The Great Domestic Cooking Renaissance
BENGALURU: Covid-19 may have caused home kitchens to work overtime. Since restaurants were closed and many were working from home, people started preparing regular meals. We suddenly realised that cooking at home is pleasurable, important and necessary, not just for our existence but also for our happiness.In the last few months, a mindless task (like peeling onion, ginger or garlic) has become a mindful task. I have made more phone calls than ever to my mother during the lockdown asking for recipes, and realised what a wealth of knowledge she is. Cooking skills have been passed on orally from generation to generation and it would be a pity to lose that basic knowledge.
I have rarely bought a cookbook before or watched a cooking show, but now I am constantly looking up recipes on YouTube and religiously taking printouts of them before I start prepping and cooking.It suddenly struck me how much more there is to know about cooking. I started by asking some basic questions: What was the genesis of cooking and how has it evolved over time? What led to the decline of cooking at home? Why is organic food so expensive? What is unique about our mothers’ cooking? Why do people spend so much time watching cooking shows about food they never get to eat?
I highly recommend Michael Pollan’s book Cooked: A Natural History Of Transformation which is also a four-episode Netflix documentary series. It gives great insight into the evolution and history of cooking, how the four classical elements — fire, water, air and earth — transform the stuff of nature into food that we eat and drink.
Richard Wrangham of Harvard University argues in his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human that the invention of cooking — even more than agriculture, the eating of meat or the advent of tools — is what led to the rise of humanity. Homo erectus (the first human, 1.8 million years ago) evolved when the ape learnt to cook; in fact humans cannot survive on raw food. Cooking also relieves us from chewing a lot. Since monkeys spend half their waking hours chewing, no wonder they don’t get anything done!
When my friend Master Chef India contestant Sadaf Hussain released his book Daastan-e-Dastarkhan I read and even tried out the recipes to understand the culinary heritage of Muslim communities across India. What makes Sadaf’s book so interesting is his ability to tell a story about every recipe. Cooking at Home with Pedatha (Gourmand Award winner in 2006 for Best Vegetarian Cookbook in the World) will make you nostalgic for your grandmother’s cooking.
One of the first cookbooks that I owned (thanks to my acquaintance with the author Jigyasa Giri), it is the best book on simple south Indian recipes. Indian recipe cookbooks are legion, but what grips me is the one that tells interesting stories, and that’s why I look forward to reading my friend Sudha Menon’s upcoming book A Spicy Affair.
Often, I have wondered why our mothers’ recipes are special. Scientifically, the chances are high that we have inherited at least some of our enzymes from our parents, so what tastes good to them probably tastes good to us too. Maybe it also has to do with the link between memory and taste. Preparing something delicious and nourishing for the people you love is probably the best expression of love itself. There is a reason they say “the way to a man’s (and woman’s) heart is through the stomach”. Only so long as the food is cooked at home!(The author is a technologist based in Silicon Valley who is gently mad about books.)