From battlegrounds to kitchens
K S S Pillai
Nobody might have foreseen the turmoil the West Asia war has brought to kitchens all over the world. One party engaged in the war is preventing ships carrying gas and oil from passing through the Strait of Hormuz, creating an artificial shortage. Its main opponent is asking its allies to send warships to bring normalcy there, but they are not responding positively, as they think it is not their war.
Years ago, the absence of gas in the kitchen would not have raised any eyebrows, but it is difficult for the new generation to visualise a kitchen without cooking gas.
Human beings became aware of fire, or the cooking of food, millions of years after their appearance on Earth. They ate all kinds of food raw. When they caught embers from natural wildfires, volcanoes, lightning and other natural events, and ate some food items that remained in them, they liked the taste, and thought of cooking food.
They learnt to produce fire by striking iron pyrites against flints, or by rubbing sticks together, and realised that cooking made food tasty, soft, nutritious, and less toxic. As the fire increased the temperature, they also began to live in colder climates, wearing suitably altered attire.
I grew up in a village when no one had any idea that kerosene, electricity, or gas could be a major player in kitchens. The fuels used for cooking were split wood, coconut shells, dry twigs and tree leaves, and dry cow dung. As the State had rains for many months, all kitchens used to store split wood above a platform over the hearth to dry it. The smoke in the kitchen was considered normal.
Our breakfast consisted mainly of pazhankanji, a dish made from the previous evening’s leftover rice mixed with water and left in mud pots overnight to ferment. We used to consume it cold in plates of clay or mud along with a pinch of salt, shallots, green chillies, yoghurt, last night’s fish curry or dry fish cooked on the open fire of the hearth. The gruel provided enough energy to do even manual work until lunchtime.
Whenever a marriage proposal came, the first thing the women of the bridegroom’s house wanted to know was whether the girl could cook. As the bride’s mother was blamed if the girl did not know how to cook, she always took care to teach that art to her daughters. Realising the truth of the saying that “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”, the girl is nowadays sent to a cooking class to learn all kinds of cooking.
The modern cooking media made their appearance years later, starting with kerosene stoves. Then came devices using gas and electricity for cooking, relegating stoves and solar cookers to the background. Most kitchens have induction cooktops, rice cookers, air fryers, microwave ovens, electric stoves, kettles, mixer-grinders, and many such devices.
As modern women do not wish to spend, like earlier generations, most of their time in the kitchen, people go to wayside eateries and restaurants to order different types of food. Those who want to enjoy these items at home, delivery boys are just a phone call away. Boundaries of nations made irrelevant by modernity, foods from those countries are available almost everywhere.
As more people eat mass-produced food, major companies began to sell it in large numbers with added ingredients to make it more palatable. Even in villages, one comes across colourful plastic bags with ready-made food items hanging from the ceilings of shops. Children go to their schools carrying them or buy them from the canteens.
Although women dominate home kitchens, cooking is the domain of men outside. Chefs in restaurants, hotels, and public functions, such as weddings, are mostly males, although females often assist them. We see males preparing masala dosas and other items by adding different ingredients from nearby containers with a flourish and throwing them into the waiting hands of other employees. Tea shops have males pouring tea from a height to a glass held way below, which, topped by bursting froth, is placed with a thud before the customers.
Let’s hope the war will end soon and the supply of gas to kitchens will become normal.
(The author is a retired professor of English. He is a regular contributor to ‘The Kashmir Vision’. His short stories and articles have appeared in various national and international publications)
