When I first came to the Netherlands, which was my first time abroad, I was overwhelmed by a lot of things. Nonetheless, here I am going to focus on one of the major elements and my favourite one that contributed to my overwhelming. FOOD.
On the very next day of my arrival I was faced with the daunting task of ordering something from a food joint which sold what looked like different kinds of sandwiches to me. I asked the perky blonde girl for a sandwich and she asked me, ‘a panini?’
For a second, I went blank. I had no idea what that word meant. But it was only momentary. I gathered my wits (I was totally not scared to be left on my own with my poor navigation skills in a European city which seemed more and more to me like a maze of similar looking buildings. Who are we kidding?) and nodded with what I assumed was a smart smile. Then the shop-girl uttered a stream of incoherent words from which I picked out a familiar word; tuna.
‘Tuna would be great, thanks.’
And when my breath was laced with relief thinking that my ordeal was finally over, she opened her mouth again and said, ‘What kind of cheese? Provolone or cheddar?’
It is only in retrospect and so many different cheese days later that I realised that the cheeses in question had been provolone and cheddar. At that point I was completely flabbergasted cos up until then, for me cheese was singular. I had no idea cheese could be plural; that there existed more than one variety.
My response to the cheese conundrum was, ‘mmmm… the second one’.
The point where I reached the word ‘one’ I burbled it out slightly raised in a nervous high pitch framing it like a question. That did it. The girl looked at me for two seconds longer than necessary. She must have thought I was a total cuckoo.
What she did not know was that, from the backwater where I hailed from, the only non-Indian condiments in my culinary rack had been soy sauce and ketchup.
From there to a kitchen stocked with varieties of cheese, sauces, spices, and herbs, it has really been a flavourful journey. Now I am the proud owner of a spice rack with different kinds of chilli powder: the regular Indian chilli powder, regular paprika, mild and sweet paprika, cayenne pepper etc. Yes. All is well on the chilly front which is beside the point.
It has been so exciting to grace my taste-buds with so many cuisines. It was indeed a revelation that what has been masquerading as pasta served in the hostel was nowhere near the real deal. I now relish both nokedli with goulash and porotta with beef curry alike. Heaven is both in the smell of mustard, onions, red chillies and curry leaves tempered in coconut oil and garlic tempered in olive oil. I find as much joy in mixing rice, avial, and fish curry together as in the twirl of spaghetti on a fork. Not to mention digging into all those desserts.
I still remember what my friend once told me while we were reading an article about a famous Malayali chef in Mumbai in which he talks about his grandmother’s recipe book. While reading that she told me that she should have given me a hand-made recipe book with pictures cut out and pasted and hand-written recipes as a wedding gift. It made me think of how nice it would be to own a family recipe book, especially since this particular friend has a lot of family recipes. I think the idea of a hand-me-down family recipe book is quite magical and charming. Imagine how the pages will keep on increasing as it passes down generations. Recently, I came across a new spice called allspice, which in reality is a dried berry. It has the combined flavours of nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and pepper. It made my stew really delicious which made me wonder how thick in terms of pages and ingredient-details my mental cookbook has become. To hold my end of the bargain, I have slowly started writing down recipes online so that they won’t be lost or forgotten. A virtual hand-me-down recipe book if you will.
It was my grandmother who kindled my interest in cooking. She never did teach me explicitly. When I went to visit my mother’s place as a kid, I used to spend a lot of time around my grandmother. So inevitably, I ended up spending a lot of time with her in the kitchen. She used to tell me a lot of excerpts and anecdotes from her childhood. In between those small stories she will be cooking various things. In between she will turn to me and tell me things like ‘put salt after adding the onions, it will turn them golden faster’ and so on. She was the one who first introduced me to paneer when that was a relatively new name in Alleppey’s typical South Indian households. I still remember what she told me before making it, ‘Today, I am going to make you paal irachi’ (which meant milk meat). She was also the one who made me my first mushroom stew. She really had magical hands. Hers is the tastiest food I have ever eaten. Everything she made tasted really good. Not in-general good. Her dishes tasted special. It was a taste that I could only associate with her. No one could replicate that, not any of her kids. One of the things that really made me closer to my grandmother was the food she made for me. Whenever I come across a new ingredient, I keep thinking how she would find the new flavour or what she would have done with it.
During my grandmother’s time, it was really difficult to source exotic ingredients and try out new things. That is what amazes me when I see the cook books of Mrs. K M Mathew and Mrs. B F Varghese. What is surprising is that I don’t even know the first names of these two women who chose to publish under their husband’s names, which was kind of the norm during those years. I was and still am astonished by the exotic recipes that occupied the pages. Sometimes I do go all Julie and Julia about those and think whether I should recreate all those recipes now that I can. But that feeling is only momentary. I know I don’t have it in me to follow that kind of a thing through. Nonetheless, I still vividly remember the covers of those and as a child I used to imagine how the dish would look, especially the exotic ones; just like how I was in awe of the food descriptions in Harry Potter and spent many a moment imagining how a treacle tart or a knickerbocker glory and strips of bacon would look. The kid version of me was absolutely sure that no matter how the comestibles in question looked, they would taste heavenly. This was the Pre-Google Age.
Setting up my own kitchen and finding my way around it was indeed a fulfilling experience. Or rather more like an introspection. I now know that my culinary preferences sort of reflect the life choices that I have made. My kitchen routine tells me the kind of person that I have become, my likes and dislikes among other things. It really took me some time to get a grasp around how to run a kitchen in a foreign country. Come to think of it, despite my apprehensions I have really enjoyed the ride.