Home Food: Loving and Living Without…
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There is an elusive, haloed image and taste one has of ‘home food’, or ghar-ka-khana, that for me, grows stronger with every passing year. Every year I put on a kilo or two seeking and craving this home food that is not available to me anymore and the only substitute is to eat everything else that comes close and regret it later (when the kilos are put on and refuse to go). As I get older and run my own home, this ‘home food’ of my childhood and youth has become one of those mythical, fairy tale, larger-than-life elements from the past that cannot be reclaimed, only recalled, by channeling my taste buds whenever something home-like shows up on my plate. But this, is sadly, rare. Borscht. Biryani. Muri ghonto. Thor. Ghugni. Luchi. Russian Salad. Khichuri and begun bhaja. Pilmeni. Fish baked in mayonnaise. Payesh. The list is as culturally rich as it is diverse. I say culturally rich because home food for me has always been a manic, schizoid mix of Bengali items craved by my father and carefully prepared by my adventurous Russian-married-to- a-Ghosh mother, and stock Russian preparations made by my father after years of training when studying and ‘hosteling’ in Russia. Dishes my father, who at the end of his life, when he was seventy plus, relegated to me and my mother to prepare, keeping only the making of fat, juicy, mutton mince chops for himself, that by the time he made his last few rounds, were neither fat nor juicy, but loaded with vegetables of all healthy stripes. There were those Sunday evenings when my father, egged on by my crossword puzzle-solving mother, too preoccupied to bother about the dinner on the table, to get him to make chops by praising his culinary abilities to the skies. Chuffed no doubt, my father would shoo the cook away from the kitchen and like the scientist he was, with his cryptic comments and precise measures, exit a tsunami-level devastated kitchen with a plate full of steaming, hot chops. Each chop would be measured and checked beforehand so that they were exactly the same size. This level of precision applied to the chapatis too. And to Sunday morning omelettes. Precision, exact measurements, and using geometry and a school box full of rulers and compasses, my father was obsessed with the mathematical aspect of his meal presentation. Once served, he wouldn’t have the patience to wait on us, or for us, he would start munching noisily but before my mother or I had a morsel in the mouth, then he would stop to ask, “Kemon hoyechhe?” His face crumpled with concern. My mother, in anticipation would begin a generous round of praise in advance to make him feel good about not only putting food on the proverbial family plate, but cooking for their palate too.
My mother on the other hand, made sure to enter the kitchen only on two occasions annually- during the annual Lakshmi puja at our home (to make payesh) and during the cook’s annual summer holidays, when she would engage me as her assistant and sous-chef for the duration that the cook would be away. At such times the menu would be identical from one day to the next for weeks on end. Doi maach, jhinge-posto, beans or ful-kopi and rice. After a few summers of the same menu, when I protested, requesting for a change, I was told to now make these dishes myself now that I had been ‘trained’ by her. Needless to say, I made them blind folded but on some occasions, burnt, as in my relaxed all-knowing state of knowing how to make these items backwards, I would step out of the kitchen to listen to Deep Purple or Tull full blast, forgetting that maach and jhol were both on the boil. Every year, as the new year arrived, freshly baked, tables loaded and creaking with Russian winter food, my birthday would be brought in with pretty much the whole of Wengers bakery in Connaught Place, bought out by my mother on her way to work. The food out of Enid Blyton would reappear on the dining table: marsh mallows, apple tarts, liquorice, lemon pie, meringue. My birthday was one day my mother flatly refused to cook. It was the day when she wanted to be free to dress me up, dress up herself and put on our favourite music so we, me, my parents, my cousins, could all dance. Then all the fooding and cooking stopped all of a sudden. Of course, a few decades after those birthdays stopped being celebrated the Wengers way. Parents get old, they die, and with them gone, home food is forgotten and dies a quiet death.
