Cooking to Eat
Quick! Get the fire extinguisher!!
Somehow, I wasn’t panicking. But I also knew that the flames rising from the frying pan on the stove were not a good sign. Luckily the apartment had a shared fire extinguisher nearby. Even better, it worked! I retrieved it, ran back to the kitchen and liberally applied its contents to the still flaming frying pan which was now resting on the floor.
Like onion chutney and vindaloo, I had discovered something in the restaurants, fell in love with it, and was determined to duplicate it at home. This time, I was obsessed by the puffy deep fried bread named puri. Of course, I didn’t have a clue about how to properly make it. I just consulted my cookbooks and figured that I knew what I was doing. As always, I had to tweak things a bit and make do with what I had on hand. In retrospect, that probably wasn’t the best idea. I was using the wrong flour (strike one), a frying pan to deep fry in (strike two) and had let the oil get so hot that it had no choice but to burst into flames (called out on strikes)! No one was more surprised than me, but luckily, quick action prevented further disaster. The floor suffered some burn marks but that was it. This mishap became known as the Puri Incident. My landlord, by the way, never mentioned it.
I continued to attempt making puri, but concluded that a wok would be the more appropriate vessel in which to fry them. I never did get them to puff really well though. I was still using the wrong flour; not nearly enough oil; right temperature or the right technique. Many years later, at a street festival, I watched someone make puri in a huge karahi (a wok). He made it look easy and they were great!
As I was entered my third year of college, I moved to my first apartment, and suddenly had to cook for myself. Every day. Even though cooking didn’t scare me and I was not bad for a college student, in retrospect, the first year was a bit rough. One of my specialties was mac and cheese with kielbasa and extra cheese. Um, I’ll leave that one to your imagination. Another “hit” was my take on refried beans with hot sausage and then there were my nachos. Oh yeah...
Thankfully I was able to move on pretty quickly and expand my repertoire. I experimented with new dishes; discovered things like falafel and hummus; cooked recipes from my copy of The Good Food of Szechwan; and even learned how to make a fairly decent chili from a friend who worked in an upscale restaurant.
Growing up, my family had two Indian cookbooks on our bookshelf: Cooking the Indian Way (Attia Hosain and Sita Pasricha [1962] amazingly used copies are still available to purchase here and here) and The Art of Indian Cuisine (Pranati Sen Gupta [1974] also available from here). As I was planning my move, no one seemed to care that I wanted them. Their loss. Both books were duly packed, and moved with me to my first apartment in Newtonville during the summer of 1983.
Even with easy access to these cookbooks, I didn’t cook anything from them at first. Other than keema korma, I didn’t cook any Indian dishes during the first several months in my apartment. But after several visits to local restaurants, I started to look at them with renewed interest in hopes of duplicating some of the restaurant dishes at home. There was no internet for me to reference (yet) so these books were my only source of information and recipes.
Cooking the Indian Way didn’t seem to catch my interest even though that is where the recipe for ”my” tuna curry had originated. The recipes seemed too simple — something the authors sort of hinted at in their intro. The idea, after all, was for the recipes to be achievable for people cooking these recipes for the first time. Eventually, I tried a different recipe from this book.
A bookmark left in page 30 for a few decades brought me to the recipe for Khitchree, a rice and lentil dish. It had looked easy to prepare, so I gave it a shot. Curiously one of the ingredients requested is “large cardamon.” Back then, I probably did not have any cardamon, let alone black cardamon which is what I think the recipe was asking for! So I left it out. I also did not have the correct “lentils” either. The recipe called for masoor or moong dal. In place of either one of these dals, I substituted plain “lentils” from the supermarket. The results were not satisfactory. In my electric skillet, the lentils never cooked completely and I found the dish somewhat bland. Perhaps some onion chutney would have helped!
Years later, I revisited this book and found a newspaper article that my mother had saved from the food section of the Boston Herald Traveler back in the late sixties. One recipe for fish biryani was marked with a note: “do not use deep casserole.” This could be the biryani recipe that didn’t inspire me. Interestingly, in the same article, there is a recipe for puri (spelled pooris) and one for duck vindaloo, to which she had also added a comment in red ink: HOT. The recipe asked for ½ tsp of cayenne pepper or to taste!
The recipes from the newspaper article were also clearly aimed at the western cook. In the introduction to the article the writer discusses, in a very broad way, the use of spices in India, and even the concept of regional cooking. It’s a bit crazy looking at this article from over fifty years ago, but it’s important to realize that articles such as this were probably the introduction to Indian dishes for many adventurous cooks in the US.
As surprised as I was to find this article hidden away for all this time, even more astonishing to me were food prices from that time (1969). On the back page of this clipping was an ad from Star Market with the headline: We Did It… Even Lower ‘Miracle Prices’. Maxwell House Instant Coffee: 95 cents. Morton Pot Pies for 19 cents. Pop Tarts for 39 cents!