2020: The One Where the Kitchen Became her Safe Space
She turned to lockdown cooking to calm her pandemic-frayed nerves, indulge in heart-to-heart chats and learn the value of imperfection.
On a cloudy Saturday noon in October, she switched off her laptop, exhausted after a long gruelling work week. She had stayed up nights writing a commissioned article on a subject she wasn’t interested in, and which paid too little. Frustrated with herself for not having the courage to draw boundaries and say ‘no’ to the editor — like being stuck in that toxic relationship that triggered her anxiety — her body went into fight or flight mode. She chose the latter. Her escape: the kitchen.
Lodged in a 1BHK flat in an old housing society in Mumbai, the kitchen was spacious, at least by ‘Bombay standards’. It could accommodate a dining table where her parents, sibling and grandmother ate together, a loft with old brass utensils, and shelves lined with barnis that stocked a year’s worth of pulses, grains, spices and other food items — a practice that had helped the family sail through early weeks of pandemic and rampant panic-buying.
In the lockdown, the kitchen became her oasis in that cramped house. As she stepped in, the swirl of thoughts would clear like dust after a desert storm, and she’d know exactly what she wanted to cook.
That day, it was caterer Swapneel Prabhu’s elaborate suran galawati kebab on Instagram that had caught her attention. Zealous about the exacting nature of the recipe, she followed it step by step — pressure cooking and mashing the suran (elephant foot yam), frying onion crescents patiently till they curled up in an even shade of golden brown, grinding the birista into paste, blitzing cashews, and adding both, along with a powdered blend of spices, into the suran mash and then, smoking it too. Those velvety, delicious kebabs could give any ‘restaurant-style’ versions a run for their money.
She relished making rich, lavish dishes, especially during weeks of high stress and looming deadlines. Earlier, a walk in the city would lead her on different discoveries and help take her mind off things.
In the lockdown, the kitchen became her only source of rejuvenation, the place where she could unclench her muscles and her mind, stiff from pandemic-related uncertainties.
Here, she would disappear for hours in scents of rose water, saffron and cardamom as she prepared a vegetarian biryani (yes, it’s a thing. Shah Jahan ate paneer biryani). She would be seduced by the soft caress of paneer koftas as she stuffed them with dry fruit and fried them in ghee while a makhanwala-esque gravy bubbled on the side. Her soul would dance excitedly listening to the delightful symphony orchestra of curry leaves, mustard and fenugreek seeds as they crackled in oil, reaching a crescendo when poured over raw mango cubes rubbed with red chilli powder, salt and turmeric for a Kerala-style pickle to accompany a meal of curd-rice on sweltering summer days.
Sometimes, she followed recipes to a T but on most occasions, she let her instincts take over, adding a different spice or sharpening a particular flavour profile to make the dish her own. Like, fire-roasting tomatoes for pasta in arrabiata sauce, adding a bit of jaggery to Sindhi-style gavar aloo or a little extra kalonji (onion seeds) in Punjabi-style khatta meetha kaddu, so that it teased and tingled her palate, helping her discern flavour nuances better.
There was a time when she hated stepping into the kitchen, neither to help cut vegetables when her father made au gratin nor look over her mother’s shoulder and appreciate the effort that went into stuffing banana, potato and brinjal with fresh coriander, green garlic, spice powders, and slow-cooking the Surti undhiyu.
“What will you do when you get married?” Her father would ask agitatedly and she would retort, “I will only marry the boy who knows how to cook.”
Her mother, though, viewed cooking as a life skill. “Knowing the basics will help you fend for yourself later.” That’s a logic she could get behind. Later, her career in food writing ignited her passion to cook.
Initially though, her kitchen chronicles, like many experiences in her life, were stewed in lack of confidence. She had grown up on an extensive dose of her father’s cooking. He had a fixed palate, preferring precision and perfection, and had a set notion of taste — where a dish would be flavourful only when cooked only in a particular way — with a severe disdain for the pressure cooker even on days when things were running late (“All the flavours evaporate with steam,” he’d say). While she imbibed his fervour for cooking and perfection, she had a more experimental palate and didn’t mind using a pressure cooker if a recipe (especially from well-known chefs) called for it. So, she felt anxious about his critical feedback.
“Make each dish the way you want and believe that what you make will be great. Be bindaas, be a confident cook,” her mother reminded her each time she hesitated when adding a particular ingredient.
Armed with these sagely words (‘do they teach this in culinary school?’ she wondered) and equipment passed down via generations, like a brass mortar pestle and cast-iron cookware, she made the kitchen her playground to experiment fearlessly.
Her mother enjoyed partaking in her cooking adventures, turning into an assistant and helping with prep. While she may not have given in to all her demands as a child lest she spoil her, in the kitchen, she happily catered to all her requests. When suran galawati needed to be smoked with coconut shell — since there was no coal — she was excited to try it. For a few seconds, when the flames shot up too high and it looked like the kitchen would catch fire, her mother stood her ground and continued the experiment, even as her father sternly dismissed the step as “something best left to restaurant kitchens”.
With more time spent in the kitchen, it also became a safe space to savour heart-to-heart conversations with her mother and grandmother. Here, they shed skins as mothers and wives, and turned into free-spirited women, sharing nuggets from their maiden lives, the faults in the way sons are raised and their views on marriage and feminism, where her grandmother once admitted, “As women, we’ve been conditioned to idealise our sahan shakti (Gujarati for strength to tolerate) for far too long and so, we’ve made things worse for ourselves.”
It’s now been over a month since she has been teleported from a well-stocked kitchen in Mumbai to its threadbare counterpart in Goa. There’s no clink of mortar pestle to give her company. The cast-iron cookware has been replaced by a non-stick tawa and kadhai and tetrapaks do the job in the absence of a grater or mixer grinder to make fresh buttermilk, scrape coconut or puree vegetables.
Surprisingly, that hasn’t taken away her joy of cooking. She has discovered cool hacks — like bashing garlic with the bottom of a heavy glass bottle to coax out its flavours (a hack courtesy her roommate), offbeat pairings, and innovations with leftovers. For instance, tempering the garlic yoghurt (from the leftover Afghan Borani Banjan) with cumin and mustard seeds, and having it with rice is as comforting as a set curd-rice.
And rajma-chawal may be a match made in heaven but it’s polyamorous with poee and sannas too.
She has also begun to find joy in imperfections. Juliennes and brunoise may look prettier on a plate but she enjoys the flavours soaked in by rough chunks of carrots, potatoes and cauliflower in a stew or curry. And instead of spice powders, she prefers whole spices in a tamarind-jaggery chutney. For her, coriander seeds and saunf aren’t a sore sight in the silken smooth, sweet-and-sour concoction but add a depth of flavour and an uncanny bite to the bhel.
In this time, she has realised that a kitchen isn’t necessarily a physical space but a feeling. One characterised by love, warmth and a cauldron of tastes, smells and aromas that can be simmered in any part of the world and still have the power to conjure up memories, recreate experiences and bring one closer to their loved ones — even those far away — in the lockdown.
Being bindaas has become the secret to her pandemic cooking.
Disclaimer: All characters, incidents, events in this story are non-fictitious and any resemblance to the writer and her family is purely intentional.
