On cooking
Tips and tricks that serve no one and a pinch of virtue signaling
I had mentioned in my previous post about how N and I had our sister’s family visiting us. Also, given my recent departure from fruitful employment, I was bestowed with the title of the chief house cook.
That was, at best, a pleasantly average deal for all involved because while I am a decent cook, my repertoire is extremely limited. Think of it like Harris Jeyaraj’s music. I have a few melodies I can rehash for pleasing effect but no one expects to be blown away by originality.
👩🏾🍳 In another life…
In another life cooking may have been my profession. It is a joyful activity for me.
Like someone said, a good laugh and a well-cooked meal cures most things (except maybe a bad haircut and terrible political opinions). Assuming that you like the taste of what you cook (a big assumption), the promise of a meal at the end is what makes cooking exciting. Of all the questions N and I ask each other like ‘Why is the bathroom such a mess?’ (N asks) or ‘Do you think this is cold? Really?’ (I ask when trying to get the AC further down from 22), the most exciting question is always ‘What do you want to eat?‘
Cooking is both inherently creative as well as mindless. It’s like therapy, but with a very real possibility that you could set your house on fire. I’ve had my own share of experiments by burning off plastic handles of utensils, letting milk boil over a few hundred times and have the food I’m cooking burnt to a nice dark charcoal at the bottom of the pan in my attempt to graduate in this surprisingly hazardous activity called cooking that humans seem to do everyday.
But every piece of the act cooking gives me joy (not the cleaning up). I like the chopping and slicing of things. I like to arrange pieces of veggies by the chopping board and imagine they are billionaire assholes waiting to be served up to my guillotine. Sometimes I carve and cut with the love and precision of a serial killer while other times I am trying to pretend to be a sous chef in a famous kitchen - going for speed. A knife in the hand is a powerful feeling.
And then you get to play with heat. Watching things transform, sizzle and occasionally do little explosions in hot oil wakes you up. And there’s nothing like the adrenaline rush of forgetting an ingredient and having to frantically search for it in the kitchen while the pan smokes away. Or is that just me?
I also love watching cooking and stories connected to cooking. If I were to pick Pixar’s best film, Ratatouille would compete hard with Wall-E. I’ve seen Street Food (the Asia one is the best), Chef’s Table, Ugly Delicious Somebody Feed Phil (although it’s less of a food show and more of a goofy travel show), Salt Fat Acid Heat, Restaurants on the edge….and on and on.
You name a food show and I’ve probably seen it (no reality contests please!). I am in awe of chefs who make it even more so than other entrepreneurial success stories. I have to admit I’ve had tears in my eyes at a few stories of Chef’s Table - who wouldn’t with a gritty human story, amazing food success story and some classical Vivaldi playing in the background.
Like I said, if in another life, I may have pursued cooking as a vocation.
🍽Playing the chief family chef
I think I have made it sufficiently clear that my love of cooking is quite romanticized and did I mention the phrase ‘in another life’? This means that in this life when I say I like cooking, I am saying it like most men say these things - a fun activity to be indulged in when the whim strikes. When I have no choice but to cook, a certain tedium begins to emerge.
And mind you, all of this preamble and drama was for the fact I played the chief family cook for a week. Who was it that said that if men ever got periods, we’d have written thousands of books about it, gave national holidays every month and spent billions of dollars of R&D on it🩸. They were probably right.
In any case, playing the chief household cook is an exhausting thing. I would start at 6.30 am and even with my limited range, I would be exhausted by 10.30 am getting the lunch in place (and the quick egg breakfasts).
I still enjoyed the cooking process.
What was truly boring and difficult for me was trying to think and plan the meals coming up ahead💤.I belong to the same gender of human beings who typically like to walk into the kitchen and ask ‘So, what can I cook today?’ (mostly to myself but hoping there are cameras to capture my flamboyance) without having spent any time or effort conceptualizing a meal ahead of time so the ingredients for it are stocked. I personally find this task incredibly hard and boring at the same time - same as accompanying someone (sometimes N) to buy clothes in a mall or watching paint dry.
All of this made me think again of mothers in the household and the mind boggling fact that for decades, they’ve served thousands and thousands of meals.
👩🏭 Great Indian Kitchen
Let’s do some simple math.
Let’s say each meal costs Rs. 50 (a very conservative estimate). Let’s now assume that for at least twenty years of your life, your mom has cooked up nearly all meals for you (again extremely conservative). With two meals on average per day, it’s a total of 14,600 meals over twenty years or about Rs. 7.4 lakh worth of food. This is for one person, you. Multiply this by household number. For four people, that’s already approaching close to Rs. 30 lakhs. This is one mom.
Now, multiply this by millions of moms in the country. With a very conservative 100 million moms, you have a number like,
💸 Rs. 300 trillion!
All of it unaccounted and free.
“How dare you cheapen love by making it about money?” I hear you mumble between mouth full of a meal probably cooked by someone. All I am saying is that it is an activity that the market has valued for us and one we just take for granted.
Moms in Indian households are doing nothing short of line cooks cum chef in a busy restaurant. They never attended culinary school but the work is no less grueling or intense and unlike celebrity cooks, they don’t get to have their own TV shows.
The work usually starts very early in the morning, often before the rest of the family is still to wake up, right from the morning beverage, which if you are a south Indian Tamil, is likely filter coffee. The prep for the meal starts pretty soon. Between breakfast, lunch and dinner, requests for second coffees or afternoon tea, several rounds of vessels to be cleaned and prep work for future meals like grinding, soaking or peeling things, the work only seems to explode all day.
