Everyone agrees on the fact that ‘hunger is the best sauce’, yet in todays world eating has become a very prominent part of our existence : it is culture, sport and even adventure. Various studies indicate that social media has a lot of influence on your food choices, food blogging and travel has become a career choice itself. Food service and retailing alone was around 1.46 Trillion USD in 2014.

Human body was designed to accept or reject food before and even after it entered the system, however we have spent many hundred years to break our own genetic code ; some for survival & some for stupidity. In todays age we want the food to look good, it does not matter if it has low or zero nutritional value.

Our scriptures and ancestral knowledge always advised about food habits, the food culture system was primarily based on the nature of work we do. The genetic survival code was that human body was capable of accepting or rejecting food before we even eat it. Then TV anchors like Andrew Zimmern came up with popularized taglines like ‘If it looks good: eat it’. Nothing bad about it, I still enjoy his show more than anyone else.

The Soul Factor 

There is a fourth dimension to good food which is often rejected in the progressive world, some cultures call it as the “SoulFactor”. The part that makes the food bring most wellbeing & positive energy to the body. It is the part of a food that is not visible to the common eye, it is an invisible energy that makes you feel charged up & rejuvenated. It is not only the effort, love and care with which the food is prepared but also the dedication & submission with which it is served. In the Indian culture there are many names with which this is referred e.g Kaipunyam, Haath Ka Jaadu  etc.. It’s something that you can’t put a price tag on. 

If you are foodie & love to cook, sample or travel for food, this blog will ring a bell with you. Here is my tribute to the greatest cooks that inspired me to enjoy, cook & experiment with food.

Mom’s Kitchen 

This is the beginning & final destination of a true foodie. Most food connoisseurs would have their own mom as the greatest cook they know of. It is that culture, nourishment & ambiance that got them to understand the complex combination of flavors.

In the 80’s cooking was mostly a mission critical task, the ingredients were scarce and house is running on a tight budget, the distribution of daily food could be considered into these three parts

1. The nutritional, tasty & limited stock – usually for the children ‘small to big’ in that order.
2. The carbs & big plate – usually for the breadwinner ‘the dad’
3. Rest of Everything – ‘for the cook herself’

For over 20 years I have seen my mother manage resource in a perfect way so that everyone gets to enjoy a certain aspect of everything available ; with absolutely zero wastage. Indian culture has an amazing way to recycle leftover food, rice becomes fryums, vegetables become pickle, bread becomes sweet & roti becomes something better. In my childhood experience, every day there was something on the table that was worth looking forward to, combine that with a physically active day & the food was amazing. All special menu like poori, paratha or sweets was like a once a month item. We would look forward to festivals when sweets would be stocked, I would see my mom plan the menu & budget ahead for special days like Onam, Vishu etc. Our life was simple eat, play & repeat. On those warm summer days there would be a kulfi seller who would bring the treat in an earthen pot, the price of that would be 25paisa to 75paisa based on the size. The peddler would ring a bell , we used to run to him with our coins and get that on a fresh Macaranga plant leaf. Most of the time, the mom would never even get a taste of it.

Imagine a cook who has accepted the fact that at the end of the day she is going to manage with leftover food. If they have to be exuberant, they have to be in a certain state of existence.  Mother is a true embodiment of sacrifice, in every small or big way a successful family is a resultant effect of amount of sacrifice and troubles that she has dealt with. 

Mom’s Kitchen Phase II

Fast forward to the millennia, I wish I had to never leave home for a job but then there is a certain advantage of being a son who is working far away from home. A few days of vacation and you receive a homecoming welcome of a prince who was out for war ;saving the world. An excessive showering of everything I ever wanted ; food, TV and undivided attention.

At home the breakfast will be set with the delicacies prepared in my own way, idly topped with a dash of curry leaves, ginger & green chilly.  Spicy chutney that was instantly prepared & hot tea. Every other dish was special, the vegetable & fish vendors were on high alert as they were instructed to bring the best stuff home.  I have heard dad point out that food is always very special when the kids come home. Fast forward to future, now as a grandma she has moved her attention to the younger ones.

Mom is a master-chef that has no expectations , I remember she would prepare all sorts of special dish and bring it to me to try. I would review her cooking to such annoyingly bad levels and still she would not get disappointed or angry. She knew that discontent is the first step in making progress.

