Before I dive into posting recipes, I wanted to preface it by talking a little bit about this project. There were a couple of things that I wanted to touch upon. The first being that I am not any kind of authority on food or cooking. I’m just someone who finds immense joy and comfort in food - eating it, cooking it and sharing it. Over time my perspective on food has seen several shifts and I have come to think of food as something much bigger than just recipes, eating or cooking. To me, it has become experiential - a doorway to some of my happiest memories and for someone who isn’t religious and tradition bound, it has given me a sense of identity. In saying that, I want to be clear that this identity is open to influences, fluid and always changing.
The way I make Papeta par Eedu (Eggs on Potato) is a result of a grandmother who was from Deolali, a grandfather who came from Navsari and their life in the city of Ahmedabad. And I love that! Deolali had a huge colonial influence and I have to wonder how that affected this dish. I wonder what the Gujarati influence on this dish was. I wonder if the fact that my grandparents raised three kids on a single, small income affected how it was made. This isn’t a quest for authenticity, so I don’t want to run around measuring this food with a Parsi/Kutchi yardstick; I want to be fascinated by its evolution. It isn’t the authenticity of a recipe (what is ‘authentic’ anyway?) that fascinates me, but the fact that this food has a story to tell. My story, but also our story. What is lovely about food is that it can be incredibly personal, but also incredibly unifying. I look forward to having enthusiastic exchanges, not only about cooking and recipes, but also around the experience that is food.
The other thing that I want to quickly touch upon is the almost non-existent idea of ‘measurements’ when it comes to a lot of Indian cooking. If you have ever asked your grandmother or mother for a recipe, you know what I’m talking about. “How much chilli powder should I add?” And my Nani will say “jara” (little bit). At this point I’d be like, what the hell is jara?! Is it a pinch, a spoonful, a bowlful or an entire bucket load? Or when I see a recipe that my mum quickly scrawled in her red cloth-bound book and it says “1 vaatki” (small bowl). At this point you look at the 40,000 different vaatkis sitting in your kitchen, you let out a sigh and you know that you’re just going to have to wing it. I taught myself how to cook (because by the time I was interested in cooking I didn’t have my beautiful grandmum or mum to teach me) and in the beginning I found this vague sense of measure extremely frustrating. My face still contorts when I think back to tasting what was the overly generous use of turmeric in the potatoes I first attempted. Overtime however, I have not only completely embraced the dark art of vague measures, but I see so much beauty in cooking instinctively. It gives you a chance to really learn your ingredients, to really familiarise yourself with the magic that each of them can unleash if treated well and exploited fully. After you’ve done the dance a few times, instinct starts to take over and you start to understand what looks right, feels right, smells right rather than going by what is supposed to be right. It is so rewarding when you start to realise that the winging it paid off and you’re starting to get the hang of it.
I’m going to try my best to provide some sort of measure in the recipes I share, but not so much that it takes the joy out of them. I hope that you will attempt your own little dance with them and enjoy cooking instinctively. Maybe even improvise when you see fit.
I was talking to my cousin Aarti about doing this post and I’ll end with what she said, because it sums up all of this up wonderfully and I can’t put it more eloquently - “Those vague measurements are exactly what make the dal at Nani’s house better than anywhere else.” You can know the entire recipe, but your mom and grandmum still make it better (and you can never quite put your finger on it). If this isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.