Author Aparna Jain recounts her childhood memories and how Punjabi, Sindhi, Bengali and American cuisine became part of their pahadi food
One day, you will have no choice but to get into a kitchen and cook.’ like many of my generations, I heard these words practically every week from my mother as she never tired of emphasising the need for a woman to learn to cook. At the age of 12 and in my loudest phase of anti-gender stereotyping (at least when it came to chores I was told ‘women should do’), I would tell her emphatically, ‘I will never enter a kitchen. And I will get married to someone who can cook!’ And I would walk off in a teenage huff.
Needless to say, her prophecy came true! On my own, first abroad and then shuttling between cities across India, I began to learn how to cook (my stint in hotel management didn’t teach me kitchen skills, only managerial ones.) But even then I resisted the roti- daal sabzi routine (I still don’t know how to make a roti) and, instead, began to experiment with non-Indian cuisine. And that started me off on this foodie trip...
Over the years I honed my cooking skills. I also bought lots of recipe books although I use them less for cooking and more to look at the pretty pictures! Indian Accent, the restaurant in Delhi, helped me get over my naïve disdain for the mostly inartistic yet incredibly delicious Indian food. I was inspired. And I kept experimenting.
Our family is spread all over the country, but we Soods are originally Himachalis from a little village in Kangra called Deragopipur. I have to admit most of us haven’t even been there, and the furthest most have gone is Shimla.
My grandparents moved to Delhi several decades ago. My maternal grandfather and grandmother had 10 children. My mother recounts this story of how every sister shared the task of making and serving the milk that all siblings had every night. Each child used to drink his or her milk differently: with 1 tsp sugar, with Ovaltine, with 2 tsp sugar, plain, with 1½ tsp sugar, with Bournvita and so on. It used to drive the sisters batty and, just to rile them up more, the brothers would keep changing their mind and concoctions.
My grandfather was a magnificent man, with incredible foresight and wisdom. My memories of him are steeped in just two magical words — churan and aampapad, which he used to keep locked away in his bedroom cupboard and give to us as treats when we visited. My grandmother was a petite yet formidable lady. (Bringing up 10 kids is no easy task). She had these lovely narangi trees in the house, and as kids of five and six, my cousin Aditya and I used to raid them, sneak off into a corner and eat the narangis (both of us love khatta). My grandmother used to get home in the evening, look at the trees, yell for our mothers (her daughter, my mother, and Aditya’s mum, Peggy) and take off in her Pahaadi-Punjabi on how badly behaved we were. We learnt much later that, knowing us, she would count the precious narangis on her tree before leaving.
My grandfather had a very simple theory for his children. Marry whom you want (about 90 per cent of the marriages in the family are love marriages) and when you do, move out and set up your own home. (I mentioned he had great insight and vision.) So, luckily, my maasis and maamus got married to incredible people from different parts of the country, and the globe. We have Punjabi, Sindhi, American and Bengali aunts and uncles and obviously they all brought their unique food repertoire with them. This trend continued to the next generation and we added Kashmiri, Malayali, Mangalorean, Assamese, more American etc. Slowly and steadily each house acquired its own speciality aside from pahaadi khaana, which was the original staple diet at Connaught Place.
courtesy The Sood Family Cookbook, Harper Collins