Cooking is an essential life skill. It is vital to know how to put a meal together. But cooking means different things to everyone. When done occasionally, it can be therapeutic or an act of drudgery when one does it every day without a choice. However, for my mother it has been a matter of duty. I have never seen her cut corners or take shortcuts when it comes to cooking. She has always obliged us by making meals of our choice and incorporating many of my whims and fancies each time. It is as if cooking for others is an act of service and a core part of her identity. And of course a large part of her day.
So when she had to undergo an inevitable surgery and the surgeon advised no kitchen work for a few weeks – I took on that responsibility while my brother took charge of the cleaning and laundry among other things.
While back in Bangalore, where I lived by myself, I was always up to a fair bit of experimentation in the kitchen. But cooking for one was easy – we all did it during the lockdown, remember? As long as the dish was edible – it was okay. Taste, presentation, authenticity didn’t really matter.
But when it came to cooking for a family of three with one recovering patient, that was a different kind of responsibility. The day before the surgery, she had stocked up the fridge and the pantry with all the groceries that I would need. So I assumed it would be a simple process. But as I were to realise, cooking was not just about stocking up and cooking meals. It had essentially three parts to it.
The first part was the planning of the meals and stocking of ingredients, next came the pre-work and finally the great act of cooking and putting the intended meal together. The ancillary activities of cleaning up after can be bunched up with these parts too.
In the initial phase of cooking, the first part was largely taken care of. The trickiest part came next. The act of cooking. I began with the essential part of the meal – the roti. For many years I had evaded making rotis. And now that we had shifted partly to bhakris (millet flour rotis), the task seemed more uphill than before. The bhakris were the first thing I made every morning. The process was a bit more complex than making a wheat roti or a chapati.
The flour needed to be cooked in hot water first and then it was to be kneaded immediately. The ultimate goal, of course, was to get round soft bhakris. But achieving that goal solely depended on – the atta to water ratio and the resultant consistency of the dough, how well the bhakris were rolled out and of course, the varying heat of the girdle (tawa) with the time alloted for sekho-fying it on the tawa.
Every stage of this bhakri preparation proved to be a challenge. Whereas my mother had done this deftly every morning before I left for work, I, on the other hand started my mornings by struggling to get the consistency right. I also struggled with the dough – burning my fingers (literally) on the hot sticky mixture (one is supposed to wet their palms before plunging it into the sticky mix, who knew) and then trying to roll round (never round – always square) bhakris. When it came to getting the line running, I messed up the sequence each time and ended up leaving the rolled bhakri on high heat for far too long or ended up undercooking it. Some how with some struggle and practice, and her patient guidance I was able to dish out palatable bhakris in due course.
The rotis or chapatis – I could never master (as you can see in the picture above). A chapati is the most basic dish in the Indian household which I should have mastered by now. But I was just terrible at it. So much so that the only roti eater – my brother – converted to eating bhakris for the entire duration of my cooking!
But not all was in vain. There were some hits too. Like, the good old rice and dal. Cooking rice was all about precise measurements of water and rice, she had her spoons cut out for this task, my trusted old Prestige cooker made things easy. Making brown rice was easier too once I had I soaked it for a few hours. Making dal was a delight especially if it was soaked and pressure cooked with basic tempering in ghee with garlic, jeera and hing (asafoetida).
Vegetables were fairly simple to make too but one had to pivot as per the ingredients at disposal. The generic tempering of jeera, rai, onions, ginger-garlic paste and the fantastic four – chilly powder, turmeric, coriander powder and garam masala – roasted well, made for a good base for most curries. I did experiment with thoran of beetroot and carrots, with a tempering of curry leaves, garnished with fresh coconut which surprisingly turned out to be good.
Chicken curry turned out to be better than I anticipated, though, her step by step in person instructions made a big difference. Likewise for cooking boneless chicken in a kadai or wok seemed simple but I had to manage the heat – lest I burnt the garlic and the onions I used in the stir fry.
Frying fish on the tawa required a higher level of patience. I would always be in a hurry to flip the fish – especially bombil or the Bombay Duck rather than letting it cook through until crisp on a medium flame, instead I would end up with a crispy skin but a runny middle!
With prawns less was more and you ought to not cook them for long as they tend to cook at a rapid pace and then turn chewy. Eggs were by far my favourite. I was able to make a variety of omelettes, scrambled eggs and shakshuka without many misses.
When the stock started to dwindle, I started to make trips after work to the local market and then to my favourite – the fish market near my school. Armed with a list I would go looking for vendors whom my mother knew on a first name basis and tried to get respectable deals on everything from tadgolas, coconut, leafy vegetables, sardines (for my cats and me) and fruits. But I always ended up spending much more than budgeted (thank you UPI). I was also careless, and ended up getting a big bunch of mint leaves instead of the coriander, pudina, curry leaves bundle.
Cooking meant not just spending an extraordinary amount of time over the stove. It meant cleaning up the counter, preparing the chopping board for the next dish or washing the dishes to reuse them. It also meant that one had to be efficient and improvise on the go. No lid to cover the pan? No problem – use a plate. No tongs in sight, use a cloth to lift the kadai. No ladle to stir the dal, use a big spoon. No Tamarind? Use Kokum.
Putting together the final plate and serving it was the most satisfying part. However, the moment of truth came when they would taste the food and pronounce their verdict. No matter how many times I tasted the food while cooking and modified it to suit my taste, it didn’t matter what I thought, ultimately it was always what they felt.
In these few days of cooking, however, some things hit me hard.
While growing up I was always very critical of the food that my mother prepared. Without appreciating the effort that went into putting the dish together,I would be quick to point out the shortcomings in the dish. And the effort was not just about cooking, it was about the other two parts too. For a long time my father supplemented some of these efforts by going to the bazaar and stocking groceries. But since the past six years, my mother has been managing all the chores on her own.
I felt terribly guilty about all the times that I had criticised her cooking and got upset over the lack of salt or some minor miss like that. I think I truly never understood what it was to cook – day in and day out, everyday without a break. To cook as a hobby is much different than cooking everyday, without a choice.
I also realised that homemakers, especially women, put up with many constraints to put the food on the table. Right from managing the galloping inflation to the demands of the family, and of cooking the right dishes as per occasion (and tradition) while ensuring there is high nutritional value in every meal. The constraint of time is an additional condition. For instance getting my entire tiffin ready before I leave at 7:30 am meant ensuring a high degree of operational efficiency to avoid any delays – lest I miss my usual local train. Operating under these constraints is not at all easy and requires a great deal of personal sacrifice (say goodbye to slow relaxed mornings).
And finally, cooking is just one of the many chores with its fair share of upstream and downstream activities, all of which are interdependent on each other and mainly cyclical in nature. This ‘system’ is then put under constraints as mentioned earlier and is continually bombarded with feedback. Now take that and multiply it with all other chores. Laundry, doing the dishes, cleaning the house, cleaning the bathrooms, feeding the cats, taking care of the bills – all of which come at a great personal cost. These plethora of activities performed by one person without even an instance of opposition makes it a thing of wonder, and also begets the question – why this unequal distribution of chores?
After a few weeks, I relinquished my overall responsibilities except for making my office tiffin box and breakfast but I promise to go back and take over as much of the load as I can.