What Does Cooking mean to me ?

What does cooking mean to me?

Cooking meant staring at my mother bringing forth mouth watering samosas and delicious biryanis in the kitchen from apparently inedible ingredients. I wondered if I could ever become a magician like her. Ma didn’t like having me hanging around the kitchen. She would shoo me out saying, ‘You will always have to cook all your life once you are grown up.’ Occasionally I would manage to sneak out a samosa before the whole batch was ready. Or she would let me taste a bit of the fried vegetables going into the biryani. But she was deeply offended if I swallowed her naryial laddoos meant for the puja. The offerings to gods were sacrosanct one couldn’t play around with that.

As one started living in hostel and had to face the occasional strike by the mess workers one was forced into cooking a simple meal of boiled rice with vegetables thrown in had with a dollop of butter. This proved to be quite a success amongst hungry friends and my Bengali bhaat was a staple during those days. Another easy and nutritious meal was bread and scrambled eggs with some potatoes added to make it filling.

Now that I look back I can understand my mother’s fear that all daughters have to fall in to the drudgery of cooking. She wanted me to escape such a conventional life and wished I would excel in academics, be career oriented and not tied to the kitchen.

Surprisingly, life has allowed me to look upon cooking as a pleasure since the truth must be told my husband’s job provides me the luxury of trained cooks. So I have spent a greater part of my life following recipes from different women’s magazines. I also love watching cookery programmes on TV. I am fascinated by the sparklingly clean utensils and brand new gadgets on the show. Although, the women who accompany the cooks on the show and go, ‘oooh-so-delicious’ grate my nerves.

I have turned out delicious cakes, soufflés and kulfis to the delight of my sons. They have adored my concoctions of chicken and mutton curries from various regions of India. I have diligently kept cuttings of interesting recipes published in the Hindi newspapers. Now my file is bursting in the seams with them. Some have turned yellow and smell of various curry powders over the years. In an attempt to preserve it for the future I got them scanned and downloaded into a CD.

Every season has a particular favourite fruit or vegetable. Some are not so popular and some downright rejected. I have tried to tempt them to accept or at least try them out. The favourites are easy to work on. One can have gobi-ka-parantha, aloo gobi sukhi, or in a curry form. The curry could be seasoned with achar-ka-masala or with Bengali spices.

But how does one make lauki delicious or sarson-ka-saag palatable to the young ones?

So often enough the rotis are stuffed with various vegetables; and pilaus are made with methi and palak.

I often experiment with sweets since dear husband has a weakness for it. Once while offering a traditional Bengali pathishapta, he declared it as pura of his village days only exception being that I should not stuff it with mawa. So now my cooks are ready with the pura sweetened with artificial sweeteners at the end of each meal.

As we grow older the search is on for foods that are steamed or stir-fried and eventually of course life comes a full circle as one must learn to live with as little food as possible. To realize that all this is a chimera ‘maya’ and one must control one’s senses and not indulge them; in our quest for salvation.