Excerpt | Man must cook (and a grand theory of everything)

Let your son into the kitchen early, says Samar Halarnkar in his forthcoming book, 
The Married Man’s Guide to Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures. 
Photo: Thinkstock
Live Mint :Samar Halarnkar : Sat, May 18 2013. 12 08 AM IST


If men have any hope of redeeming themselves, 
they need to get familiar with the kitchen. 
PS: Involve sons too

I’m a glutton.

I hate to admit this in public, but there’s no running away from it.

My father-in-law always says, in the admiring manner that an Indian father-in-law reserves for his favourite son-in-law, ‘No, no, Samar, you’re a gourmet!’

I’m not, really, but you know how it is when you are the favourite son-in-law in an Indian family? No? Well, just make sure you are the only son-in-law.

I can’t do with two toasts and an egg for breakfast. Or two parathas and pickle. Or two dosas andchutney. I need four toasts, two eggs—and that leftover kheema or chicken; or ham or Mum’s pork pickle.

That’s my first breakfast.

I have two, sometimes three, breakfasts, variously stuffing milk and almonds, poha (puffed rice), idli or whatever, into my plumbing.

And my plumbing is none the worse for it, thank you very much.

Since no one can possibly cater to my whimsical and varied tastes, I’ve always done it myself.

So, I cook.

The Married Man’s Guide to Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures: By Samar Halarnkar, Westland Books, 248 pages, Rs 495

I know what I am not—a great cook.

‘No, no, Samar, you are a chef, a gourmet-chef!’

That’s my father-in-law, of course.

The truth is, my cooking is like a roadside mechanic’s fiddling and tinkering. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. A twist here, a turn there. Throw it together, and hope the engine fires.

What I am is a jhatka or jugaad cook, that indefinable Indian quality of somehow making things work using whatever’s available.

I know most married men don’t cook. I do because (a) I like to eat; (b) I like it that my family and friends like it; (c) I like it that my wife gets very, umm, excited when I cook; and (d) I like it that my cooking has made me—not wealthy, but—happy, healthy and wise.

You can blame this obsession with food on my upbringing. I grew up eating paya (a spicy soup of goat’s trotters, or hooves) for breakfast in the Deccan, the steamy, arid heart of the Indian peninsula. To this day, the Deccan remains a land of black soil, backwardness and bhanamati, the local dark art of black magic.

It was the 1970s, a slow, dreamy time of no television, when tomorrow was much like yesterday and counting your marbles or walking your sheep down the dusty backstreets constituted the daily entertainment.

I did have a sheep, you know, an amiable, woolly, and sometimes woolly-headed, creature that followed us around all day, infuriating my mother by leaving droppings in the living room.

My brother and I, unimaginatively, called him Curly.

Illustration: Farzana Cooper/Westland Ltd

We had a cook who turned out the most delicious biryani (I suspect Curly ended up in one after we tearfully bade him goodbye some time in 1975); Goan curries made with, horrors, river fish; and, oh yes, spinach that we swallowed with water.

As you can tell, I come from a family that has always struggled with vegetables. My father claims to like a few, but my mother, brother and I have always stayed with the ways of the flesh. Anything that has lived, we’re willing to try for breakfast, lunch, dinner—or any time in between.

My antipathy to vegetarian food faded somewhat only after I married—a vegetarian.

My friends did not let me live this down for years, because I had brashly sworn never to marry one. Older today, and certainly wiser, I confess that not only do I eat some vegetarian food—though an all-vegetarian meal is as rare as a moon landing—I also cook it. My repertoire is limited to what my wife likes.

My friends complain that I never offer vegetarian recipes. This is not true. I have served up some veggie entrées, but I guess they tend not to be noticed because they are always footnotes to the transformation of God’s creatures into my lunch.

Of course, liking food and cooking it are two very different things. Men, especially Indian mamas’ boys, often say, disparagingly, ‘Cooking is difficult, boss.’

It isn’t, really. The trick is to adapt, innovate, stumble and triumph.

When all else fails, call your mother. I do.

