Cooking has always been an inscrutable art form. A dark mystery that happens in a kitchen somewhere. You arrive at the crime scene after the bodies have been disposed of. There are no mutilated cabbages, severed lettuce heads or scooped-out seeds. The food is laid out photogenic on the table.
Once upon a time it was considered a woman’s job, to get creative with vegetables and fruit, fish and fowl. In old havelis and tharavads, women controlled the home like minor mafia dons via everyone’s stomachs. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were political gambits, chess moves. This was when matriarchs imposed their will on the rest of the family. A miasma of caring hung over the scene along with the smell of food items chosen craftily to coincide with men-folk’s tastes.
A fast-forward into the current century and you see a million male cooks turning on the piped gas in apartments all over cities, asking their female bosses what they’d like to eat today. Not just the detonation of the joint-family system, but women joining the workforce meant deserted kitchens. Cooking suddenly became a unisex activity. Whoever was hungry got to cook.
Somewhere along the 90’s, it became fashionable for women to say they cannot cook and for men to say they can. The tables had turned, the dining tables. It made no sense to slave over a stove if everyone who turned up to sup were busy talking to each other and automatically shovelling in the food I had taken a long, long time to prepare.
Soaking in lentils the previous night, marinating meat for hours, slow-frying on a small flame, stirring with wooden spatulas in non-stick pans… And if someone actually stopped chewing for a moment just to tell me how I got a recipe wrong or could better a dish, I barely contained the homicidal rage within me.
I have listened to friends praise each other’s culinary skills with a fake look of complete interest.
When two pals discussed a cake, one of them came to me—after the other had left—to whisper sinisterly, ‘I didn’t tell her the secret ingredient: mixed fruit jam.’ Now if only I knew the rest of the recipe! I dream of meeting the other pal in a dark alley so I can psst ‘jam’ at her and together we run away to bake the perfect cake.
I have a gift for forgetting anything I keep on a boil until the pan itself is completely cooked. When the smoke alarm goes off on my floor, I always answer the doorbell with a smile, wondering which moron has burnt his flat down, and it is always—to my utter surprise each time—from my kitchen. Fried water is a specialty of mine.
Shinie Antony Author shinieantony@gmail.com