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Well before all the gory passing on of parents and their well trained cooks happen, I suppose in many ways, work – career – and the act of moving away and creating one’s own ‘ghar-ka-khana’ is in itself the process of becoming an independent adult, especially the part where we make choices and decisions as to which dishes and items from our childhood to recreate in our own homes as adults, and which ones to subtly edit out and forget because those items never appealed in the first place. (Because one never has the gumption to refute a feeding frenzied parent.) Sometimes such an edit is hurtful to the parent who cooked the same item for their child, thinking mistakenly, that it was a food they couldn’t do without. In my case, when I set up my own house and kitchen in Bombay, it was the refusal to source fish and cook maacher jhol. My father would visit often on weekends and find his meal falling short without his daily staple of maach and jhol. Completely uninterested in fish at the time, I tried sharing the recipe with my Maharashtrian bai who didn’t quite get the concept of simple jhol i.e. jhol without many masalas but just the onion juice, haldi and a bit of tomato. For all the times that my father stayed with me in Bombay, he had to forget his daily fish eating habit and settle for a simple Maharashtrian style meal that my bai would cook. Cooking himself was out of the question, I had a tiny kitchenette that I cleaned manic-ally whether food was prepared or not as it was bang in front of my bedroom door. All that changed when my mother moved to Bombay to stay with me. Having retired and more time to herself at home, she taught the bai Russian dishes and Bengali ones. From Russian salad, mayonnaise and posto to shukto, by the time my mother left for Delhi, never to return again as she was too sick to travel after that, Prema, my bai became a pro in Russo-Bong cuisine of the Ghosh household that she still prepares to this date.
As for me, a finicky and temperamental eater, to whom home food was force fed until I grew old enough, and less sickly enough, to actually make choices and eat of my own volition, home food was initially the recourse for times when discipline and relentless hard work and concentration were needed, like when giving board exams or recovering from chicken pox, or malaria. Later on, when in my twenties, I started working and still lived with my parents, it was times when I was working on a particularly tough or challenging story or episode. Of course in between the pressures of delivering good marks or results, the desire to eat and try food outside was constant. Like ordering in from Qureishi’s across the road, a roadside attraction in the Delhi neighbourhood where our house is, and where I still order chicken tikka and mutton seekh from. A constant source of pre-prandial energy for me used to be from Bonnie Mix, a ready made porridge mix of semolina with milk powder et al that one had to heat with some actual milk and one part water. When supplies ran short in Delhi, I found out about the familiar yellow tins being sold in Calcutta and got my uncle to cargo cartons of the stuff. I couldn’t have given, or passed, my board exams without the porridge named after baby food and still quite tasty when one is sick and in need of comfort food.
Looking back in time, even further back, as a child, food fetishes would begin with the annual school holidays spent in Calcutta, when at the start of summer, my father would pack me and my mother and whatever creature of East Bengali dispensation was working in our house as cook, to board the Rajdhani Calcutta-wards. Goggle eyed on seeing jhaal muri on the train, I would beg my mother who would immediately silence me with a few words. ‘Jaundice’. ‘Typhoid’. And later, ‘pet-kharap’ (Bengali word for diarrhoea). Usually, the first two would be enough. Not to silence me but to remind herself about the sorry outcome if she pandered to me and all the time she’d have to take off work. On reaching Calcutta I would go under the vast, room-sized, four poster bed that took up the entire red oxide floor of my father’s maternal home, followed by a few cousins – we would conference to plot a trip to the neighbourhood phuchka stall when no one was looking (my aunts examining my mother’s saris and vice versa). Then, while our luggage was being unpacked, we would rush out en masse, a scramble of hands and legs, to the stall with coins as I would grab at dried, raw tamarind ‘tetul’ and date squashed into a kind of sour-sweet delicacy of Tollygunj. By the time lunch would be served, I would have a full blown case of diarrhoea as the bag of sticky raw tamarind would be prized out of my hands and thrown into the dustbin. I would be still licking my red tamarind stained hands as my mother wiped by sore bottom. None the worse for the wear, a few Dyrade-M’s down the chute later, I would be ready for evening tea with shingara, bhaja and some mishti or the other. For as long as I can remember, I only craved extreme tastes -the phuchka and chutney induced sour-sweet that would send twinges of shock waves to the brain, or saccharine-sweet sugar-laden rosogolla and payesh that made me so thirsty that I would need to down a bottle of tasteless Calcutta brine (still don’t call that water) to dilute the sugar sticking to my tongue. Maach bhaat, mangsho , vegetables and fruit didn’t quite interest me. Later, as an independent adult, I would blame my mother for the ban on sugar in the household – between the age of 0 – 10 no aerated drinks and sweets were allowed for me. The first time Coca Cola was served in the house, everyone but me was served the fizzy drink in what was then my favourite set of glasses – purple and topaz Morano glass my father brought from a trip to Italy where he was part of a team of Indian cementologists setting up a cement manufacturing unit. By the time I was handed a glass with a small sip to sip, I bit off a large chunk of the glass itself in excitement. There I sat, silent and still with Coca-cola and glass frothing in the mouth. That was possibly the one and only time when I was allowed anything sweet other than the time when my father was away in Germany, also setting up another cement