How do you get your children interested in cooking, especially your sons? It isn’t easy, given the legion of coddled, kitchen-illiterate males our middle class produces. Sons always were—and continue to be—willing victims of the mera-raja-beta (my precious son) syndrome, which manifests itself in doting mothers who indulgently serve their sons and adoringly watch them eat. Once pampered thus, the Indian male not only expects to be served but also prides himself in his ignorance around the kitchen.

So, how do you get your sons into the kitchen?

I say, push them into the kitchen when they are young.

I can only offer my own story. I am an adequate cook, skilful enough to send my wife into the occasional rapture, and as readers of my column in this paper know, I get by with piles of recipe books and my ownjhatka instincts.

I am hazy about how I became master of my kitchen, regarding it as a fact of life, like wearing clothes or brushing teeth.

A recent visit home provided some useful revelations—after some conversations with my mother and a close examination of a school exercise book from the seventh standard.

My mother, a physiotherapist who juggled a job with running a household of seven (my grandmother and two college-going aunts lived with us when I was in primary school), freely used her two boys as household labour.

Illustration: Farzana Cooper/Westland Ltd.

It was an excellent idea.

We helped set the table, clean up, and as we grew older, my mother says, I started to clean and chop ingredients. I remember very little, except that at some point, I started writing recipes.

The first recorded date for a recipe in my school exercise book is 29 May 1980, when I was 15. It’s a recipe for meat loaf.

How did that get there, given that I spent my pre-teen years in the small towns of the peninsula’s great beyond?

My mother says I wrote the meat loaf recipe after eating it at the home of a family friend, a Mangalorean, who made the most divine Christmas dinners. To this day, Fifine Sequeira, as she has every year for nearly forty years, sends my father a rum-soaked Christmas cake. I mean really soaked. I remember the lights being switched off after dinner in the cavernous dining room of the Sequeiras’ high-roofed, colonial-era bungalow in Bangalore and the cake being set alight, the ghostly, blue flame thrillingly seared into my memory.

‘You ate at our friends’ houses, and what you liked you picked up,’ says my mother modestly. As I browse through the exercise books—now slowly falling apart—I see how she and I converted these random menus into repositories of culinary memories. I can see how I copied her habit of committing great meals to pen and paper.

Our handwriting was remarkably similar, rounded letters and friendly curves, but my recipes appear to be distinguished by sketches of diving planes, tanks and warships—my other schoolboy passion.

As I grew older, I was happy to work as kitchen help for the many official and unofficial dinners my parents hosted. My father was a wandering police officer, who was rarely assigned to a town for more than two years. Entertaining prominent townsfolk was apparently a requirement for effective policing. By my teenage years, I was trusted enough to cook an entire dish.

My kitchen instincts were honed by years of living alone at minimum pay at the start of my career. I earned Rs.1,800 per month; Rs.800 of that was paid as rent for my charming one-room residence on the terrace of a little house in Bangalore, owned by a perennially sozzled Tamilian gentleman.

Either I cooked—chiefly because I was confident of producing pleasurable meals— or I ate cheap, oily rubbish in seedy neighbourhood bars and hotels.

Illustration: Farzana Cooper/Westland Ltd.

There is much I have learned along the road of life—from cookbooks, from travels, from people who can really cook—but my greatest learning has evolved from my own experiments. Today, cooking comes easy to me. It keeps my marriage exciting and happy, helps me stay in touch with tradition, family and friends and makes me smile a lot.

Tell that to your sons.

As it emerges, the kitchen is the place that granted humans control over the planet, the place that has made men what they are, the place that reminds them that they can be better than they are.

You see, the world’s oldest profession isn’t what the idiom says it is.

The world’s oldest profession, according to a 2011 study released by Harvard University, is being a cook.

Cooking skills first developed at least two million years ago among Homo erectus, an extinct cousin who wasn’t far from us, Homo sapiens, in the human evolutionary tree. Cooking, the Harvard scientists contend, is the mother of all evolutionary advantages. It set humans on a path of divergence from and dominion over other apes, proto-humans and, eventually, other species.

