I know that some people are born cooks - or at least, born with an affinity for cooking. People like my sister, who by age 20, despite the vagaries and fits of college apartment kitchens, was hosting gourmet dinner parties for groups of ten.
But for me, like for many people I know, the revelation came much later. For most of my 20s (a terrifying phrase, in that I have to now admit that "most of my 20s" are over), the only constant in my life was transience. I went to college 700 miles from home, spent summers and autumns in various apartments and hotels in Italy and New York, and then made the most astonishing leap of all: to New Delhi, where, at last count, I have now managed to occupy six different houses. I've moved more than most people I know, and these moves haven't just crossed physical distances - they've been prompted by necessity and desire, sometimes by catastrophes, often by aspirations.
And despite all this, for many, many years, it never really occurred to me to cook. I rejected cooking as banal and ordinary, a surrender to the domesticity that I had spent so many years of my life trying to abjure.
My first independent kitchen - the first one that counts - was in my college apartment. I bought pre-packaged hamburgers from the Whole Foods downstairs and ate them with lettuce and tomato but no bun. I learned how to make omelettes by accident, on a trip to New York. I was visiting a friend in Queens, and one evening we found ourselves at home with nothing to eat but eggs. I bravely volunteered to take a turn at the skillet, and was surprised by how delicious the results turned out. It was an experiment, not that I told her that. And then I made pasta, but this too involved an element of quest. I became convinced, in senior year, that it was possible to make a pasta that fused perfectly the flavors of East and West. I ground cardamom into linguine, dusted noodles in turmeric, sliced ginger over lasagna. It was all perfectly repugnant, and I ended up tossing a lot of it in the trash.
Beneath these attempts there lingered an abstruse reverse competitiveness; the awareness of a fraternal separation of powers between my sister and myself. She lived in nice apartments, matched her sofas to her drapes, scouted for castoff tables on Craigslist, reinvented her decor with mosaic tiles and embroidery. She owned multiple can openers. As for me, I was too busy for all of that - I was going places.
But where exactly was that? My second independent kitchen was in Neeti Bagh, in a tiny studio apartment above the house of a Bengali doctor and his wife. They treated me like their daughter, although this generosity didn't extend to the table. My counter was a narrow green granite slab, and my range was a single burner with a tiny gas cylinder attached to it by a pipe. I had seven or eight pots and pans, many of them - I'm now embarrassed to admit - gifts from my mother, who packed them in my suitcase when she learned just how ill-equipped I was for any semblance of adult life.
So I started cooking again out of a sense of nostalgia, perhaps. I'd trek to the tiny grocery store in Neeti Bagh, poring over $10 jars of imported olives and pasta sauce. As for cheese, I smuggled it from the US, in enormous Costco bricks that I laid in the bottom of my suitcase like ballast. In Delhi, surrounded by Indian spices, I still managed an approximation of American food. Pasta alfredo. Egg salad. Omelettes. The only difference was the substitution of the occasional Indian cookware. For a while, I managed all my cooking in a single aluminum topiah, hoisting it on and off the burner with a pair of tongs. This arrangement will make sense to Delhi-ites, everyone else will find it literally unimaginable.
And I stuck to the recipes of my hazy past. It didn't occur to me to consult a cookbook, to explore new vegetables or flavors or herbs or whatnot. People would ask me why I didn't learn more Indian dishes; my answer was a thoughtless shrug. I had come to India expecting that I would learn the dishes my mother made - her spinach rice, her dahi bhalla, her rajma. I don't know how or why I expected that after years of standing senselessly at her elbow, I would magically sprout this talent in her absence.
For a while, I surrendered to Delhi custom and hired a cook. This was no easy task. It's never easy to surrender control of your personal space, and with Shatrugan ("just like the actor, madam") I had more struggles than most. I wanted only Indian food ("but I cook for all foreign peoples") and quantities of oil that he found microscopic. Towards the end, I would wake up in the early morning and perch myself on the living room sofa, watching him out of the corners of my eyes to see exactly how much oil he was adding to our food. This insane behavior quieted neither of us, and eventually the arrangement ended.
