Eating Well - Part 2

 I was 35 when I first saw a photo of my maternal grandmother who had been dead for decades at that point. I began asking my mother questions about her mother and since she was just four at that time, she had just a fleeting recollection of her mother but there was one thing she would always recall. My mother would always mention the milagu kuzhambu her mother had made even as she was bleeding profusely before climbing into the waiting ambulance never to return home again. Ever since that recollection, each time  I make milagu kuzhambu I find myself thinking about that 27-year old Ramalakshmi who had contracted tetanus in a botched abortion and died a painful death leaving behind five young children. In some ways it is that invisible thread that holds us together. A thin sliver of molten brown pepper sauce that flows across generations to bind us in its common humanity. 

It is a small comfort to know that this woman from whom I have descended would have made this very dish just days before her death. That she too would have soaked some tamarind pods in warm water, heated sesame oil in a stone pot, toasted chana and urad dals in it before adding dried red chillies, curry leaves and the eponymous peppercorn and some asafoetida before emptying into a pestle and mortar where the mixture would have been pounded coarsely. The pot would have remained on the wood fire stove where she would have added some more oil, thrown mustard seeds, waited for them to pop before scooping out the ground paste and tossing them into the pot. She would have given it a quick stir and then added in the tamarind extract. She would have stirred the sauce briefly and covered it as it came to a boil. Using a piece of hand cloth, she would have removed the pot from the fire, added salt and possibly a thumb of jaggery to bring out the fiery pepperiness. 

In my mind I then imagine her wiping her sauce-stained hand on her saree - a gesture my mother remembered vividly given that at four years of age her mother's hands was what appeared to her at eye level - before wobbling into the ambulance unaware of the fate that awaited her. It is some consolation that I make this milagu kuzhambu as Ramalakshmi would have made it as her mother before her and her mother before that, and countless women before that for hundreds of years whose names are long forgotten. We are somehow united across time in this enduring act of feeding our families. 

Food is about history, it's about stories. It is about Ramalakshmi and Shyamala and Abhirami standing in our respective kitchens thinking about our grandmothers and our grandchildren and nourishing them with love as the main ingredient as only we can. To reduce it to mere nutrients is to ignore all the richness it stands for and that would be tragic.