Sush Aunty

Living in an ordnance factory quarters has its own advantage of being part of a diverse social setting. It was a complex multi cultural arrangement. I had a very few good friends in my childhood ,yet my parents used to think that in itself was excessive. However, they had some designated safe homes where I was allowed to visit more often than others. 

Sush aunty was a motherly figure for me, I used to go there because on any given day she would simply appreciate for any trifle things I did. While at home, I was constantly taunted of my academic success, she would simply declare me as the best. Not only did she appreciate, she used to scold her own son for not doing the same. It was double joy for me, watching your best friend being washed, wringed and hung dry while you get to be praised in comparison is awfully joyful. 

That was my place to be if I was ever disappointed or wanted to stay away from home. When there was some special dish in the house, somehow I would wander and be there in time. I will never forget the taste of her dry coconut chutney with appam, sardines fry , Aviyal or kanji-chammandi. She used to make this instant spicy chutney, the thought of which still leaves me salivating.

She is one person whom I could trust hands down with any food. She had some kind of magic to make any boring food taste extremely good. The ordnance estate quarters was a lush green living space with lot of fruit bearing trees, each house had at least one kind of mango tree.
Our gang knew the house, the tree and mango variety. The tree in her backyard was Kallanai or a similar breed that has the lowest citrus level and somewhat sweet tasting even in its raw form. The small baby mangoes were easy target for kids like us who were going around looking for a mid-day snack. She used to hand crush a raw mango with a green chilly ,some rock salt served on a plate and the taste of which was mind bogglingly different. I have tried the same many times & I have never been able to replicate the flavor of it. She taught me that one can work wonders with even 3 simple ingredients, the fourth being an ardent desire to serve it with utmost dedication & devoid of any expectation.

She never used any complex ingredients or long process, it was fast, it was tasty and it was gone before you know it. She always had some quick fix food that was guaranteed with a unique taste – it did not matter if it looked good or not.

Santosh uncle 

He was my neighbor and a very close family friend. I used to see him as a perfect example of how a family budget should be managed, his accounting was precise to the point that he could exactly calculate the net cost of his expenses to a daily level. He was also pretty good at analyzing his weak & strong areas in budget to improve. Yet he was not stingy, instead he was abundantly joyful & humorous. He taught me that it’s not the money that you need to manage, it is one’s expectations & desire which can make the money look a lot less than what it is.

Even with his tight budget there was one day in a month where he would cook, that was a special day when he would invite one of his friends & family.  During those days there were not many family dine-in restaurants, so it was customary to be invited over to another family for a get together. 

So the day when uncle used to cook was a special day for the kids, he would cook one non-vegetarian dish. He had a special prepping-up process that involved in carefully chopping, arranging and lining up his ingredients.

He used to infuse flavors so carefully into the dish , he had the right timing of when to add what. Using the right amount of curry leaves & spices for tempering, sizing the vegetables and  meat to absorb the curry. It was surprising that everyone would ask him the recipe, he would tell them & no one would be able to cook the same taste. The secret was in his timing , chopping & the vessel he used. There is a certain ratio for everything, his non-veg recipe was a super-hit all the time. It appears that he had some magic ratio of size of meat piece to everything else kind of recipe. He could simply do the calculations by looking at the quantity. There was some science in his cooking, beyond that he used to time this right. There is a duration within which the fresh cooked food tastes best, so serving it hot was his specialty. Indian food is not Stir-Fry, it takes an awful lot of time to get something right. Having your guests entertained into a healthy humorous conversation was his second best quality.

One incident that I still remember is, we used to catch the early morning bus & goto a big fish market in Trichy. It was the place to get some fresh catch that would arrive every day from the coast, once it so happened that we brought 10 kilos of a fish in a steal deal , unfortunately it was completely tasteless and we had mistook it for some other fish. When we came home, we had to face the music from people who knew fish. Next few weeks, the challenge was to make this thing taste good, it was so funny that we were at the peak of innovation during that time.

There was always something special to look forward to in his cooking, it was probably that he considered cooking as an art & every time he took it to a new level. I consider him as a disciplined cook who always comes up with simple innovative ways to make boring food taste good, specifically the part that a cook needs to be in an exuberant mindset.

