My mother was a cook par excellence “when she was younger” (to quote her). The rest of the family would tuck into whatever she produced perfectly out of the stove with gluttony.
My father, between chewing the tasty food, would complement in superlative terms the culinary skills of his mother-in-law, which he had many opportunities to overindulge himself in. His paeans for her culinary expertise were loud enough to reach the ears of my mother toiling in the kitchen. Her response to her husband’s deliberate attempts to get under her sweaty skin would range from choosing to ignore him to asking him to live in her house at Kollam.
Her favourite exercise under the circumstances would be to attribute the exquisite taste of her mother’s cooking to coconut oil that was used more liberally in the kitchens of old, and the freshness of the raw materials available back then. My sister, coming of age, chose to spend more time at the stove, oven and the grill, under the proctorship of her mother. She had inherited significant numbers of culinary genes from her mother and grandmother, I must admit. I can vouch for her fish cutlets and sandwiches, besides many other ‘produces’. As the food she prepared gradually jostled for space on the dining table, she came to receive many an accolade and bouquet from the rest of the family, much to my mother’s chagrin!
Years speeding by, my mother tends to hang up her spatula and close that recipe book more often. “I cannot do everything as I used to earlier. I have aged”, is her favourite catchphrase.
She is now a grandmother. “Having aged considerably”, she has chosen not to spend much time in the kitchen, where she makes her occasional guest appearances, usually at dinner time. My older daughter, picking up from where her grandmother left off, loves to cook, and is adept at it. Her tastes are quite extreme. She loves to have her food spicy, and taste “North Indianish”. She often criticises the food prepared by her grandmother (which has come down to a trickle), quite vociferously at that, earning a reprimand from her parents. I, adding fuel to fire would walk down memory lane on the dining table, recalling the exquisite taste of my grandmother’s cooking, and my mother’s too, in her “younger days”.
This war of words, a by-product of culinary preferences which seems to vary between generations, would usually commence when my daughter’s dish lands on the table. Or, is ‘tasty food’, as one’s taste buds perceive it, a casualty of a widening generation gap?
Email: earaly@hotmail.com