the
struggles in my life I faced and endured.
In the stark reality of a
modern city evening, I now see myself delving into the pool of the days gone by.
My first memory of cooking is the dish of fish curry I prepared at home under
the supervision of my mother, who was not too pleased to realize that her
daughter, whom she seldom allowed to enter the oily kitchen in our Kolkata home, would after her marriage find herself in the household of a graduate student in
USA where she would have to cook her daily dishes, if she wished to eat modest
Bengali meals that is, and my mother wanted me to eat them. Indeed, she was
unequivocal about it, since she had and still has a nasty way of regarding
anything that has not been cooked at home. I can still see her standing before me
goggle-eyed with beads of perspiration on her forehead trying to teach me how
to fry a fish correctly. After my first few attempts when I dropped the fish
pieces marinated in turmeric and salt in a pool of mustard oil that still
hadn’t reached the correct temperature, my mother found herself on the brink of
tears. “What will you do,” she said helplessly, “if you cannot prepare a simple
fish curry!” She was sure that I would die of starvation, but was later assured
by my then fiancé and now husband that you seldom get fish like the ones you
buy in Kolkata in the small university town we would be calling home, so perfection in cooking that dish wasn't required. My husband's words didn’t
reassure my mother for she insisted that I learned a few Bengali dishes before
I head for the altar and announce my vows. For days she literally pushed me
into our kitchen at home and made me cook. Aloo posto (potatoes cooked in
poppy-seed sauce), sorse mach (fish in mustard sauce, daal (lentil soup) were
the first few recipes I learned to cook. I tell you that even now despite the
wistful winds of time howling pensively in the tenebrous corners of an
ever-moving life, I can clearly see that little kitchen at home and my perspiring teacher, my mother,
armed with a stainless steel spatula ready to drop a blow on my head in case I
made any mistake in wielding the skillet.
The second kitchen I went
into was the one at my in-laws place. My mom-in-law was evidently anxious when she discovered before our wedding that her would-be
daughter-in-law was “interested” in cooking but has had no experience in that
department so far. Here, I must tell you, people in Bengal are great foodies.
They love to have a good meal three times a day complete with fish and vegetables; and cooking in the eastern part of India is considered an art, a
skill to be assiduously mastered. As a devout lover bent on marrying the person
I now come home to, I was thoroughly bent at the time on securing an affirmative nod from
his mother. Make a good impression was what I had in my mind. I am sure despite
my incessant effort, my mom-in-law was convinced when I tried cooking for them
that I wasn't a star in that department. She was patient and taught
me and my sister-in-law on one of our visits to her place before our respective
weddings, how to cook Muri Ghonto (a special Bengali dish made with fried fish
head and rice). Now, after six years of my marriage when I step into that kitchen on my occasional visits to my in-laws’ suburban home, I cannot
but smile at my naiveté at the time I first encountered that cooking-room. Now I
am a confident cook, years of practice have taught me how to browse and sluice, but the memory of my appreciative glance as I beheld
the crushed fried fish heads being dropped into the bed of half-cooked rice and
cashew and raisins by my mother-in-law still makes me smile.
And then there was my
third kitchen where I was the master-chief and decision maker as to menus. It
was a great independence to find myself in my husband’s graduate-student abode
with a kitchen solely at my own disposal. In the sleepy town of Carbondale, IL, USA,
I found myself experimenting with spices and cuisines. Kitchen wisdom
generously provided by acquaintances, homemakers who have been making delicious
Bengali meals from scratch in their kitchens in their homes in the USA, came as a great help at the time. I learned from one of my lovely acquaintances how to make mishti
doi (sweet yogurt) using condensed and evaporated milk. Alone at home in quiet
afternoons with ample time at hand, I would head over to the kitchen and try to
execute my newly acquired cooking skill. The experiments often bore ghastly
results when I had to rush to the internet to find out how to sweeten an
overtly salted dish, or how to deal with a curry with too much spice in it. The
kitchen burn marks I still bear in my arms will testify to my ceaseless
struggles to learn how to cook. My husband, a chemist, was already a
master in the cooking department by the time I had arrived in his kitchen. Five
of six initial disastrous meals and a few minor kitchen burns convinced him
that matters need to be taken at hand and so, on weekends, he used to have me
by his side while he cooked a delicious chicken curry or a tasty veggie dish.
