Kapur - Chillies and porridge: writing food

Chillies
and
Porridge

Writing Food

Edited by Mita Kapur

HarperCollins Publishers India

No, this book is not dedicated to you, Bunny, or the kids will have me for dinner. No, this book is not dedicated to Sakshi, Resham, Rehan, because well, just like that. But, in a way, all of you do become a part of it since I'd like to dedicate this book to each one of you who lives by the four-letter word: food.

Contents

MITA KAPUR

I am obsessed with flavours. And textures. And the smells of food. Even today, if I am somewhere within the narrow alleys of the old city area of Jaipur to run an errand, I find myself drawn to the old lady who sits crouched at the corner of Churoko ka rasta leading to Umrao Jewels selling dal, roti and mirchi ka achaar. The thick rotis smell of just-roasted wheat, and one bite fills your mouth with textures that take you right back to a mitti ka chulha.

I find excuses to go back to Gopal ji ka rasta in search of nan khatais baked in an old iron contraption that serves as an oven. To watch them change colour, turning amber to match the just-switched-on street lights, and wait for the chap to gingerly pick them up from the griddled rows of the oven before placing them in a brown paper bag. To reach into the bag, feel the warm, fuzzy, buttery biscuits which collapse into cottony balls once on your tongueheaven! Simple joys, simple food, and the treasure of memories that leads to a search for more.

Over the years Ive been a steadfast observer of how people talk about food even when they are not eating. However intense the mood may be, however varied the intellectual capabilities of a group of people in a room, food is the ground we level on. Our facial lines relax, the corners of our eyes crinkle, we gasp, we exclaim and breathe deep over our discoveries. I have tortured friends with pictures of eleven-course meals, made them exclaim over photographs of black ale alongside hearty marrow on toast and fried langos in Budapest. Or over pictures of jungle maas being cooked in a dekchi over wood fire in my garden.

Food brings us together as a family, as friends, even as strangers who chance to share a table at a hole-in-the-corner-joint; it opens up silences and creates shared moments, some laughter, and then you move on. But you carry the memory within the recesses of your mind, because you bonded over a food-laden table.

In my first book, The F Word, I explored relationships via food and shared some of my favourite recipes with my readers. Several of them responded by saying it felt like their story. That made me hungry: I wanted to know their stories. I wanted to know how they ate, what they ate, what they held dear in terms of taste, form, colour, texture, smell and flavour. Simple home-cooked food, varied food traditions, specialities of regional cuisine, unexpected discoveries made while travelling the worldthere is an endless spiral of foody experiences waiting for us just round the corner.

Its a Proustian remembrancethe familiarity of food. An addiction not just to flavours and a routine, but an emotional connect which we carry within ourselves. I remember being persuaded of this as I read through a food writing anthology I had picked up: Eat, Memory:Great Writers at the Table edited by Amanda Hesser. After that, I read everything I could find in the genre: Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink edited by David Remnick, The Table Is Laid: The Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing edited by John Thieme and Ira Raja, A Matter of Taste: The Penguin Book of Indian Writing on Food edited by Nilanjana Roy, Drinking, Smoking and Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times edited by Sara Nickles, just to name a few.

Somewhere between devouring one book of food writing after another and lying collapsed in bed after a hectic day, taking in the visual feast offered by food shows on television, the urge to put together this anthology became stronger. It would be a collection of stories, reminiscences and essays by some of my favourite writers. The dusty playground of a Delhi colony, a makeshift cricket pitch, a bowl of porridge made for breakfast, friendships over food experiences, slow cooking, the collective hypochondria of a community over food, walking through vegetable markets, the slurring over swigs of mahua, changing landscapes of street food, food iconography, food as a celebration of a life passed by, chefs preferring to cook over studying calculus, the poetry of fresh, warm storiesChillies and Porridge took shape without any conscious geographical mapping or, to be honest, any deliberately imposed parameters at all, except that of taste, subjective as it is. I must thank all the writers, many of them friends, who rallied around and came up with their best at fairly short notice, and I can only hope that you, my reader, will find enough to savour and linger over, and perhaps take away too.

I can still hear the scrape of it. The thin, long sound. Metal on metal. Shrill as a banshee, piercing the morning chill, and my dreams. Its sharp persistence disallowing silence and sleep. My grandmother emptying the porridge pot in the kitchen, cleaning it carefully, edge to curved edge, with a spoon. At the time, admittedly, it elicited sullen complaintmy elder sister burrowing her head under the pillow and I pulling the covers over mine, in vain. Later, when we were dressed, all convent-schooled up in demure skirts and clean white socks, it would be waiting on the table, steaming gently, a grey,
gloopy mess.

It is impossible to be eloquent about porridge. As everyday as rice, yet not as elegant as that fragrant grain. In our house, it was prepared daily, a humble morning paeanjust enough, no less, no moreas steady as us saying the rosary, rhyme for rhyme, in the evening. The kind of life the Scottish poet James McGonigal alluded to in First Things:

My granny made porridge first thing

with the same untroubled movements

of hand and eye, the same patience

that she gave to her night prayers.

It is a holy and wholesome thought

to eat porridge and pray for the dead

every day of your life, I now think,

reaching down a white bowl from its shelf.

In the poem, porridge is not incidental. It cannot be replaced by something else. Sausages and eggs, toast and jam, cereal and muesli. The point of it is in the routine, and having cooked it often, I know it takes time and attention. In the poem, I like the way the lines run to the end of the verses, how the general moralthe youchanges to I now think, a movement from the past to the present, re-enacting the poetic movement to, and the coming about of, this understanding. How, at the end, the lines sit neatly, firmly, as though contained, cradled, in a bowl.

For the uninitiated, porridge is a dish of ground, crushed or chopped cereal, boiled in milk or water, usually served hot. Admittedly, not quite the stuff fine-dining dreams are made of. Porridge is as unexotic as, well, porridge. Yet as trends come and go, this humble one-bowl meal trudges on, quietly filling bellies around the world first thing in the morning. One might even imagine it quite abashed by the claims of Alistair Moffat, writer, journalist and founder of the DNA Project in the UK that the greatest invention in human history wasnt the wheel, the Internet, the iPad or even sliced bread. It was porridge. (Moffat, whose most recent book is titled