In her recent book, Rushina Munshaw shares why she sprinkles salt in food with her left hand and discards sprigs with flowers on them when she cleans coriander
Nobody is born cooking; I certainly wasn’t. And if you consider a week’s worth of meals from my kitchen you will be hard put to find any pattern; Monday could be a simple Sindhi curry with rice, Tuesday rice paper rolls and glass noodle salad, Wednesday could be homemade garlic pasta, Thursday might be my signature dumpling soup and Friday could be rajma chawal and raita. There is no method to this madness — meals from my kitchen happen as a result of what is available in season, dishes that have passed the family test but mostly owing to my whims. And one day I found myself wondering, where did these whims come fromIJ What made me the cook I amIJ
As I mused to myself, I realised that I have a food memory associated with every event and every person in my life! And that this activity I love so much — that I spend more than half my waking hours indulging in — is a result of my idiosyncratic personal history.
India is ancient, with a culture that is centuries old. But very little of it is documented, especially when it comes to our cuisine. What is documented is the equivalent of a pinch of salt compared to what is available. And all the rest is a living legacy handed down orally from one generation of women to the next. Even today in most Indian families, women and cooking are inextricably linked.
Somewhere in our childhood, we women naturally shoulder our mothers’ responsibilities, watching, helping in the kitchen and imbibing their culinary knowledge. Eventually becoming food providers of our own families. The most significant influence on my cooking then, has to be from the women in my life. The roots of my cooking are an inheritance from them, a culinary legacy. My earliest memories are of their voices, telling me things about food. In spite of never really entering the kitchen as a young girl, somehow their kitchen secrets filtered down to me and, when required, came to the fore to become the heart of my cooking. And in this also lies the evolution of home cooking. The quintessentially Indian inheritance of parents from the different culinary heritages is something many of us will identify with. And the blending of those cultures in the cooks of the following generations. The ethos of my cuisine is rooted in the culinary influences of my grandmothers’ kitchens, a blend of two dialects, Kutchi and Amdavadi of the regional cuisine of Gujarat. It is not even so much the things I learned that amaze me, but the way I learned them. It was completely subconscious!
Today if I discard sprigs with flowers on them when I clean coriander, it is because my grandmother did that in the belief that they caused rifts in the family.
If I always add salt to a dish with my left hand, it is because my sister-in-law once told me that adding salt with the left hand meant one would never over salt a dish. And if I never taste food to check if it is done, relying instead on my eyes and nose to guide me, it is because I saw all the women in my family do that. Tasting food was disrespecting those you were cooking for.
Somewhere in my early teens, I began to watch, help and imbibe. Cooking was a fun activity to indulge in when I wanted to play grown-up or impress the adults.
And when the time came to exchange the dolls’ houses and cooking sets of childhood for the real thing, it all began as an adventure as I experimented with being the decision-maker of my own kitchen.
And then I got really lucky in finding a career to legitimise what had become my obsession with food! As I wrote my first words as a food writer, the aspect of food and food ways and their ability to evolve through successive generations of women fascinated me; and no city offered richer pickings for this than the home kitchens of Mumbai. If the women in my life initially influenced me, it is this city that shaped the cook I am today. I would simply like to say that a cook is a condiment in themselves.