Eating cooked food, or processing food in other ways, such as grinding, pounding, blending, did two things for our hominid ancestors, who until then spent hours chewing food. First, it gave them time to think, reason, socialise, discover and invent. Second, it gave them energy in concentrated, more nutritious form, in a way raw food could not.

The extra time and energy encouraged bonding of male and female, creation of the household, the sexual division of labour, and growth of the human brain.

With this big brain, humans out-thought other species. Teeth and jaws shrunk. Our canines and molars are a shadow of what they once were and what our modern cousins, the great apes, possess. The rates at which teeth-size dropped offer clues to the rise of cooking.

Earlier studies found that changes in the molar size in Homo erectus, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens have been more rapid than other evolutionary changes to the human body. The Harvard team studied the remains of fourteen human ape-like ancestors and confirmed that Homo erectus and Neanderthals spent as much time cooking as we do in the 21st century.

You might say that humanity was launched by an ape that learnt to cook.

Chris Organ and Zarin Manchanda, two of the study’s authors, observed that Homo erectus had smaller teeth than other branches of the human family. This means processing food was a behaviour that had already evolved by then, 1.9 million years ago.

The era of cooking had a downside: it led to the primacy of the male. The time freed up from chewing gave males time to hunt, roam and do the things that men do. For females, the time was spent on gathering or preparing food. Further evidence that cooking predates Homo erectus comes from the fact that males were fifty per cent larger than females by then.

The leader of the study, Richard Wrangham, a primatologist who first argued that cooking was not about better-tasting food as much as providing humans with evolutionary advantages (read his 2009 book,Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human), believes the human-as-chef development sparked great social change, starting at home. That led to further divergence from the great apes.

The researchers found that human beings set aside, on average, 4.7% of their daily activities for eating; if we put in the effort other primates do, it would occupy 48% of our activity time. “It is not just that we feed differently from other primate species, but that changes in the time we spend feeding have been important to our evolution,” Organ told the Harvard Gazette.

Although humans have since diverged enormously from the great apes, research over the past twenty to 30 years indicates we are more ape-like in our social behaviour than you could attribute to chance. Something has carried through, reasons Wrangham, who studies chimpanzees in Uganda—as does Manchanda—and previously studied chimpanzees at Gombe (Tanzania), a site made famous by Jane Goodall, the primatologist who lived there among chimps for 45 years.

Illustration: Farzana Cooper/Westland Ltd.

“To take an example, there are only two mammals that we know of in the world in which males live in groups of their male relatives and occasionally make attacks on individuals in neighbouring groups so brutally that they kill them. Those two mammals are humans and chimpanzees,” Wrangham said during a 2008 interview. “This is very odd and it needs explanation.”

Wrangham’s point is that, for all their awareness of self, humans continue to follow biological rules. In other words, many of us may not be able to escape our genetic destiny. He believes life might become easier if we understood these rules. Obviously, this is a deeply contested proposition, and I cannot agree with it.

Recognising the deep contradictions of humanity ties us to our distant past and, whether we like it or not, lights our future—a grand theory of everything, starting from the kitchen.

So, what does it all mean to men and, specifically, the Indian male?

He needs to get back into the kitchen.

If you can persuade yourself to get into the kitchen, you will find no better way to create a library of life.

That’s how it works for me.

I associate spice, food and fragrance with periods of my life. Oddly, most of my recollections are linked to hot, Indian summers, as you will notice in this book. Perhaps that is not so odd, since most months on the Subcontinent are given to the heat of day.

When I think of summer, my mind’s eye gazes on scenes from another time, pulled up from the archives of memory.

I see the family sheep, Curly, swimming with the family dog, Bimbo, in an ancient well on a hot, still Deccan day; the clack of marbles that I religiously clean and put away every night; the distant, ghostly tombs of sultanates lost and sultans buried. I smell the 1970s, the paya, that rich soup of trotters, and fragrant, spicy biryani of Gulbarga, which is often the hottest place in India when the summer first breaks.

I see the great, green expanse of Cubbon Park, Bangalore; the death of the jacaranda and the birth of the crumpled, pink-lavender Queen’s flower; leisurely dosas under lush, living canopies of creepers that formed a natural roof over open-air restaurants, now consigned to history’s dustbin by the rise of globalised Bangalore. I can taste the rich pork curries of Mangalore and Coorg (now Kodagu), as I can the special Id haleem of Bangalore.

