Punjab via Pompeii
Health, hospitality, and a recipe for egg curry
“Preparing Medicine from Honey,” from a Dispersed Manuscript of an Arabic Translation of De Materia Medica of Dioscorides dated A.H. 621/ A.D. 1224. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
My daughter spent a semester in her junior year of college in Rome, studying classics. My son and I visited her for a week. After soaking in the antiquities of Rome, we ventured outside the city itself.
On a bright November morning in 2000, my son and I walked down the narrow cobbled streets of Pompeii, beneath Mount Vesuvius. Soon we were at a pharmacy shop, with an elevated platform, replete with a pit to concoct and cook ancient medicines.
In my mind, I was immediately transported to my maternal grandfather’s (my nana’s) village, which had a population of about a thousand in the 1950s. He was a hakim, a homeopathic doctor. On the main street of the village, he had his hatti (shop) where he practiced and dispensed his homemade remedies. Only my nana lived almost 2000 years after Pompeii was buried under the ashes of an erupting volcano.
In India, until the last forty years or so, rural life in India stayed at a standstill for a few millennia while the rest of the world moved on. [Editor: I would have endorsed this statement as a teenager, but now I’m more wary of the internalized Eurocentric assumptions it encodes and modern technology’s terrible cost to the environment, so let me add: as I/she perceived it.]
The village had no electricity, running water or indoor plumbing. The land was plowed by teams of oxen. The fields were watered by wells. Oxen went round and round each well in a circle, driving a horizontal cogged wheel. This wheel drove another vertical wheel, with a shaft attached. Along the shaft ran a chain of buckets, which scooped water from the well and dumped it into a trough. This whole concoction was built on an elevated mound of dirt. The channels funneled water to the fields by gravity. The same method was used during Archimedes’ days in ancient Greece. (Editor: I think my mom is referring to “Archimedes’ screw,” but is thinking of something more like a saqiyah or Persian water wheel.)
My nana learned his trade by apprenticing to a master hakim. He was well known and patients flocked from miles. Every so often, supplies would arrive from long distances, to be made into medications and tonics. He would light a fire under his concrete platform just like in the Pompeii dispensary. I remember kilos of rose petals arriving and him cooking the petals with sugar in a cauldron for hours, to form a sweet aromatic fudge.
My nana practiced his profession in the mornings. In the afternoons, he attended to his other business, which was managing his fields of crops. He was very modern for his time. He did not want many offspring. He had only two children: my mother, followed by my uncle, about 8 years later. He also believed in educating his children. My mother, along with the daughter of the high priest and the daughter of the kila (fort) people, were the only girls in the secondary school. He regretted (and my mother never forgot to remind him) that he never sent her to college.
On the other hand, my mama (his son, my maternal uncle) was treated like a spoilt child. A pampered boy, his only job was to study. He was not to be disturbed. He was given his own little apartment behind the hatti. Of course, mama was not interested in studies. He ran amok with his friends. They would kill pigeons and cook and eat them, unbeknown to my grandparents (who were vegetarians). Nana wanted him to study ‘science’ so that he could be an engineer or a doctor. Mama did indeed study ‘science,’ but it was political science.
Since my nana had no kids of his own to help him with seeding, ploughing and harvesting the land, he employed a couple of my mother’s cousins (his older brother’s boys) full-time to help with the chores. We had nicknames for them. One was ‘one-eyed mama’. Another was ‘camel-cart mama.’ We adored the latter mama, because we loved to ride the back of his camel cart whenever we visited.
Nana loved politics. He would try to discuss world politics with us supposedly westernized kids, and he took part in local politics. For many years, he was the head of his panchayat, a traditional local government system consisting of a five-member council. He always remembered a visit by India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, whose train stopped for a few minutes at the village station en route to the new Bhakra-Nangal dam.
Nana was a firm believer in “you are what you eat.” He shunned cooked food as much as he could. He preferred raw fruits and milk straight from the cows. He also practiced yoga; I saw him doing headstands many times. He must have been in his fifties.
One of the traits he imparted on me was to treat all human beings compassionately. During the sectarian riots in Punjab that led to the partition of India and Pakistan, he saved the lives of many Muslims by hiding them from gangs of young Sikh men, bent on killing Muslims in revenge for Hindu/Sikh killings on what would become the Pakistani side of the border. My mother, myself and my children inherited his trait of never being afraid, standing for our values, and trying new things.
My nana always wanted me to be a professor. I am sure he has a contented smile, looking down from wherever he is. He must be very proud that his granddaughter became an engineer, his grand-grandson, a doctor, and his great-granddaughter, a professor of classics.
Recipe for egg curry
I had planned to add a very tasty recipe for corn sabzi, since my grandfather used to grow corn (though not the eating kind) and liked simple foods. But when I went to the grocery store, I remembered it’s hard to get fresh corn this time of year. So I wrote this easy recipe for egg curry instead. It’s one of my go-to dishes if I have unexpected company. I must have made it often for my daughter’s friends, since one of them specially requested it.
[Editor: I like to think this dish would have delighted Roman tastes, too. It also reminds me of Etruscan funerary art I first fell in love with at the Centro, with its egg imagery gesturing toward death and rebirth. This recipe is easy to scale up and tastes great any time of day or year, particularly as a leftover once the eggs soak up the gravy. I’ll be sure my mother shares the corn recipe too, another favorite of mine, when it’s back in season!]
Ingredients (makes 4 servings)
gravy (using the standard gravy recipe I provided in a previous post)
6 hard-boiled eggs
salt to taste
fresh cilantro to garnish
Method
Make gravy using the recipe I provided earlier. Then add it to a pot with about one and a half cups of water. (Feel free to use frozen gravy if you pre-cooked it in advance. You can use more or less water, depending on how thick you want the dish to turn out.)
Bring this diluted gravy to a boil and cook it for an additional couple of minutes. (Cook it down more, if you like your gravy thicker.) Add additional salt, according to your taste.
Peel the hard-boiled eggs. Cut them into halves and add these to the gravy. Cook another minute or so. Shut off the stove. Transfer to serving plate. Garnish with cilantro. Serve.
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, and is sorry for her delay with this one). We love your comments, recipe requests, and photos/notes/questions — thanks for all your support!