manufacturing unit, and the ayah, Miriam, would throw a bunch of sweets up in the air every time an aircraft flew by, as instructed by my mother, to make me believe that my father was flying past and the sweet being consumed had been flung down by him from the sky. At such times, I wolf refuse to eat any other meal – only what for the evening when aircrafts would pass by and a few sweets would fall from the sky for me. My grandmother, so fed up was she of this refusal to eat and have only sweets, that in her communist style, placed a puscht on them and at lunch, the driver would be instructed to bring ‘the biggest grass hopper he could find’ and it would be places a few milli metres away from my face so that I would eat a few bites of potoler jhol and palok shaag. Then there was the time when a pair of tortoises, `kochchop’ in Bengali, who had been kept in the store room, I mistakenly thought as pets, were cooked into a stew one Saturday afternoon when I returned home from school. I still cry tears of shame when I see tortoise on the menu in any restaurant for I remember how much I played with my two in that store room for weeks while my father was fattening them up. A few years later, another ghastly meat episode. This time with my mother, who would return from her nightly broadcast after midnight. Those were the days of load shedding and night long power cuts. My mother, ravenous from after her broadcast came home and polished off a large bowl full of mutton curry. The next morning my father sent telegrams to his brothers in Calcutta announcing that his wife was eating raw meat now. It seems when the power got cut, my father boiled the mutton, adding in some haldi and salt and kept it in the fridge, overnight, thinking that he would make a nice mutton curry to have for breakfast before leaving for work. The telegram was an indicator of anger at having lost the opportunity thanks to his hungry wife. But in this area, my mother soon upstaged him. A few weeks later, a newspaper report claiming that a pickle store has popped up behind South extension market and they served pickles made from mutton, prawn, lobster and beef. A family visit was planned to said store when a few jars of prawn pickle were picked up after inspecting the rupees forty price tag several times over covert glances between my parents. That night, along with his dinner, of Khichuri and begun bhaja, my father polished off an entire bottle full of prawn pickle claiming that ‘it ‘ll spoil otherwise ‘. My mother had an instant reply, “that mutton… I polished it off because as you say, it’ll spoil otherwise,” she said, rolling up her eyes. Polyanna came easily to my mother when it was about taking a cue from my father to tease and taunt him back at his own game.
***
I can still picture my exhausted and irritated mother trying hard to shove a simple and elegant pabda maacher jhol with bhaat into my mouth and then giving up in utter disgust. She belonged to a part of Russia, the northern most reaches, where fish was eaten practically raw. And fish soups were a delicacy. After moving to India with my father, imagine the collective joy on both sides of the family – my mother and my father’s -upon the discovery that fish was the beloved choice staple in both places. But none of their love for fish passed down to me. Oblivious of their fish obsession, the instant lunch would be over, I would idle near the fridge looking for chops and fries to cram into my mouth before bounding off to play outdoors in the searing summer heat of forty plus temperatures. Given all the sugar and fried carb, I was an overactive child who ran amok night and day like a mad hare until the neighbours complained to my father that I was a bad influence, robbing their children of ‘dupurer-ghoom’ by roaming around in the sun and making myself dark. Back home in Delhi after the holidays, the time after school got over would be all about reading the local library collection of Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys cover to cover -these came hard bound in a pistachio-olive green jacket that smelled of strange glue, while munch on dry hard toast sometimes with layers of Amul butter and sometimes with a thick layer of Milkmaid condensed cream. During bouts of sickness, of which there were several, my mother would make stewed apple, borscht, poached pear and custard. On weekends, my father would pull out the recipe booklet that came with the Osterizer bought by him on one of his trips to London, and bake a variety of cakes and shortbreads. Weekends when I was in school were about playing sous-chef to my father’s dessert chef ambitions in our household. If it was simple yogurt cake one weekend, it would be custard or jelly the next. Seasonal fruits be added in and indigenous fruit like bel would be used to make bel panna or a milk shake with the strawy, sticky aromatic contents of the bel . On some hot summer nights when the desert cooler wouldn’t help, he would use the Osterizer to make a mango shake though it was called Mango full then- I suppose to convey that the pulp of an entire mango had gone into it.Come to think of it now, not one single bake, cake or custard turned out to be off the mark. My scientist father used his scales and weights to measure everything to the T and this applied to the chapatis he made when the help went away on leave. He would roll out the dough just right to make the perfect circular rotis and triangular ‘folded’ calzone-style parathas. Later on, as I inched closer to the dreaded class ten board exams, my father would pack me off to his best friend ‘s hill station home, near the observatory in Nainital, where in relative isolation and less distraction, I would badger his wife and my aunt, to prepare all the Lucknawi North Indian dishes she was so well known for. In Nainital, over the course of many summers spent rowing in the lake and walking in the woods with my uncle’s children who were siblings to me, I tasted lauki ki barfi for the first time and the best range of north India dals and koftas and kormas for the first time. My aunt has moved continents to Australia and my uncle, another precision seeking scientist – astronomer – is no more. So I kissed the lauki ki barfi and other delicacies goodbye over a decade ago.