I don't know what I did in Green Park, where I lived for over a year. I did add one dish to my repertoire: after an enlightening dinner at a friend's house, I learned to make Thai curry. (It's not as complex as it sounds.) I invited friends over for dinner once and made pasta, with a chicken that turned out disturbingly dry.
And then I moved to GK 2, and something changed. I don't know if it was the proverbial page being turned, or the fact that I was tired of eating nothing but pasta and eggs. It might have been this simple: one day, I went down to the vegetable vendor's cart to buy tomato and onions, and I realized - in a blinding flash! - that he had so much more available than that. Suddenly I was looking up recipes for beetroot and sweet kerala, for pumpkin and paneer. I realized - for the first time in 4 years - how much I could do. I realized that it was fun to cook for myself.
Or perhaps it was more complex. Sometime in the past, and without my really thinking about it, my vision of my future life had changed, or perhaps it had merely developed. I met friends at restaurants, at bars, in parks. We ate out, we still do. But I began to imagine a time in my future when I would want to make food for others - when I would want my home to be a refuge in the truest sense. I remembered how my parents had hosted so many of my high school play rehearsals, and how my mother had cooked for us. I remembered her setting out a banquet at my high school graduation party, while I flitted around in a flowered white dress.
Suddenly cooking didn't seem like a chore, or even a skill, but a part of that complex process by which we create our homes and ourselves. And yet, it was also - like everything - an assertion of the individual self. They say that you cook like your mother did, but I almost never do. If you come to my house, chances are, you will not eat anything that I had growing up. Partly, this has to do with what's available. But mostly, it has to do with the ways I've used cooking as yet another destination on a journey that has taken me further and further into the world - into Thai food, Keralite food, meat (I grew up in a largely vegetarian house). And perhaps these differences reflect the differences of my mother's life, as well - I grew up eating chicken, fajitas, stir fries. I doubt my grandmother, who has spent the past forty years of her life in roughly the same part of Mumbai, has ever made any of these things.
I don't know at what point a journey becomes a departure, and at what point we can say we have started to come back.
But for me, like for many people I know, the revelation came much later. For most of my 20s (a terrifying phrase, in that I have to now admit that "most of my 20s" are over), the only constant in my life was transience. I went to college 700 miles from home, spent summers and autumns in various apartments and hotels in Italy and New York, and then made the most astonishing leap of all: to New Delhi, where, at last count, I have now managed to occupy six different houses. I've moved more than most people I know, and these moves haven't just crossed physical distances - they've been prompted by necessity and desire, sometimes by catastrophes, often by aspirations.
And despite all this, for many, many years, it never really occurred to me to cook. I rejected cooking as banal and ordinary, a surrender to the domesticity that I had spent so many years of my life trying to abjure.
My first independent kitchen - the first one that counts - was in my college apartment. I bought pre-packaged hamburgers from the Whole Foods downstairs and ate them with lettuce and tomato but no bun. I learned how to make omelettes by accident, on a trip to New York. I was visiting a friend in Queens, and one evening we found ourselves at home with nothing to eat but eggs. I bravely volunteered to take a turn at the skillet, and was surprised by how delicious the results turned out. It was an experiment, not that I told her that. And then I made pasta, but this too involved an element of quest. I became convinced, in senior year, that it was possible to make a pasta that fused perfectly the flavors of East and West. I ground cardamom into linguine, dusted noodles in turmeric, sliced ginger over lasagna. It was all perfectly repugnant, and I ended up tossing a lot of it in the trash.
Beneath these attempts there lingered an abstruse reverse competitiveness; the awareness of a fraternal separation of powers between my sister and myself. She lived in nice apartments, matched her sofas to her drapes, scouted for castoff tables on Craigslist, reinvented her decor with mosaic tiles and embroidery. She owned multiple can openers. As for me, I was too busy for all of that - I was going places.
