Lost Words and Food

Loved this long essay on Urdu, India and more. The author's beautiful prose made me want to read some of her other writing including this one about Dalit food and its omission from India cuisine. Deepak cites some creative cooking as in these passages:

“We couldn’t afford oil, so we would grind peanuts and use them to cook,” says Shahu Patole, the author of  Anna He Apoornabrahma, a book that chronicles the food cultures of the Mang and Mahar communities in Marathwada from 1950 to 1972. “I still do this.”

Shahu writes about the keen inventiveness of his community: Bee larvae plucked from walls, and faashi, the epiglottis of the goat—both delicacies. A dish made from the dill easily foraged in the village was common, as were onions toasted on an open grill, and chutneys made from fat chilies pounded into a fiery slush with salt.

Given that both sides of my family were refugees to India at the time of partition, this notion of creativity and thrift aimed at using every single bit of a vegetable or fish is not at all unusual to me. For families like ours, it had more to do with poverty and less with class or caste. We all learned to adapt to our new circumstances irrespective of what we had once been. 

Part of that process was learning to make a meal out of the entrails of a big fish and a vegetarian dish made just out of watermelon rind. By the time I came of age, the families had gained their footing in India and could afford to eat well. However, we learned to love the food that had sustained us in hard-times, and they became  delicacies a few generations out.