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My mother’s culinary abilities were only put to the test when we had guests over, or on Christmas and New Year’s eve (her family were Greek Orthodox so the Christmas and New Year both fell in January for us at home until my mother aligned their calendar with the one the rest of the world seemed to follow). For these two big celebrations my mother would prepare a spread large enough to make the dining table creak and groan with the weight of the many dishes dressing it up. For the guests and social meals, she would often make Indian food (Russian cuisine wasn’t appreciated by Indians especially Bengalis who tend to dislike the very idea of the sour, heavy soups and mayonnaise – one of my uncles gave my mother this wonderful backhanded compliment ‘Stop, stop Liza, had my wife tasted any of this Russian food, she would vomit’. My mother never prepared Russian food for Calcutta relatives after that. ). The Indian spread would consist of a North Indian kali daal, paneer matar, mutton and chicken and koftas, dahi bhalla and some store bought Bengali sandesh and mishit doi from Home Delicacy near our house in CR Park. The box of Sandesh would be polished off by me and left physically intact in its corner in the fridge much to the embarrassment of my father who would carefully pull it out of the tray so as not to spoil its perfect shell like shape only to find that not one sweet had been left inside. After a few episodes like this the box of sweets would be hidden away and kept in some unknown spot in his study and brought out after the meal had been cleared – I would sit in the middle of the drawing room, eyes glued to the box, waiting for my father to give me the biggest helping. Ignoring me completely, he would serve everyone twice and then give me a half piece if any was left. But this didn’t deter me from stealing the Sandesh during Lakshmi pujo which was celebrated with much care and devotion by my father in our house every year. Each member of the household – my mother, me, the help and the dog – had to contribute and do our bit on that day. My mother being the real pro -would make a payesh with almond shavings, jaggery, dates and cream that till date no one has been able to replicate, even though she shared the recipe whenever she made it. My father would cook the bhog himself – perfectly round luchis, lightly fried with less oil, begun bhaja, cholar dal, bandha kopi… all impeccably made with little or no spices though delicious with the help of our trained-by-my-mother help. My role was to cut all the fruit and place and present all the ready made and sweet stuff for the proshad. Zara, our dog’s role was to be locked out on the balcony and stay patiently that way all day until the puja was done and the camphor burnt and smoked the house out. Then Zara could be let in to have the proshad – as much as she wanted since my father considered her the real Lokkhi of the house. Then there was the annual New Year’s eve gathering at home when, after weeks of shopping for just the right and perfect ingredients (pickled peas, pickled dill and gherkins, variety of cheeses especially emmenthal, plum cake and honey glazed hams, mortadella… I would be instructed to station myself at the dining table with a chopping board and all these ingredients lined up in a semi circle around me. My duty would be be cut and chop these for the Russian salad as my mother made the mayonnaise and the cook make the mince chops. My father would be sneaking between the television set and a tiny bar he had fashioned out of a part of a wooden rack for random breakfast items where he kept his Old Monk and Chivas. On New year’s eve he would pull out some bottle or the other of stowed away Cinzano, pouring them into shot glasses and serving us all as we cooked. Zara, our indie family dog, would be nibbling away at the chopping board mooching off bits of honey glazed ham inaudibly as the tv blared some ghoulish new year’s eve party specially put together for new year’s eve. (I have never understood the’ faux tv party’, staged and pre recorded to be played on Christmas and New Year’s eves, and till date find them fascinating, anthropologically speaking.)
**
For as long as I can remember, our house had a schizoid cooking and serving system in place when it came to food. On some days there would be potol bhaja, khichri and aloo bhaja with the potatoes sliced wafer thin, and at other times, there would be blinis with a jar of hot berry jam standing by along with the pot of tea that always stayed on the dining table no matter what time of day or night, or season. On some days, there would be rain and because of the downpour, a khichuri and bhaja instruction would be given to the cook, on other days, keema parathas and chicken tikka because the cook was in a sulk and missing his wife. No wonder that recently, when going through my old diary, I found this piece from 2008 describing a typical evening at our dining table when dinner would be served at half past eleven over much debate and argument – and wasn’t surprised at all by the madness at our dining table. In my memory, like home food, it will always remain exactly as it is so. So very us, so very Ghosh.