Often, unlike a line cook (or perhaps like those who did not make it to the right place), an Indian mom finds herself in a poorly equipped kitchen, with a burner that doesn’t work well, pans with missing handles and pressure cookers that need a secret combination of a tap and shove to cook rice perfectly.
After all this, the Indian mom having spent a big chunk of her life in the kitchen, uses it to express love in the way only she knows, by making sweets and savories for visiting children, who complain about having to tap keys on a keyboard all day. In between she also managed to squeeze in a whole career to earn, made connections, learned a bunch of things and created more things than most people.
When you think about it, it’s less like a line cook and more like indentured labor.
In the eighteenth century, Asians wanting to migrate to the new world signed an indenture wherein as a payback for the passage to the new world they would have to work as farm laborers or domestic servants. Many Indian marriages are indentured servitude contracts for the women where in return for social acceptance and basic safety, they toiled in the kitchen and household for a family.
So, when I say I love cooking, its because I have a choice on when I get to do it.
🍴 Eating out is the way
Look anywhere in SE Asia (Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, S Korea..) and the number of people eating out is way more than those that cook at home. Homes often may not even have a kitchen. This is the way.
On the other hand, ask any Indian male of a certain ilk and he would prefer that most meals are home cooked. The number of home lunch boxes that open in an Indian office has no parallel in any other country (I extrapolate here). Indians probably have the most restrictive taste and food preferences palate in that even among things they eat, they need it to be made in a specific way.
It’s a system built on the indentured labor of the Great Indian kitchen. It demands that a person spends a few hours everyday in the kitchen and most often than not its the woman.
Many urban Indians subscribe to this because:
Eating out is expensive
Eating out is unhealthy
Eating out should be a luxury
The first two are real issues while the third one is a cultural hang-up. The first two should be solved, imo. There needs to be a vibrant eating out market for cheap, healthy food and it is beginning to happen. The idea is not to romanticize home cooking but to build infrastructure that allows eating out that is cheap and healthy. But for that to happen, the third issue needs to be solved and more Indian families need to start thinking of eating out (or have meals delivered) as a regular sustainable strategy rather than something sinful, bad, unhealthy or impure.
📃 A thought on recipes
Anyway, back to cooking for joy.
I can’t remember recipes. I tend to blame this fashionably on ADHD as I search for the recipe for the hundredth time on the internet and get annoyed by how people write recipes.
Dear recipe writers,
You are not Salman Rushdie and your recipe for a pulao isn’t the blockbuster bestseller you are hoping it to be. I do not care if your great grandmother cooked this dish for the president of the country or about how you used to eat it sitting under a mango tree at your house. Just get to the damn recipe please.
It doesn’t help that I open these recipe pages only after oil is sizzling in the pan already.
👨🏫 Behold my cooking tips
In the true tradition of a man who does a thing sometimes and now thinks he is an expert, let me offer all of you some cooking tips.
What’s my expertise you ask? Pretty much nothing.
I personally like approaching cooking less like a science and more with a ‘why the hell not’ freedom. Over time, you develop a sense of what ingredient adds what flavor profile and then it is just a matter of mixing and matching as you please. Basis this grueling technique, I have refined the ultimate guideline for cooking like me. Note that the objective here is to maximize fun for yourself while hoping to achieve something palatable.
Here goes the list:
🧅Everything can do with some onion - unless of course you’re baking something and even then no harm in experimenting. This also offers the best opportunity to shed those tears you’ve been holding back and blame it on the vegetable.
🧄Everything in moderation, except garlic. If you have planned to use X garlic for a dish, my tip would be to triple it at the very least. (I have learnt what to do with garlic from a scene from Goodfellas where the chef in the prison teaches how to slice garlic so thin that it melts in the oil and the taste pervades.)
🌶️Sprinkle spices with the flourish of a performing Sushi Master (without any of the attendant expertise or precision). Once you’ve cooked, anyone walking in should viscerally feel the cooking in the kitchen and ask ‘ what the hell happened in here?’
Shepherd all your spices in one place so that when you are unsure of what more to add to your dish, pick one at random and see how to make it work. Cinnamon in sambar. Garam masala in rasam. Why not? After all, the first cooks didn’t have a recipe.
The best tip to make dosa perfectly is to get someone who can actually make it perfectly. I usually call out for N (who makes prefect crispy dosas) in a tone that’s not too demanding but also does not give any wiggle room for her to say no. Influencing without authority is the key to cooking.
Have a thick wooden spatula. Helps to swat people away if the adage too many cooks in the kitchen begins to come true. Aim for the rump.
🧂If it's salty add lemon juice. If not salty enough add salt.
🎵Cook with music on. It adds a whole new level of rhythm.
If you are drinking while cooking, remember the thumb rule: A sip for every stir. Food starts to get tastier with every sip.
🍳The trick to make perfect sunny side up egg is not think about the perfect eggs when they are being broken. This is similar to how quantum physicists operate - the act of observing changes the behavior.
After you finish cooking a meal, always make it point to shout, “the perfect feast is ready” even if you are alone in the house.
All of this makes me sound like a bad cook, I probably am. But I promise you that I cannot be faulted for taste and flavor even if not authenticity of the dish.
The trick, of course, is to make those that consume hungry enough that they’ll eat anything before you serve up what you cooked.
Bon Appétit!
Could be worse,
Tyag
I have started to cook aswell!!! , nice article, I was able to connect in myself in mulitple places in the article.