My Kitchen Café #1: Of Bhelpuri, Brown Rice and Forbidden Treats With Sra

My Kitchen Café is something I've wanted to do here for quite sometime, but didn't get around to acting upon it until now. The idea was to have one guest post a month on my blog, written by a fellow food blogger (or non blogger) on something that was food-related and vegetarian.

Since I run a virtual kitchen on this blog, I guess this is the closest I can come to sharing some time, perhaps some food or at least food related talk with another person. The only thing is that at this monthly meeting at the Café in My Kitchen, the guest brings the food!

I thought it would be nice to feature a blogger whose blog/ writing I enjoy (provided they agreed to do the post) and also introduce them to any of my readers who might not have discovered them.

The other plus would be that you would get to enjoy something different from what I regularly serve out, while for me, it would mean one less post to write up every month!!

I'm happy to inaugurate this series of guest posts at "My Kitchen Café" with Sra, a good friend of mine, who blogs at When My Soup Came Alive.

If you read her posts, you would know that she has a unique (and witty) style of writing, and a very interesting take on things in general. Sra was very accommodating and managed to find the time to write this post within the deadline I set her, despite being very busy at work and otherwise. I guess that's how good friends are.

Her post "Of Bhelpuri, Brown Rice and Forbidden Treats", came from of a remark her Uncle made one evening. It got her thinking and made the material for the first guest post on my blog.


"Bhelpuri always reminds me of the sand on Chowpatty beach,” said an uncle, sampling the chaat at the new restaurant that opened near our home. "This bhelpuri does not have any sand in it", he said, his shrug suggesting that he didn't really know how he made the association. Perhaps something about the raw spices in the bhelpuri set my bland-food-loving uncle’s teeth on edge; he probably associated the roughness of the sand with the unsubtle taste of the spices.

Bhelpuri (Image source: Wikipedia)

Recently, the unlikeliest of places - my office, full of computers and central air-conditioning - smelt of the kind of rice I sometimes ate as a child at a grandmother’s home. It was white, but flecked with brown, and had its own aroma that no other rice now seems to replicate.
No one was eating at the moment and I wonder what combination of atoms connived to tease me at that moment, transporting me back to that house with its ancient wooden staircase and an ancient ice-petti (refrigerator). I didn’t even realise I had had a memory of that smell, leave alone a liking for it, till I experienced this in the office.

Every time I see an egg fried sunny side up, I think of my grandfather. He would tear off pieces of his chapati, rolled out thick and square and well done, dip it into the yolk, and chew it with zest.
The more traditional accompaniment to the chapati in our house would be a sweet and sour onion-gravy, jaggery and tamarind playing their part. I’m not sure it gets made any longer at home but the memory is one of a not-very-obviously-foodie grandfather relishing his meal.
I, though, have never liked the runny yolk, though I do like the other combination.

As children, my cousin and I were forbidden to buy any food from the hawkers outside our school. Our teachers were told to keep an eye on us.
Our school didn’t have a wall, it had a thick grille-like mesh and the ice-fruit would be passed through the mesh once you handed over the money. The ice-fruit with the semiya (vermicelli) in it was more expensive.

Once I asked the hawker to give me one, and he sneered at me when I said I didn’t have any money. I’m not sure whether my classmates wouldn’t give me money or whether I didn’t dare ask them, but I began making off with some change lying on the dining table after the vegetables had been bought for the day.
No sooner had I started this life of stealth and crime did my teachers dutifully inform my grandparents. I was dragged into the kitchen and violently disciplined by my grandmother, and my uncle then asked me if I’d paused to wonder where the hawker’s bare, dirty hands, with which he passed on those forbidden treats, could have been. I was all of six, so no, I hadn’t thought of all this until Uncle’s helpfully graphic description.

I’ve tried many times to recreate what I’ve felt were the best, and the simplest, meals of my childhood with little success. The smells are aplenty, the associations numerous, and the nostalgia is immense and bittersweet. One practical use it has is that it forces you to keep trying.
It’s puzzling how something suddenly dredges up a long forgotten fact (or something you think is one) from the labyrinth of your mind, and equally puzzling how you understand something in a flash after it’s been eluding you for long and you don’t even know it has been.
Very often, the tempering for my recipes - and ultimately the dish - doesn’t smell right. When I say right, I’m usually comparing it to the aroma it gives off at my parents’ and grandparents’ home. What would give it that fresh, clear smell, I would wonder? Then one day it struck me, just like that. That it was the curry leaves which were missing!
Now every time I forget the curry leaves, I take the trouble to check for it in the fridge. If it isn’t there, fine and if it is, excellent - it’s like bringing home a small piece of home!

Here is some nostalgia I've managed with a certain amount of success:

Drumstick curry (the vegetable)

Okra gravy

Plantain and colocasia stews

Melon cucumber curry

Tomato curry

A dal recipe

A breakfast accompaniment

The copyright for this post rests with Sra of When My Soup Came Alive, and is reproduced here with her permission.