My first recipe book was an unimpressive production. No soft-focus photographs of strawberries dipped in molten chocolate. No nostalgic foreword about pickle-making parties on the terraces of sprawling houses. In fact, it was a hastily scribbled affair, oil-splattered and a bit bloodstained. It was a basic Scholar notebook — 100 pages, single-lined — with a malevolent-looking teddy bear on its battered cover.
This recipe book boasted a grand total of six recipes: rice, dal, dahi kadhi , a dry potato bhaji, chana and a generic chicken in brown gravy. It was, in short, more survival handbook than treasure trove; more a guide-on-how-to-jump-back-after-tossing-green-chillies-into-hot-oil than how-to-create-mouthwatering-masterpieces. To me, however, it was as valuable as anything else in my bulging bag. Without it, I wouldn’t have a clue about how to tackle the fiddly pressure pan. Or distinguish between the little packets of spices. Or crack the mystery of the perfect tadka .
I was heading to the US for my Master’s degree, in an age before email and instant communication. Letters took at least two weeks to make the trip and phone calls were crazily expensive. So it made sense to arm myself with recipes. After all, I was going to be living in an apartment, and would have to cook for myself.
There was, however, one problem. I was no dab hand in the kitchen. In fact, I was never in the kitchen. So two days before I got on that flight, I reluctantly took a tutorial and wrote down six recipes in a new notebook. Truth to tell, I was planning to subsist on glorious junk food and spend hours wandering the pre-cooked section of the grocery stores. Who on earth — faced with tantalising conveniences, aisles of cereals and flavoured yogurts — was going to waste their time cooking?
I figured the answer to that question soon enough; as soon as I met my flatmate, a bright and sensible Bengali girl from IIT Kharagpur.
Gopa squashed my suggestion that we head to Taco Bell for our first dinner together, and instead announced that we would cook. It was cheaper and healthier. And between her suitcase and mine, we had a treasure trove of Indian spices, one pressure pan, one pressure cooker and three recipe books (My Scholar compilation, a pamphlet that came free with Gopa’s brand new Prestige cooker and a Bengali cookbook that involved scary spices like kalo jeera .)
What more did we need? A quick trip to the 42nd Street Market in LA and we marched into the kitchen to make dal and rice. Well, hello! Two Indian girls cooking their first meal, and what else do you expect? Gopa knew how to cook. Well, kind of. At least she knew we had to rinse the rice thrice. Then she reached for the rice recipe in my cookbook and got busy. I tackled the dal. And five minutes later, I managed to blow the pressure cooker safety valve, which in turn set off the fire alarm. By then we realised that we had forgotten to buy salt, but were too exhausted to do anything about it.
So we sat down with our salt-free dal and rice in our rather brown apartment in downtown, gangland LA, while menacing police helicopters hovered overhead and the genial drug-peddler across the street hid his stash in a gutter. And we actually enjoyed our meal. Within weeks we were organised. We bought salt. We figured out that supermarket tortillas worked well as chapatis. We inherited a few battered vessels from an Indian student who had graduated. We begged our mums to send 10 pressure cooker safety valves — by then it was clear I was a serial safety-valve blower. We requested a Tarla Dalal cookbook, which arrived after ages. And for six months, at least, we managed very happily.
Till one day we were invited to a potluck. The American potlucks were relaxed affairs — usually Sunday brunches with bagels and Philly cream cheese. But the Indian potlucks were serious business. The girls wore smug expressions and unveiled pav bhaji , gulab jamuns and chapatis. The boys were fabulous cooks — especially the South Indian contingent that arrived on American shores with copies of Samaithu Paar Part 1 and Part 2 by Meenakshi Ammal. We could not take our nameless chicken dish or three-minute dahi kadhi to this august gathering. Mercifully, the Tarla Dalal book had arrived and we had even managed a passable cabbage rice and vaangi bhaat . Emboldened, we decided to make paneer makhanwala from scratch. On that fateful Saturday morning — instead of tackling heaps of class assignments — Gopa curdled the milk and tried to squeeze out the liquid with a tea strainer. It didn’t work. Desperate, I rummaged through my cupboard and pulled out a favourite red mul dupatta and used it to strain the liquid. This worked magnificently till we spooned out the paneer and found it a garish shade of pink. While we examined the pink mess, the voluminous dupatta caught fire. Then the smoke alarm went off. A furious security guard arrived and had conniptions when he saw bits of charred dupatta floating around. Then we had conniptions when we realised that bits of charred dupatta had floated into our gravy.
Mortified but undefeated, we camouflaged the pink paneer in a rather-too-red gravy with a mysterious smoky flavour. Then we graciously accepted the compliments that evening.
But we had learnt our lesson. Never again did we stray too far from our trusty Scholar recipe book and Prestige freebie again.
Shabnam Minwalla is a journalist and the author of 'The Strange Haunting of Model High School' and 'The Shy Supergirl'