Flashback : Memoirs of my Culinary Experience (HW 1)

Food is an important part of a person's life. In its basest form it is something that is needed by a human being to survive. But with increase of logical capabilities of human being’s brains, man has learned a valuable lesson. Food can help in different ways. It’s useful in maintaining mental balance, it helps in spiritual upliftment and mostly helps in keeping your body healthy. Once he learnt that he started experimentation with food. A spice here, a certain flavour there has a different kind of effect on different people. A person's mood can be affected not only by the taste but also by the aroma that emanates while its being cooked. A simple example can be the aroma of durian. Its pungent aroma can cause a headache to some but may initiate a sense of heavenly peace in others. Food has this kind of power which is beyond doubt. Ancient history is abundant with examples of tribes, clans, kingdoms and empires reaching to agreements just because the food served on the truce table was lip-smacking.

Coming to how food has played a vital importance in my life. Explaining this can get very difficult. My relation with food has never been easy. My father since his child-hood has been an extremely hard-working man. Food for him is just something that needs to be ingested to keep on surviving. A dinner according to him was no sacred ritual like it seems to be in other houses. It was a 10 minutes affair, and if this time limit was exceeded it was a waste of time. If needed he could survive on meals consisting of fruits three times a day. This habit must stem from the fact that he lived alone for a year or two during his high school years since his father ( my grandfather) was required in Iran being the chief-engineer for the Iran-India oil pipeline project. So with his parents so far away, an elder brother in college and a younger brother, food seemed to be the least important thing in the days itinerary.

Now to explain how my father’s eating habits have affected my gastronomic experience. Being the head of the family and certainly my role-model and guide I tend to follow in his footsteps. One thing that was instilled in me since my formative years by keenly observing my father was that “food was only for nutrition.” This indirectly pointed to the fact that if the food article I was eating tasted good, it more or less meant that it was not nutritious. Fruits were an omni-present feature in all three meals of the day. And the fact that we are North-Indians our choice of healthy foods was abundant. Food had a monotonous tone to it. Lunch and dinner consisted of a bowl of pulses, two chappattis ( three if you were really hungry ), three big spoons of vegetables, and a bowl of home-made curd or yoghurt. Probably the most filling and nutritious meal that can ever be found on the surface of the earth. Not that there was no variety. In a single week we never had the same type of pulse twice. There was a different type vegetable dish everyday. Food was cooked in extra-virgin olive oil. Not more than one table-spoon of oil in a single dish. This kind of lifestyle was something you would find in a Army boot-camp. But it was followed religiously by our three member family for several years. There wasn’t anything I was missing either, since this was all I had ever know.

In my rambling memoirs I forget to mention about one-person who is the closest person to my heart. This person is undoubtedly my maternal grandmother, or in our Indianized terms my “Nani.” She lived in another city, in Bombay. A visit to her house during the vacations was the only thing that got me through 220 working days of school. Though now even my exceptional memory is failing me, I only have faint memories of her cooking, but one thing I distinctly remember is her “grilled chicken with white gravy”, something even God in all his glory must have not tasted. Though my Nani doesn’t cook much now-a-days, her food is something I will cherish in my memories forever. It was in these summer and winter vacations I got my experience in fine-dining. Regular dinners in the best hotels in the world, a sampling of my Nani’s cooking, and an infrequent visit to Candies, a high end fast-food joint was the extent of my culinary experience.

Looking back I can safely say that I had the best of both worlds. A strict, nutritious diet thanks to my father’s unintentional habits, and a rich experience during my vacations. Even today my affinity to fast food joints like Mcdonalds and KFC is limited to a Diet Coke and more recently the Coke Zero. I would like to end my article with a polite thanks to my family, especially my father and grandparents for instilling in me the habit of a balanced meal and the ability to appreciate good food.