Be Careful What You Wish For
(My stint as an only child in Brussels, with recipes for “do pyaza” mushrooms and gravy)
Near the end of our stay in Karachi, Pakistan, my parents were anxiously waiting for word to arrive from Delhi about their next posting. India had an embassy in almost all the capitals of the world. The countries were ranked A, B, and C, A being the most desirable and C the least. The countries with an A rating tended to be in western Europe, the US, and Canada, with a smattering of other countries like Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. During my father’s service, the B countries were the Communist countries of eastern Europe and countries still under British rule like Kenya. Under category C came countries like Pakistan.
To be fair, the government rotated postings for all employees between A, B and C stations. My father had already done a B and a C posting, so he was due for an A. In category A, the most desirable countries were the English-speaking ones: the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. If you got posted to one of them, you won the jackpot! You took your children along and enrolled them in the local schools. Otherwise you might want to leave your children in boarding schools in India.
There was a lot of anticipation and anxiety in our household as we awaited news of our fate. Finally, D-Day arrived. My father came home with a sad face. He had lost the lottery. We were to go to Belgium.
My parents huddled for days on end, discussing what to do with us kids. They decided my brothers, who were 11 and 8, would be left back in India for school and I would be taken along.
I was both excited and angry. Excited, because I would be like an only child: I would get all the attention from my parents. And angry, because I did not like that my education was considered less important than my brothers’.
We went to India for a holiday and said teary goodbyes to my brothers in Chandigarh. Then we look a luxury train ride to Bombay (in those days, airline travel was still very expensive). We stayed in a nice hotel in Bombay, now called Mumbai. The stories I’d heard about gigantic rats there were true. I saw some in the back alley of our hotel from our balcony.
We went shopping. My parents bought me a half dozen ready-made dresses, each more beautiful than the other. (Up to this point, all the dresses I wore were made by my mother or the local tailor, not fancy at all — not in the least bit like the dresses I later made for my daughter or my granddaughter.) We visited a family that had a pet rabbit; I wonder, in retrospect, if it was the Bhatnagar family. I was already enjoying the attention I was getting!
Finally, we boarded a P&O steamship to London that had begun its voyage in Australia. My parents had their own cabin. I had a bed in the next cabin, which I shared with a young Goan woman headed to England to join her husband. Life aboard ships then was very different from cruise liners today. There was no nonstop entertainment every night. But we did have a library, and I used it often.
One day, I happened to go there after I was supposed to be in bed. The next morning, when my mother realized that I had ventured out alone, she was furious. She slapped my cheek and gave me some choice words. (It was normal then for Indian parents to slap their kids, and so did the schoolteachers.)
At 13, I had my first fit of teenage rebellion. Until then, if I ever felt that I had upset my mother for any reason, I would start crying and apologize before my mother could slap me. This time I felt strongly that I did nothing wrong. I held back my tears. I told her that I had nothing to be sorry for, and she was welcome to slap my other cheek. Of course my mother flew into a rage, and gave me a barrage of slaps on both cheeks.
I remember going ashore in Aden, traveling through the Suez Canal, and stopping in Marseilles before finally arriving in London. But my daughter/editor says my descriptions are ‘orientalizing’ and ‘interrupt the narrative flow,’ so I will share them only if you ask.
Life was good on the ship. I insisted that we sign up for all the tours they were offering. We toured the engine room and the captain’s cabin. We went to the navigation room, learned all about radar, and saw the blips on the radar screen. They told us how navigation works and how they chart the ship’s position in the middle of the ocean. (This was before GPS.) I had a hundred and one questions. I wanted to know how everything worked. I suppose the seeds of becoming an engineer were already sprouting.
Finally, after arriving in London and spending a few days sightseeing there, we reached our final destination: Brussels. So far, we had been constantly on the move, experiencing new places, new people, new food. My mother had no chance yet to miss my brothers.
Overnight, as we began settling into our new apartment, my mother’s mood changed. She had nothing to do other than cook and clean. She became depressed and angry, missing her sons. Once, she asked me to iron some clothes, and accused me of leaving the iron on after I finished. At dinner, when I didn’t finish eating everything on my plate, she would go on tirade about how my brothers were starving in India, a third-world country, while I refused to eat the good food in such a rich country.
Her bad moods lasted a couple of months. I avoided her to protect myself from her anger. Things would get better, and we would resume our normal activities. We went to many castles around Brussels. We took long walks in the woods. We went to a tulip festival in Holland. I read up on Paris and we spent a week there. We toured every attraction on my list, me leading the way, with guide books and metro maps in my hand. We visited Germany and Switzerland. My parents let me be in charge of our passports.
Many years later, I took my children to these very countries.
[Editor: While my brother and I were very grateful for the opportunity to travel as children, our mother’s inability to distinguish ‘right’ from ‘left’ in any language continues to astound and amaze. Remind her to tell you about the time she dropped us off at a random Paris hotel and drove onward to park at a garage the clerk indicated a hundred meters away. She got lost for hours and rejoined us past midnight only with the assistance of a patient gendarme. I thank episodes like this for developing my own unerring sense of direction. I am not sure if my mother has internalized the lesson, though, that tout droit does not mean ‘take every right turn.’]
