REMNANTS OF A ROOM - a recipe book

REMNANTS OF A ROOM - a recipe book -

The Spice Box is always round, sometimes aluminum, often, in stereotypical middle class style, stainless steel. There is always another lid inside, to keep the unopened plastic packets of lesser used spices – bay leaves, nutmeg, maybe cinnamon sticks. Beneath that are seven small bowls arranged to t in neatly. Covered by this inner lid and then shut in tight by the outer lid, these bowls brew in their own smells. Mustard seeds have a bowl for themselves, so do coriander seeds, cloves, fenu- greek, white lentils, black pepper and cumin. Pale green pods of cardamom might get some space too. If they do, they will soon pucker up, open an inch and take over the box with an intoxicating fragrance. The smell of those red strands of saffron and asafoetida are somehow an upper class version of spices. Maybe that was why Maa put them away separately. Not that the rest of the spices behaved any better. Maybe they had a pattern, because every time the box was opened, the smell of one spice would strike rst, and last a second, before it all became mixed and confusing again.

The way Maa prepared Payesh for every little or big occasion at our house! The way its aroma spread across the house and its taste.

I have her exact recipe, but no matter how well I follow it, it is never the same. I don’t know what goes wrong but I do know something is always off.

Like, it never feels like home.

I have archived home with the fading taste and the smell of my mother’s Payesh.

It won’t ever be quiet right.

It will never be the same again. But it is what it is.

-MILKThe milk smells of the city, as does everything you touch here. The grime and the sweat of those that seek to be chewed up and spit out by this unforgiving city. That is what the milk smells of. Just like the rest of me.

-VERMICELLIThe strands of vermicelli smell like lifelessness, pale and broken down. You could arrange them into a boulevard of broken dreams for the millions on these streets to trample on. They would do unto it what the city would have done to them, to their illusions.

Hope dies every day.

Just like it is born every day.

-SAFFRONThere are small, thin strands of saffron when added in milk just warm enough for your thumbnail to feel— the way lukewarm is described in these parts—they bleed yellow and smell of what I imagine the Valley must have tasted like before the guns and bombs and tears and cries began reverberating out to the rest of the world. It smells of happy memories with the dear friend who brought that saffron box back. We no longer speak, this friend and I. As I said. Hope dies every day. Just like it is born every day.

-JAGGERYI add sugar, from this small tin box which once held white head. The sugar is white because I cannot afford brown this month and neither can I swallow and choke it down with water or just with spit.Waiting in horror and hope that the saffron will overwhelm the stench from the streets of the city. I cannot nd jaggery in the local shops anymore. Things which were once familiar; change when you move across borders.

-CARDAMOMAnd then I add cardamom, the one thing that smells of the sweet mythologies of home. Just the right shade of green, a green I don’t see anywhere outside my window, sometimes not even in my mind, not even if I close my eyes shut and think and think of back home. The smell of concrete cakes into my nose and refuses to leave on some days. And that gets into my tired eyes and tired ears and tired, tired, tired everything and all I see is grey, everywhere.

Then, in the last step to make this recipe, I bring all these complications to boil. A hot bowl of this payesh. It boils slowly and spills over the steel vessel, whirled together atop the re to smell nally of melancholia.

Turmeric latte.

That is apparently the new thing that is all over health blogs and yoga studios and in the expensive chic cafes in big cities in these Western countries.

What is it, you ask? It is our good old ‘haldi-doodh ‘,turmeric sprinkled on hot milk that is boiled maybe with a piece of ginger, stirred with a bit of sugar or honey and poured down your throat by grandmothers all over my country for heaven knows how long.

In regions of war, those who survive; carry the wounds of the familiar sights, sounds, and smells of war wherever they go like unwanted heirlooms. So do the soldiers after they’ve served and gone. Those who die, die in a distant land, away from their families without that last touching farewell from a loved one when their bodies are still warm.

Wars are never happy things for anyone; there are no winners and losers – just sufferers on each side. This so, even as life goes about its usual cycle of daily rituals. Just like at the crack of dawn, the taste of a cup of nice, rich lemon tinged tea with a hot buttered rooti straight out of the tava.