But where exactly was that? My second independent kitchen was in Neeti Bagh, in a tiny studio apartment above the house of a Bengali doctor and his wife. They treated me like their daughter, although this generosity didn't extend to the table. My counter was a narrow green granite slab, and my range was a single burner with a tiny gas cylinder attached to it by a pipe. I had seven or eight pots and pans, many of them - I'm now embarrassed to admit - gifts from my mother, who packed them in my suitcase when she learned just how ill-equipped I was for any semblance of adult life.
So I started cooking again out of a sense of nostalgia, perhaps. I'd trek to the tiny grocery store in Neeti Bagh, poring over $10 jars of imported olives and pasta sauce. As for cheese, I smuggled it from the US, in enormous Costco bricks that I laid in the bottom of my suitcase like ballast. In Delhi, surrounded by Indian spices, I still managed an approximation of American food. Pasta alfredo. Egg salad. Omelettes. The only difference was the substitution of the occasional Indian cookware. For a while, I managed all my cooking in a single aluminum topiah, hoisting it on and off the burner with a pair of tongs. This arrangement will make sense to Delhi-ites, everyone else will find it literally unimaginable.
And I stuck to the recipes of my hazy past. It didn't occur to me to consult a cookbook, to explore new vegetables or flavors or herbs or whatnot. People would ask me why I didn't learn more Indian dishes; my answer was a thoughtless shrug. I had come to India expecting that I would learn the dishes my mother made - her spinach rice, her dahi bhalla, her rajma. I don't know how or why I expected that after years of standing senselessly at her elbow, I would magically sprout this talent in her absence.
For a while, I surrendered to Delhi custom and hired a cook. This was no easy task. It's never easy to surrender control of your personal space, and with Shatrugan ("just like the actor, madam") I had more struggles than most. I wanted only Indian food ("but I cook for all foreign peoples") and quantities of oil that he found microscopic. Towards the end, I would wake up in the early morning and perch myself on the living room sofa, watching him out of the corners of my eyes to see exactly how much oil he was adding to our food. This insane behavior quieted neither of us, and eventually the arrangement ended.
I don't know what I did in Green Park, where I lived for over a year. I did add one dish to my repertoire: after an enlightening dinner at a friend's house, I learned to make Thai curry. (It's not as complex as it sounds.) I invited friends over for dinner once and made pasta, with a chicken that turned out disturbingly dry.
And then I moved to GK 2, and something changed. I don't know if it was the proverbial page being turned, or the fact that I was tired of eating nothing but pasta and eggs. It might have been this simple: one day, I went down to the vegetable vendor's cart to buy tomato and onions, and I realized - in a blinding flash! - that he had so much more available than that. Suddenly I was looking up recipes for beetroot and sweet kerala, for pumpkin and paneer. I realized - for the first time in 4 years - how much I could do. I realized that it was fun to cook for myself.
Or perhaps it was more complex. Sometime in the past, and without my really thinking about it, my vision of my future life had changed, or perhaps it had merely developed. I met friends at restaurants, at bars, in parks. We ate out, we still do. But I began to imagine a time in my future when I would want to make food for others - when I would want my home to be a refuge in the truest sense. I remembered how my parents had hosted so many of my high school play rehearsals, and how my mother had cooked for us. I remembered her setting out a banquet at my high school graduation party, while I flitted around in a flowered white dress.
Suddenly cooking didn't seem like a chore, or even a skill, but a part of that complex process by which we create our homes and ourselves. And yet, it was also - like everything - an assertion of the individual self. They say that you cook like your mother did, but I almost never do. If you come to my house, chances are, you will not eat anything that I had growing up. Partly, this has to do with what's available. But mostly, it has to do with the ways I've used cooking as yet another destination on a journey that has taken me further and further into the world - into Thai food, Keralite food, meat (I grew up in a largely vegetarian house). And perhaps these differences reflect the differences of my mother's life, as well - I grew up eating chicken, fajitas, stir fries. I doubt my grandmother, who has spent the past forty years of her life in roughly the same part of Mumbai, has ever made any of these things.
I don't know at what point a journey becomes a departure, and at what point we can say we have started to come back.
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