Everyday Musings > Food Glorious Food

I've been attempting to cook for the last few months. Recently I bought a book - ‘Pure and Simple Vegetarian Cooking’ by Vidhu Mittal. It has beautiful pictures, easy instructions and some lovely recipes. It’s been three days since I’ve been trying a dish a day from the book – brown rice with besan zucchini, carrot and peas pulao and today, phulka with minty aloo. My salt is consistently less and the phulka today fluffed beautifully but wasn’t as soft as it ought to be. It is truly fun to cook and eat fresh, hot food. And I’m sure it is a hell of a lot more fulfilling to cook and feed it to someone too. Once or twice I’ve carried my experiments to work, so my dear friends (who I call my three mothers) can taste it and tell me where I’ve gone right or wrong.

Lunch in the canteen is a depressing affair. The food is insipid and far from nutritious. A platter of diced fruits is all that’s palatable at times. The days when someone gets food from home, our eyes light up. Everyone heaps spoonfuls and relishes it, conversations are more animated, the laughter heartier than usual. A good lunch gives everyone enough reason to smile till the afternoon tea.

The other day, on the way to a meeting, a colleague J and I were discussing that if not for our taste buds, we could pop little green food pills and life would go on without a hitch. There’d be no restaurants, no canteens, no wastage and no hunger problem. I shudder at the thought though. The smell of fresh bread being baked, the taste of apple pie, the last bit of chocolate sauce that waits to be licked off the lip, the appeal of a hot roti giving into a slab of white butter...I cannot imagine food not being food.

India has so many varieties of food; they differ from state to state, region to region, home to home, hand to hand. World over, food is a major reason some people know that a few countries exist. Lebanese Falafal being one instance. Or Caribbean beans. Japanese Sushi. Or Indian curry. Food seems to be a great way to understand culture and initiate hospitality. The first thing anyone does to make a guest feel welcome is to take them out to dinner. The simplest way to show your appreciation for an alien culture is to eat the local food.

Anthony Bourdain, Jamie Oliver, Kylie Kwong, Yan, Sanjiv Kapoor, Tarla Dalal have all earned much praise and fan following for entertaining people with their culinary talents. A cookery show is so relaxing to watch, the neat precise manner in which the ingredients are measured and set aside in plain bowls, the different woks and kadhais, the cooking process and finally the garnishing and serving. Cooking is therapeutic and it is amazing that in a planet with so many creatures, human beings are the only ones able to cook food and relish it.

I learnt to cook a few months ago, and realised that I’ve been missing out a wonderful experience. I wonder why food is not taught as a science to students and why there are no kitchen labs and culinary studies in school? How is it that such an essential skill escaped their attention and is relegated to a Home Science or Catering elective in college?

The way my grandmother cooked and the way my mother cooks and the way I cook are so different. Like copying the same film onto different CDs, there is much generation loss, but as long as there is the willingness to cook, and enough love in the preparation of it, I’m sure food will never turn into a little green pill.