Then, as the day goes on, getting ready, going about the routine chores, taking a break to visit the fabulous gardens, going out to the coffee shops to chat with friends after a sumptuous meal of lamb shwerma, or just a hot cup of tea in one of the city’s latest haunts. At night, everybody sits down for the usual family meal – hot rice served with traditional vegetables like shalgham and spicy rogan- josh or koftaas. The food tastes rich enough to the palette. But marred by the sense of war, it leaves the bitterness of war inside the soul. Nothing is, nor quite will be, the same.

Only if grandmother’s Haldi doodh or your turmeric latte at the end of the day would have numbed the pain.

The moment Maa started making lunch or dinner, the Spice Box would come out, rather ceremoniously, I would think, as if they knew of their important place in the scheme of things. I couldn’t be bothered by the process of cooking back then, but watching the process as if it were theatre. Food to me, still, sounds of the Spice Box – Either Maa’s bangles, catching the glint of the light as she brought the ensemble out; the spluttering mustard, cantankerous and almost impatient; the angry hiss of the oil when the chillies dropped in, the cackle they all made together in the large dollop of ghee, not unlike ‘Abracadabra’ in another language.

When I think of memories, I think of how the chillies in the angry oil, indignant at the intrusion upon themselves, nevertheless allowed a fragrance that I can only describe as the smell of childhood. Like my own mistress of spices, the aftertaste of a blend of these, of shreds of coconut seeping into succulent pieces of tubers or roots or other vegetables, remind me of the performance Maa unwittingly staged every time I sat myself down in her kitchen.

As children, with morsels of curd rice – comfort food, survival food – you are taught to meander your way around the plate, starting here, moving across, cutting down diagonally, and ending there, with a coin in your hand and a paan in your mouth.

Sitting beside my mother on small raised wooden platforms laid out in neat rows, my own little leaf before me, I learnt to navigate my way around, negotiating the portions and the servings, and I learnt when to divide what into how big or small a helping.

Food maps exist in every community, with seasonal, sometimes geographical variations. This is what mine would look like: a certain part of the plantain leaf laid out facing a particular way, starting from the top left corner, pickle, salt, Green chilli, a range of vegetables prepared in different ways, on the left, papad, a heap of pearly white rice plunked in the middle, The dry fries to be eaten first with daal, and then a series of curries are served, you learn how to divide the heap of rice, taking portions to your right for each curry, adding the appropriate vegetable to go with it. Down in the hierarchy come the sweetmeats, ending with curd, Chutney and any sweet dish.

But nothing ever tasted better than what Maa prepared using her Spice box.

But over time we move houses or leave home, some parts of the spice box would come along with us where as some parts always get left behind. New aromas get added into the box. The other spices shift and haggle about a bit to make space for them to adjust.

The cupboard shelves change and we get used to the new routine of having the spice box in a new space but always at our hand’s reach. It takes a while but then it is just embedded in our muscle memory. Just like we jump across broken sections of pavements on our way to and from home, but then home changes and the skills attained to skip the broken pavement is no longer valid.

To be extremely honest- the Spice box never just rule in the kitchen. Maa’s catalogue of traditional recipes, were not limited to unusual green vegetables; strange concoctions for treating colds, headaches and other various ailments came along with the box. She grinds her spices in a stone mortar; the spices turn coarse, playing with the senses: taste, smell, touch the moaning rumble of stone against stone.... Those sounds, those smells are not something any curry mix sauce packets or bottles from Co-op or something similar could ever replicate.

You grow up, you leave the hearth, you enter the melting cauldron that explains the idea of a metropolis, you get your own Spice Box, for a while you even take Instagrammed photos of the fancy places where you eat and of foods that made the childhood memories of friends. But when you lose a love, leave a job, catch a cold, you turn to your Payesh, the smell of cardamom that wafts in through the back of your memory room and you nd your eyes moist, for no reason, or for many reasons. You seek out that place in the distant neighbourhood that purports to make authentic food your kind of food. They lie. They can never match what the mistress of spices of your particular history makes; even your own cooking is better than their purported authenticity.

You start your own theatre, you invent secrets, you smell new smells when you reach up to the last shelf in your tiny kitchen to bring out the array of spices. There is fancier glassware now, they look better than middle class steel. Yet you cannot give away the Spice Box. Some secrets are not to be passed on.

OH! AND ALWAYS REMEMBER...

To add salt according to taste! “नमक स्वाद अनुसार”

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REMNANTS OF A ROOM - A RECIPE BOOK[2020]