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The Doctor wanted to make a point. It didn’t matter to him that, thanks to the soaring temperature (it was 45degrees that day) he was only dressed in torn cotton underpants that looked like they had been willed to stay in place on his skinny frame. One wrong move and it could all be downhill from there. It was a sheer miracle that they hung on in the first place. Well, not a miracle actually, it was the sweat that gave them their gravitas. But all this was not relevant to the Doctor. His interest lay in making a point. A point had to be made. After all, it was dinnertime.
Seated at his regular place at the family dining table at their apartment in Delhi, he pontificated to his wife who had lost interest in the proceedings (and the cotton underpants) a long while ago. His daughter, half listened, picking on her salad, while their man Friday slunk away to the drawing room after swiftly sliding a fresh batch of chapattis into what looked like a melting casserole dish that was indeed melted as it had been left on top of an oven and its base had indeed melted from the heat. Rather useless as a casserole dish, it had become the chapati dish instead.
“Mama, WE have fish everyday when you are away. Most of the time, I make batches or portions, each consisting of four to five pieces and these lasts us up to three days! Can you believe? But when you are here 3 batches get consumed in a week.” The “we” was pronounced with such emphasis that it almost came out like a whistle. This statement was directed at his wife. Clearly, she had dealt with many a dinner pronouncement that began with the classic “We”…
“Here you go again – WE? Why do you refer to yourself in the plural all the time, Papa?”
“Mama, we know what we are doing. We don’t cook much when you’re away visting your daughter in Bombay. See how long the food lasts!”
The mention of Bombay stirred the daughter somewhat. “Baba, you can come too, you know, it’s not only Ma who needs to visit…”
“Not so easy. WE discussed this a while back, your Ma and I, both of us cannot leave the house and be in Bombay!”
This comment excited Ma no end. “Hear, hear! WE again – and which WE are we referring to now, pray?”
“To us, why of course… Who else did you think I was talking about for heavens sake??” said the Doctor, getting exasperated.
“No, just asking your highness – there are so many subjects – WE just don’t know sometimes which WE we’re being told about, you see…”
“Nonsense. Your concepts are weak, Mama. Chandan, hurry up… WE are done… hurry up, or there’ll be no food left”.
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When I think of how much food, meals, meal times, dinner, lunch, and practically every single aspect of what and how I eat has changed today, I realise that our ‘home food’ is irretrievably lost and gone. I don’t even use the dining table. Often, I find myself rustling up chops and kosha mangsho, or Russian salad, when the occasion demands, but the satisfaction of having it is brief and short-lived. A few prolonged munches and the moment in the memory that was glimmering in my mind’s eye, all sharp and textured and multi-coloured, is gone too, like the taste. One gets a hint of it, a taste of what it was like to be loved, but a few seconds later, the feeling dissolves like the food in my mouth. At times like these , it is quantity that satisfies instead of the piercing stab of quality – I mean just one bite, or two. Maybe one lives to eat after dealing with trauma and loss and not eats to live. Without love, the food just doesn’t taste the same. Like the image here of the light outside the windows, best describes this feeling – a shot taken from inside a darkened room, of the dawn, day break outside. One feels like an outsider, sitting in the dark room, looking out – the light outside is bright, and multi-hued. One can see it, feel it, but never touch it, or be in it, because it is the darkness one is enveloped by. Step out into this light, and the colour and texture of the same light has inexorably changed. The view from within, if you will, of the food one is without – the home food, the food of home, that I can never have again because family associated with the making of it are gone. I can dream it, wish for it, make versions of it, and eat so many other things to fill the hole that the food that my mother cooked and taught her cooks to make, but is not possible to make the exact same item or dish again. In the last few years I have found scraps of notes here and there at home – a newspaper cut out of a deliciously creamy prawn malai curry from Times of India that my mother used to make (this was possibly the original recipe she made it from), the recipe for shukto cut and pasted at the back of a diary where my father noted down the date of birth, death and wedding anniversaries of all the relatives, most of whom too are long gone. (I’m surprised his precise and scientific self missed out the date of divorce for the many divorce in the family). So shukto and death, birth, the marriage anniversary, and all other things in between – this is what filled me up that day, instead of having the actual shukto. I knew I would never be able to prepare it with precision the way he did. Then I think about the recipes for mayonnaise, lemon cake and honey sauce, and other stock items noted down in cook books on flour, honey, and brown sugar and egg stained pages that I still consult now… Finally, healing is about reviving the recipes, one at a time, and learning how to make home food exactly the way it used to be, for that is the food of the soul, and only that can fill me up and make me feel whole again after all that has been lost, is gone for good.
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