It was he who passed on me the trick that when you fry turmeric before you cook
any Indian dish that has the spice in it, the taste and appearance of the dish
gets a positive boost.
My fourth kitchen was a
joint-establishment I shared with three other inmates of a house we lived in for a
few months in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA It was a three-storied house where we had our rooms in
the third floor. Our Taiwanese flat-mate was a woman I instantly bonded with soon
after my arrival; I often shared our Indian meals with her while she in return
would introduce us to some of the delicious dishes from her distant homeland. I
remember her telling me once about something called a thousand year old egg,
which was apparently hot-stuff. The description of the egg's black exterior and
green yolk make me avoid its homely substitute for a few days. Still egg-curry
was the thing I once cooked for her, and she, I remember, was lo less happy to
find out that our humble
one-day-old egg was equally
delicious as its thousand-year-old rival.
My fifth kitchen in
Nashville, TN, USA was the address to my major cooking-related-disaster. While
making a delicate salmon curry for my husband’s birthday meal, I found myself
mistaking the little finger in my left hand for the fish. I applied the knife
on my finger with vim and found myself dripping with blood and was subsequently
rushed to the nearest Walgreens. Upon seeing the medical practitioner and
relating the story of how-I nearly-chopped-off-my finger, I mentioned to her in
unequivocal terms my fear about injections. A few moments later a needle was
punched into my forearm; still, in the end, after the bloody-drama was over, I
managed to cook that half-done fish under the glaring eyes of my eyes, piqued
to the core by my display of defiance when he said I should rest and not cook
anymore.
It was in the papered
walls of my Nashville kitchen that I find myself returning now with a sigh one
breathes when one remembers good ole days. That kitchen in our two-bedroom
apartment in Nashville was my cooking-abode for nearly three years and therein
I saw myself mature as a cook. It was it that kitchen that I upped from an
apprentice to a descent cook. It was in that kitchen that I cooked my
first Thanksgiving meal complete with turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy.In
there, I regularly reproduced the meals I watched Paula Deen, Ina Garten and
Rachel Ray make in their respective cooking shows on television. I am sure I
may have had several failures when I re-did the recipes I learnt at the time
from varied sources, but right now all I see are the good things I cooked: a
delicious looking jambalaya, a juicy chicken-roast, mashed potatoes with cream
and cheese in it, cakes perfectly baked, etc.
And now, finally after
six years of marriage and staying by myself with a husband for company, I see
myself heading to my kitchen in Gurgaon, India, my sixth kitchen, on days I
don’t have to attend classes at my university or on weekends. A happy
academician keen on literature, I now find myself waxing lyrical about cooking.
It doesn’t seem to me a rocket-science anymore; it’s a humble chore that needs
to be performed at certain times in a week. I am no more intimidated by recipes
with weird French names of ingredients that I thought were only begotten in
some other world. My view of cooking has changed with my experience with that
art. Like writing, which liberates me and makes me happy every time I try it,
cooking too gives me ample joys when I am wielding the skillet. Writing the
menu before embarking on the project is most fun for me. I am yet to learn how
to make a perfectly round roti (Indian bread) though, and I have avoided the
task so far. May be someday I will learn it, but right now cooking isn’t a
priority anymore like it used to be at one time in my life. I am at peace with
my skill and don’t have to impress anyone with my cooking; I now do it for love
and with love and sometimes when exhausted from work with extreme dislike too.
I guess we all face a certain lull in our activities after the tempestuous
initial stage of new-beginnings is over. All that is now left with me about
cooking is a reticent liking for the art but no more; nevertheless, my
experiences as I learned how to cook,will always remain little gems
illuminating in my album of collected occurrences from my life and will bring me ample joy whenever I shall recall them.