Rani Chechy & Co

A few years later I took on an assignment to become a so called ‘non-resident alien’ in US of the A. Leaving all the good food, friends and tasty restaurants in Chennai & Hyderabad. Even though I had some sense of cooking, I was here to work & it is not easy to put forth a lavish spread when you are here alone. The vegetable and Indian grocery tasted so aftermarket compared to home, there is no energy left towards the end of the day and all it calls for is to put something in the stomach. We were 3 bachelors and still used to cook, some days in good mood and other days furious at each other.

I had made a good friend at work who would invite me for lunch or dinner , during those days the only break was to visit him and family. I still call him them today as ‘Mash & Chechy’ , they were adventurous about food and I would join them monthly once or twice to try out something new. I did not have a car and so that was mostly an outing that I used to wait for.

Those days there was no yelp or food rating system, we explored based on word of mouth or TV ads.  Our most common place was Foodruckers or TGIF in Parsippany where we would finish off 1/2lb burger , a dozen wings and quesadillas . Since there were not many restaurants and this was getting heavy on pocket, we eventually started to meet for homely meals.

Once or twice a month we will meet to have a special lunch or dinner, it was a simple menu but I always used to feel at home. They were extremely loving & caring hosts, the menu was no longer important as the experience was more rewarding. Be it the payar thoran, goorka fry or the chicken/fish curry, there was always a very special native touch to it, so much so that I used to be looking forward for the invites. If there was some special menu at home, she was considerate to send me a small box of it. Life was starting to make some sense again 🙂

It is for the taste that I was somehow able to convince Chechy to provide a self funded mid-day meal program. We worked out a simple calculation & would get a box of lunch on weekdays , since we were carpooling it was easy to exchange the boxes. The food was amazing, the menu that I used to see once a week or two was now available for us every day. She was so honest about the process that she used to send us fresh food, while mash would get food from previous day dinner leftovers. I have my reasons to believe that it was her integrity & sincerity and not a punishment for Mash, I never felt bad for him either way :). She would ask for feedback about the food with genuine concern, I would be outright honest about it. I am not sure if my feedbacks were hurtful, but I was & still am very blunt about giving feedback about food. 

The best part was that my roomies were also getting the same food without doing much , they were not foodies so this setup did not last long. I wish we had spent some time scaling this up, we could have been the GrubHub of today. 

Eventually the mid-day meal was cancelled, I still used to get some portion in lunch and our fallback was to continue the restaurant hunting. In about a year’s time we had covered a lot of places around 50 mile radius.
To enjoy a good meal, you need the right company of like minded people who can create a joyful dining experience. Our menu choices were same, we had good teamwork while ordering food and we never wasted anything. We still meet and until today, I know that if she is cooking it would be certainly something that reminds me of home.

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There are many more who I would want to recall, the list would be long .The intention of writing this is to leave a message to my kids that world will always move to more commercial approach to everything, there needs to be equal importance to quality of food in terms of nutritional value. Adding a bit of sharp taste can make anything edible, it is only cheating your sensory experience. What goes inside eventually will become a part of you, one needs to choose wisely.
A decade ago just a simple smell test could let you decide on the quality of the food, now the multi million dollar enterprises have changed the game. From peach flavored strawberries to lab grown meat a.k.a edible tissue we have come a long way – of course in the wrong direction.

The multi trillion $ food industry is doing its best to attract, addict & abuse the sensory experiences of eating. In the process of making an instagram friendly plate and a 5 star ambiance, the nutrition value of the food we eat has reduced to mere stomach filler.
In todays age one can get away with a $100K salary by simply being good with words & writing food reviews targeting restaurants and cuisines, the outcome of which is very much financial driven.The current industry standard of food menu is based on how it looks on social media and the sophisticated needs of the food connoisseur . We no longer touch our food, nor we have the ability to smell & judge its digestibility based on our genetic origins. Humans have forgot the fact that we have inherited our digestion capability from many multiple generations based on the geographical & cultural identities. What works in the western world, might be harmful to another person from a different culture. Our identity is in our DNA, it is wisdom and it is many generations of memory which we have to preserve.

Research on how social media shapes your food choice.

Food statistic

Tagged : Great Chefs / Great food / Soul factor / South India Cuisine