I see the great shrub jungle—also gone—of R.K. Puram, New Delhi, the pail of water beside my charpoy, the string-bed I sleep on in our balcony during steamy nights without electricity. As I pour the water, I feel the liquid soaking gloriously into my skin. I feel it drying up within minutes. I smell the1980s, the heady tandoori chicken of Kake di Hatti (now Kake da Hotel), Connaught Place, basted with the pot-bellied cook’s sweat in the days before air-conditioning. I smell the heaviness in the air. I taste the dust from the approaching loo, the hot summer storm from the great western desert.

I see the wide, open spaces and big skies of Missouri, the American Midwest, where I am reduced to eating 99-cent McDonald’s burgers because it is all I can afford, which is not to say I did not enjoy them. I feel my surprise at the humidity and heat, after a long, freezing winter. I see the superstore on the edge of town; I see the cheap catfish and cheaper pork brain. I smell the 1990s, endless rounds of barbequed meat marinated with whatever spices I have at hand, immersed in whatever liquor I drink. I open my eyes while lying under the big oak tree in the city of Columbia and meet a man who becomes a close friend.

“You are lying in my spot,” he says.

“Well, it’s mine as well,” I respond.

He frowns and asks, “Are you from the third world?”

He is too, a South African who grew up in the township of Soweto. He asks if I can cook biryani. I never have, but I invite him over, and I do.

"If you can persuade

 

yourself to get into the

 

kitchen, you will find no

 better way to create a 

library of life. 

That’s how it works for me. 

I associate spice, food and 

fragrance with periods of 

my life. oddly, most of my 

recollections are linked to 

hot, Indian summers..."

I see the smiling faces of my nosy, generous Punjabi landlords and ladies in Delhi, asking why I am returning from office so late; I recall love gained and lost. I smell the paneer, chola and chapatibeing shoved at me by Mrs Malhotra from a window in the kitchen wall. I smell my own cooking in the poky kitchen out on the terrace of my top-floor,barsati flat. I like my roast mutton and fish curries, and I dish them out by the kg for the stream of visitors, all of us sweating, smoking, drinking and eating together in the furnace that is Greater Kailash-I, made worse by a thousand generators trying to stave off one of the worst summers on record.

I see my aunt, Meena Moushi, walking ahead of me, visiting the garrulous Koli (fisher) women of Grant Road Market, Mumbai, one early summer morning, to get the freshest fish. I smell the 2000s, dried prawns from Mumbai’s last fishing villages and fresh fish from Machiwala Mohammed, the hard-working Bihari fish-monger. I smell my latest attempts in the kitchen, the roast chicken, lamb and duck, lapped in freshly ground spices and Old Monk rum. As the decade wears on, I see new flats, cities and people, gaining a wife and child but keeping up the nomadic life, registering my twenty-ninth home in life by 2013.

You will forgive my extended ramblings about summer. It is a season I treasure, for it is when I have done my best cooking, when I have wiped endless lines of sweat, when I have ignored the power cuts and the flies and stood there, feeling triumphant, exultant, unbowed.

All right, so I exaggerate a bit.

But I hope you understand.

Rise above the artificial, air-conditioned bubble that surrounds you in the summer, and you will find the kitchen a good place to challenge your mind, body and faculties; you will find it is a metaphor for life—to step out of the Indian male’s comfort zone.

Shop, chop, baste, marinate, sauté and stir.

There is a reason why there is nothing more memorable than the remembrance of a fragrance, why summers tend to stay more eternal than winters, why a year without summer is like a life without love.

At the end of a summer’s day, you must produce a meal with flavours more intense than ever. Have a bath. Cool off. Eat what you have cooked, feed your friends and family. 

There is no better way to experience the summers of your life.

Excerpted from The Married Man’s Guide to Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures by Samar Halarnkar. The book, derived from the Lounge column, “Our Daily Bread”, will release in book stores at the end of May.