What Bou used to say…stories from an Odia grandma’s kitchen
A new visual project documents home-cooked Odia recipes garnished with nostalgia and a grandmother’s wise words
Once upon a time, there was a greedy king who loved eating aloo (potato). He consumed it all, side-lining other vegetables and tubers. One day, he became so big, he floated away, flying over cities. Two day later, the starving monarch landed in a jungle. He found a hut where he asked the inhabitants to feed him some potatoes. ‘Our king uses up all the potato crop, so we do not have any’ was the response. Frustrated, he agreed to eat their offering of mixed vegetables. ‘This is amazing. I’ve eaten so much aloo, I have forgotten the taste of other vegetables’, said the king. He returned to the palace a changed man, no longer obsessed with potatoes but welcoming of all vegetables.
Folklore or a true story, we will never know. Decades back, it was this story (and others) that got the eight Mohapatra children from a joint family in Bhubaneswar hooked to eating vegetables. “Bou [my grandmother] used to say, ‘these mixed vegetables are eaten by royalty, so you should eat it too’,” says Shilpi Sampad, one of those eight kids, now all grown up and working as a journalist in Hyderabad.
Sampad grew up in a large joint family, presided over by her paternal grandmother: Bou to the elders, and Maa to the grandchildren. Bou was the late Surama Mohapatra, a school teacher who enjoyed cooking and feeding people. Bou took on the responsibility of cooking and feeding the grandchildren, and catered to their every whim. She fed them on a steady diet of traditional Odia dishes, and some not-so-traditional stories.
These dishes, garnished with memories of a wise grandmother and her style of cooking, make up a new visual food project, Bou Kahuthile (literally, ‘Bou used to say’).
Dinner table stories
In the third month of the lockdown in India, the Mohapatra family found themselves gathered at family old home. Sampad and her husband had come for a visit, and her brother Raj wasn’t able to return to Mumbai. “After a long time, the entire family sat together for meals. We would spend most of our time talking about food,” says Sampad. At the time, she was busy uploading food pictures on her Instagram account. She had the idea of creating videos of food but her brother, a freelance cinematographer, wasn’t convinced. Nihar Desai’s Aav Re Varsad, the short film series documenting Gujarati monsoon food, changed his mind.
The siblings didn’t have to think too long about a subject. “Because of the COVID-19 lockdown, restaurant food was out of bounds, markets weren’t functioning properly and we had to rely on homegrown produce, and cook with minimal spices and ingredients. It was a back-to-basics kind of cooking and it reminded us of Maa’s food,” says Sampad.
They chose five of her recipes and decided to create a recipe video that documents memories and traditions. The first episode looked at dalma, a medley of dal and vegetables and part of the part of the Chhappan Bhog (56 items) offered to the deities at the Jagannath temple in Puri. Sampad, who does the narration and makes a brief appearance, calls it soul/comfort food. The “mother of all dals” was a common fixture on the family table, eaten at least thrice a week. Bou cooked it because it was high on nutrition and easy to serve. Her recipe used a tadka of ghee, pancha phutana — a five spice blend of whole cumin, black mustard fennel, nigella seeds, fenugreek and sukhila lanka — dry red chilli and heaps of coconut. She would measure out the dal using a Colgate tooth powder tin, which is still in service 40 years later. In the episode, Sampad’s mother, Seema talks about learning to cook dalma from Bou after her marriage, and then going back home and wowing her Bihari parents with the hearty dish.
Other episodes explore Bhaja Manda — fried semolina dumplings with a coconut and dry fruit filling typically eaten during festivals; Dahi Machha — fish cooked in a curd gravy, which is sent from the groom’s house to the bride’s family on the wedding day; Rasaballi — fried chenna dunked in sweetened milk, and Chingudi Patripoda — prawns cooked with a paste of black and yellow mustard in banana leaves.
Every episode is anchored in the present while honouring the past. Though traditional, there is a nod to change: food once cooked over firewood is now reliant on gas stoves, ingredients are swapped for those readily available. As is befitting the name, every episode of the series is peppered with things Bou used to say. “Kids don’t eat traditional food unless it looks appealing. But, if you make fish or meat, they suddenly feel hungry much earlier,” she would say when making Chingudi Patripoda or ‘leaf-wrapped presents’ for lunch.
The Dahi Machha episode gives us a backstory into Bou’s life. She grew up in Puri in Odisha, and after marriage moved to Bhadrak town where she worked as a schoolteacher. There was a pond behind the house and as children, she and her siblings would sit on the compound wall and catch gilt head, koi carp, and catfish. The fresh catch would go straight into the frying pan. Bou, we learn, didn’t like cooking fish much. “How can market bought fish compare to the fresh catch from lakes or ponds?” she would say.
Family production
Bou Kahuthile is a family production: Sampad scripted it, her husband loaned his camera, her aunt Ira did the narration, and her brother handled post production. Sampad did the cooking, inviting her mother and aunt to show up for certain shots. “They were not convinced about the idea. They said, ‘Everyone thinks their grandmother’s food is special. Why will they listen to your stories?’,” she says. The reaction to the first episode changed their mind. Though reluctant to come on camera and talk, they did agree to do voiceovers.
Ira’s voice is a melodious accompaniment to slow motion shots of ghee dripping into a kadhai, fish browning evenly in a pan, the slow bubble of vegetables simmering in dalma, and the forming of manda balls. There’s a certain wistfulness in her voice as she reminisces the past and talks about treating each homecoming of the children as a festival, to be celebrated with steamed or fried manda pitha. “When the kids are home, pitha is a weekly affair. Once they go away, who will bother about manda pitha?” she asks
Bou Kahuthile launched on August 1. The response was unexpected. People sent messages sharing stories and memories of their grandmothers and how they related to the food. Repeated requests for recipes meant the family — used to cooking by andaza (approximation) — had to start noting down measurements.
As Bou used to say to the kids when they made a fuss, “Once you start working and living on your own, you will realise the importance of home-cooked food.”
We certainly do.