[Back to Kulwant in Brussels:] The following March, my mother was in a frenzy of excitement. My brothers were coming for their summer vacation. My mother prepared and cooked all their favorite foods. The apartment was full of happiness and excitement. Once they were with us, the world totally revolved around them. But once they left for India at the end of July, she became inconsolable.
In these moods, my mother would lash out at the slightest provocation. I was not eating right, I was not asleep by 8 pm, and so on. (I would shut my door, switch off the light, and read by the streetlight outside my window.) By September, she recovered, and we resumed our normal life. The cycle repeated again the next year.
There were a lot of good things that happened too. Belgium was a safe country and I was allowed to go out on my own. My mother agreed to let me take swimming lessons, for which I had to ride a tram alone. I took painting classes, also a fair distance away. Of course I went to the library twice a week, alternating between the British and American ones. I also took evening classes in French at an academy a couple miles away.
Our Belgian sojourn taught me that being an only child was not such a boon after all. I would rather share my parents with my brothers than face my mother all by myself.
Recipe for gravy and “do pyaza” (“twice onions”) mushrooms
In the sixties, fresh fruits and vegetables were not always readily available in Belgium. So when we were living in Brussels, for variety, my mother once made a mushroom curry. She made a typical Punjabi gravy and added whole mushrooms. The mushrooms toughened and the dish was not very appetizing.
A few years ago, we went for a dinner at a restaurant called Embassy at Connaught Place in New Delhi. I had the best mushrooms ever. I deconstructed the dish, Googled some similar recipes, and came up with the following simplified version.
The recipe is written in two sections. First is the gravy recipe. The second is a mushroom dish that uses this gravy. [Editor’s note: this gravy is essential to many of my mother’s favorite dishes. You’ll want to bookmark this and refer to it often.]
I make the gravy concentrate in bulk, multiplying the ingredients by 20x, and cooking in two 12-inch pans. I freeze the concentrate in ice cube trays, store them in ziplock bags and keep the bags in the freezer. When I want to make a recipe that calls for this gravy, I just throw a few cubes in a pot, add some water, and boil — about 4–5 cubes for a dish for 6 people. [Editor: let’s leave my mother’s sense of how much people can eat for another post.] This pre-frozen gravy tastes as good as fresh. So consider making triple the amount below, and save two portions for the future. You’ll be glad you did!
1. Gravy
Ingredients (serves 6)
1 large yellow onion (or 1.5 medium-sized onions), chopped
4–6 cloves of garlic, chopped (I chop the onion and garlic together in an electric chopper)
3/4-inch piece of ginger, chopped
1–3 hot green peppers, according to your taste (you can chop the peppers and ginger together using a small chopper or by hand)
2–3 tomatoes (use crushed canned tomatoes if not in season), pureed in the food processor
salt to taste (I use one and a half teaspoons for the amount in this recipe)
1 teaspoon ground turmeric powder
1-2 teaspoons cumin seeds
1/4 cup plain yogurt
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
Method
Heat the oil on medium. When it’s hot, roast the cumin seeds in it until they splutter.
Add the chopped onions and garlic. When all are lightly browned, add the pureed tomatoes. Cook the mixture down, stirring often and scratching from the bottom, until the oil starts to separate from it at the edges of the pan.
Then add the yogurt. Cook it down again, continuing to stir often from the bottom, until the oil separates again at the edges. Then add the turmeric and salt.
If you want to make “do pyaza” mushrooms, proceed to those instructions. If you are freezing gravy for future use, remove the mixture at this point. Cool it, transfer it to ice cube trays, and freeze it. You can then put the gravy cubes into ziplock freezer bags until you need them. I use this recipe for many dishes with gravy, such as koftas, meatballs, egg curry, etc.
2. “Do Pyaza” Mushrooms
Ingredients (serves 6)
gravy (recipe above)
1 pound button mushrooms, cleaned and sliced lengthwise
6 tablespoons vegetable oil
one and a half large onion, chopped lengthwise
1 cup coconut milk (optional)
1 handful of cleaned, washed, and chopped cilantro (optional)
1 teaspoon of lemon juice (optional)
Method
Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a 12-inch inch pan. Sauté half of the mushrooms on medium-high heat until their edges are slightly crisp. (This will take about 3 or 4 minutes; don’t cook so much that they ooze water, or shrink.) Repeat for the second batch of mushrooms. Remove with slotted spoon. (Try to leave as much oil as possible in the pan after each batch.)
Add two more tablespoons oil. Add the diced onions and cook until slightly golden. Add the sautéed mushrooms. Add the gravy concentrate. Add about half a cup of water (use less, about 1/4 cup, if you also plan to use the coconut milk). Cook 4 to 5 minutes longer. At this point, add the coconut milk if you’re using it. Cook a couple of minutes more on medium heat.
The dish in the restaurant had the consistency of a thick soup. If you like thinner gravy, add more boiling water.
To finish, add the fresh lemon juice and garnish with cilantro. Serve hot with naans, or rice.
Thank you, readers, for all your support — we are so happy you’ve been using these recipes! Please send us your food photos and any questions/additional notes you think of so we can keep improving the recipes (with thanks to Athena Kirk for her aloo gobi photos!). In the mean time, as you know, Kulwant Pandey is a retired computer hardware engineer who enjoys gardening, cooking, knitting, sewing, and reading. She lives outside Poughkeepsie, NY and is the mother of Vidhu and Nandini (who edits these posts).
