Cooking Up Memories…

I am learning to cook. Well watching my mum cook at times is more like it. Even though there are some primitive notions attached to the whole process (GirlReaching Marriageable Age – Must Know To Cook) I quite enjoy it. Especially when there is this cooking show inspired voice over going on inside my head- “now that you’ve added the onions, stir the contents until golden brown” or “lift up the lid and mmmh the flavour just hits you, doesn’t it?” I’ve got my very own ‘You Can Cook’ going on in my head.

My childhood is polka doted with memories that are connected to food. My first (hopefully made up) memory is being irritated with all the other kids, at my birthday party, for eating my sweets, my memory of leaving Lucknow as a seven year old, is connected to the fact that Anup uncle bought me not one but TWO packets of Lays chips from the railway station and that when I went to the planetarium for the first time in my life I had vanilla cup ice cream. Need I go further?

Reading about food itself for me is terribly satisfying. I am sure one of the reasons I always loved the Enid Blyton books was because of all the food that was spread out. I mean most of the Secret Seven’s started with an inventory of all they could eat at their latest meetings, the Famous Five’s though very dicey about the whole toiletries issues never lacked in food supplies and was there ever a St Claire’s semester when there wasn’t a midnight feast?

One of the quaintest books where book foods have been gone into is What Katy Did Next. She spends her time in England eating all the food that is described in books and surprise! Surprise! not all of it is good! However good or enticing it may sound- sausages pressed into gingerbread do not mouth watering make.

One really cool food book that I’ve got recently is Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. For someone who’s grown up thinking that the genial Sanjeev Kappoor is the archetypical chef the transition to Bourdain’s life of sex drugs and well cookery can be something of a culture shock. His cast of chefs seem more suited to the Mafia than the kitchen, but the love for food and cooking – what matters most- is very evident. I am half way through, and it est good.

Last year, we, in the intrepid editorial board of our college’s rag tag magazine Writer’s Block, scouted the city’s streets and back alleys in search of good food on the excuse that we needed to fill the odd 600 word Restaurant Review column of our mostly monthly rag. Never again, do I think that I am going to be in the company of such, for whom the ability to ingest copious amounts of food is a matter of pride and honour.  Of course our original intention was not forgotten and we wrote about the food and though describing ‘Pancakes at Piccadilly’ in a profusion of food clichés is hardly the literary heights of food writing, it was extremely entertaining.

When I read our very own food reviews now, it’s weird how it’s not the food that I remember.  It’s the subtext that stands out clearly – the stuff we didn’t write about.–– Bhavna singing from the back seat of a mostly empty bus, waiting at a railway crossing for the longest goods train ever to pass, Anuj’s attempts to finish a kula of lassi in one go – the sad realisation that I must never ever be photographed with food ever again.

And suddenly I am glad, that my memories are all connected to food.