"There is no love sincerer than the love of food."
~George Bernard Shaw~
Before I got down to writing this piece I Googled some famous quotes on cooking. I wanted to know what great men and women had to say about the skill, which I’d rather call an art form. The ones interspersed throughout this writing are quotes which I resonated with, for one reason or another. I must let you know that my search wasn’t extensive; I had just wanted some wise words handy to throw in-between tales of a novice cook.
My family has always enjoyed food. You’ll never find our conversations steered too far away from it; after all, at the end of the day all we live for is to eat. Or at least that is what my dad's got to say.
Let me paint a picture. We haven’t gotten past breakfast and the dining table is already buzzing with suggestions for lunch and while some hot tea is being sipped at five in the evening, debate's already begun about whose favorite dish will be cooked for dinner that night. You see, we take our meals very seriously.
I can’t stand people that do not take food seriously.
~Oscar Wilde
My love for food shifting gears from eating it to cooking it has however been a recent development. Some would consider it an inevitable move post my re-location to a foreign country but I for one believe that there’s more to it than that.
For the first seventeen years of my life I was fed by my mother. She'd been the sole in-charge of the kitchen from day one; it was her playing field. Maybe that is the reason why I consider her to be a significant reason behind my family’s passion for food.
I moved to another city (read:Mumbai,India) soon after turning seventeen, to pursue a bachelor’s degree, and spent the next three years in a hostel, living off of bland, colorless food. Whenever I needed a break from the sad grub (because that is all that my hostel mess was capable of producing) I’d either order in or step out with friends to grab a decent bite. One of the many reasons why I started to look forward to the holidays was because I would get to go home and eat all the delicious food I had been missing out on.
This cycle continued for another two years as I moved again, minus the family, to a different city (read:Chennai,India) this time to pursue a master’s degree. Surprisingly, at the end of those two years I developed a soft corner for that city’s cuisine; a cuisine which I hadn’t been even remotely tolerant towards for all of my life until then. (Today, I would kill for a ghee masala dosa and some tomato and coconut chutney!) I guess that is what food does to us-- it makes our hearts grow big so that we can learn to love that which we didn’t earlier and make room for more and more.
I remember days when mess food would be utterly boring and completely uninspiring-- anything that was even a little less as bad would turn desirable and finger licking good. On days when it'd be more than just edible and sometimes even delicious, us hostel-dwellers would sit and wonder what good deed we were being rewarded for that day.
We’d often talk about how it would be so much easier on our pockets and our tongues if we could be exempted from having to compulsorily pay for mess services during our stay at the hostel; we spent a considerable portion from our monthly budget eating outside either way.
But more than the sad food, I am sure that each of my friends remembers the happy memories more. We looked forward to sitting down together for a meal at the end of the day and bring each other up to speed on the happenings of our lives. We laughed, joked, cried and bore together the hardships of those ill-fated years living in a hostel. Sharing food, tasty or not, always brought us closer because it was never any less than sharing and spreading love.
When my move to foreign land was confirmed, building my skills as a cook became instantaneously a necessary and much-needed undertaking. Neither would eating out every day be ideal for my health, nor would it be a wise decision on my part if I had wanted to keep my living costs to a minimum. So, as time grew nearer for me to leave, I began to work on refining and improving my moves in the kitchen. I had never cooked before but I had seen my mother do it day in and day out for a large part of my life. So, for some unexplainable reason, when I did step up and step into this new role I did not operate like a beginner. I sometimes think that my mother actually Miyagi’d me; taught me the basics and a little more even without me realizing it.
No one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.
~Julia Child, My Life in France
I have been cooking for myself for the past month and a half now. I make breakfast, pack my own lunch, and also cook dinner after getting back home from college in the evening. On the weekends when I have more time I like to experiment and try my hand at dishes I have never cooked before or even seen my mother give a go.
No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks; past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.
Laurie Colwin
For instance, she is a vegetarian, so me cooking chicken for the first time the other day, and successfully so, was a sweet victory I’ll never forget. I am excited about cooking non-vegetarian food for my father and sister when I return to my home country. I doubt if my mother will let me use her kitchen, but I figured I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. For now, I keep day-dreaming about dinner parties and Sunday brunches I would like to put together for my family and friends and have everybody present marvel over my cooking skills.
My doctor told me I had to stop throwing intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people.
~Orson Welles
It has been both entertaining and informative, looking up recipes and watching How to cook… videos on YouTube. There are some great people out there who are redefining ways in which you can cook your food, keep yourself healthy and construct a clean, efficient and friendly kitchen. You can either look up recipes as easy as 1-2-3 or recipes which are elaborate, fancy and demanding. I don’t have to drool over all the delicious food I get to read about and see now; I can simply step into the kitchen, give the dish my own twist, work with ingredients I can manage to lay my hands on and get cooking!
It’s also a great way to hone your multi-tasking and time management skills. You must be smart, stay sharp and open to all kinds of challenges in a kitchen. It is a place that will dance to your tunes and your tunes alone but only as long as you’ve got a grip over yourself.
As you spend more and more time in the kitchen, you also begin to find your rhythm. And as you grow more confident in your movements, you begin to cook more instinctively and need less and less to follow a recipe to a T. You’ll soon find out that there is both calm and chaos in a kitchen—it teaches you discipline but also how to let yourself loose and follow your heart.
Spending time cooking has made me re-evaluate my eating habits and choices too. It is impossible to not get a little picky about what you decide to put inside your body after you spend all that time cooking for yourself. I now make sure that the ingredients I use are as fresh, as clean, and as non-synthetic as they can be. I am willing to pay a higher price for food that is less processed and drowned the least in preservatives and artificial components.
The second you start paying attention to the above, you also begin to give serious thought to the true source of everything that occupies your refrigerator and your kitchen. Issues such as depleting health of water resources, increasing soil pollution and inadequate waste management systems suddenly take on a graver meaning. The statistics on deaths from hunger and starvation carry now an indecipherable weight. The fight against farmer exploitation has found in me a more invested and sensitive advocate. My life would be devoid of this wonderful experience if not for the men and women who toil our lands day and night to make food available for us all, often at the cost of their own empty bellies. How grateful we should be for their contribution, and how ashamed that we haven’t cared and respected for them well.
I understand that some of you might find it bizarre, the route that my train of thought took while talking to you about my new found love for cooking, but this is how it is. These are some very real and very serious concerns, which should have us all worried.
I’d like to conclude with a thought that I shared on my IG account (@purple_ceilings) a few weeks ago.
Step into the kitchen and you'll find out that there's an important part of you that you haven't yet discovered. Eating had always been fun; always will be. But cooking is making me a different kind of happy these days. I was so wrong in assuming that women lose their power when they are associated with a kitchen, with cooking, with feeding, with food. Now I know that the problem only lies in the 'blind association’ of the women of the house with the kitchen. They yield something so noble and so great within them; we should be thankful that they are so patient and kind with it. I'd wanted men to step into the kitchen more to balance out the gender role play. Now, I want them to step into the kitchen simply because they are human too and must invest time and effort in discovering an important part of themselves. Maybe then they'll understand that a lot can be taught, and learnt, standing behind a gas stove.