Everyone does it differently. Our taste buds dictate our likes and dislikes and our head and heart dictate the rest — but most of our dealings with food start at home, in childhood.
Mother would have liked to cook by the book for she was a perfectionist. However, since she could not follow recipes to the letter for lack of availability of ingredients and insufficiency of resources to buy the ingredients, she substituted wisely and lingered over the stove patiently. Thus, everything that came out of her kitchen — in huge amounts for our extra-large appetites — was perfection itself.
She was known for her laden table and her outstanding curries and desserts and confectionery. We knew, however, that she was able to do all that without the lavish use of exorbitantly priced ingredients. She was practical and parsimonious and what’s more — she recorded her endeavours and the fruits of her friends’ labours — with substitutes and suggestions — in her handwritten recipe book. All repeat performances were therefore possible with no mistakes, no last-minute collapse of the souffle or curdling of the kulfi (an Indian cold dessert, like ice cream).
Our first lessons in cooking were naturally under her sensible wing. Since all of us were what is now called ‘foodies’, we quickly learnt our way around the kitchen and in time, when we fledglings went our independent ways, we took with us Mother’s sure-fire recipes in our own little recipe books.
It was only natural that when I met my mother-in-law, who had nurtured a numerically larger set of ‘foodies’, I sat down with that book to record the sum of her completely different but equally wise culinary ways.
By this time, I had realised that the kitchen was not my field of interest. A wiser person would probably have got someone else to take over food production in my home, but using my own brand of rather skewed logic I did not abandon it completely, and instead took to improvising.
What should have been a combination of Mother’s and Mother-in-law’s par excellence cuisines and all their sure-shot recipes degenerated in my hands into short-cut ones. A bunch of this, a handful of that, a dollop and a sprinkling (or more often, a gush) from whichever jar or bottle was close at hand became the most accurate description of what went into our meals.
Amazingly, slow poisoning was not the result — or if it is, it is still in process. We survived. We thrived. Our children actually believed that food should taste like that. The illusion was nurtured further when our son set up his own home. At regular intervals, frozen meals of all types, to cater to every whim of his increasingly discerning and finicky palate, were transported to him by an indulgent and energetic (though definitely flagging) mother.
When trips to re-stock his freezer were no longer possible, he had no choice but to get in front of that stove himself. I should have been happy, but I really had no opinion about it until it became obvious that his contact with our home was entirely — and almost only — around meal-making time.
Christmas, New Year, birthdays, anniversaries: Like clockwork, there is a hurried call to get on-the-spot instructions on how to make the meal he associates with the occasion.
When did I devolve into a cook book, I question; but he is already off the line. Time is short and he is hungry.
Maybe I should leave out an essential ingredient, I think — as many are viciously wont to do when sharing recipes. Perhaps when his end-product does not look or taste like what he remembers from his childhood home, I could get to hear his voice again ...
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
