Cooking with my mother
And a Ship of Theseus homage to the recipe
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I never realise1 how much work cooking is until I actually start cooking. And then it dawns on me that it’s so fucking hard and annoying, especially when it’s close to 40°C2, the humidity is at 89%, and there is sweat everywhere from my face to the back of my shirt to my thighs that have appeared to be glued together—by sweat. I end up cursing myself while making hummus. First, I tie a towel around my head and wrap it into a turban. Then I proceed to toast the sesame seeds lightly and take some rest while it cools. Half my energy is drained this way.
I come back to make the hummus. In a small mixer-grinder jar, add in cooked chickpeas, salt, as many cloves of garlic you desire, chickpea water, cumin and chilli powders, olive oil, and a generous squeeze of lemon before blending everything into a wonderfully beige puree. Baby food. The rule is to eat some while making it so you have to make more of it to compensate what you ate.
While I frantically rush around the tiny kitchen, my mother remarks, “you’re putting in too much effort for a meal” and laughs. This is how my mother views cooking anyway—way too much effort—and would be happier if we all just subsisted on meal replacements pills or something. Ok, maybe not, but in all the time that I’ve known her, my mother prefers to not be cooking. “I’d much rather do something else,” she says, “take a walk, play games on my phone, read, have a nap…” I don’t know if this is because my mother has cooked for us for 20+ years or the drudgery of a thousand (and counting) meals has taken a toll on her. I’ve asked her constantly if she hates cooking and she always replies, “I just couldn’t care less perhaps”.
I guess she finds it amusing that her daughter thrives on cooking as self-preservation.
To make dumplings from scratch, you need a lot of flour, tepid water, and salt for the dough. Some meat or vegetables, spices, and seasonings for the filling. Oil to pan fry and water to steam. Beyond that, it requires patience. Heat the water and mix it in the flour to form a dough. Knead the dough and place it to rest for an hour at least under a damp towel so it doesn’t dry out. Then get started on the filling: chopping up ginger, garlic, and tiny purple onion bulbs whose gossamer skins slide off smoothly on a chance encounter with the sharp blade of the knife. “Look, so thin and pretty,” I say, and hold it up for my mother who passes by. “Imagine a sari in this colour and material. Will be soft no?” Before I can reply, she walks off to play a game of connecting dots.
I love chopping up cabbage into tiny, tiny shreds, stacking the leaves on top of each other and folding them over like bookmarking a page over itself because I hate the idea of a separate bookmark. I’m fascinated by the way they crunch, belying the way they actually taste: sulphurous and vegetal, and rounding off with a faint sweetness. Then I move to the carrots, painstakingly chopping them up in halves and then thirds, wondering if I should grate them. Because I’m often smug when it comes to consulting recipes, I only realise very late that the easier option would be to pulse the carrots. Of course, if my mother was in the kitchen, she’d tell me to do that. So I reach out to her to check on this, and she confirms. Do you want me to do it?
Every time I call out to her to ask where she’s shifted the box containing the tofu suspended in water, my mother emerges with an impish smile on her face. I ask and she tells me she was watching this specific scene from a Tamil serial that aired in the 2000s. “I should’ve been reading actually,” she laughs. Then when I crumble the tofu, my mother asks if I’m making momos. I tell her they’re dumplings, and she says, “momo and dumpling, same only?” True. So I launch into a short history of the diffusion of dumplings, trying to remember what I read in Rachel Laudan’s Cuisine and Empire. That it was Pax Mongolica that shaped their geography; that most dumplings have a cover made out of wheat flour; that the filling is mostly meat; that pleats are preferred for sealing tight; but that the original dumpling came from China.
“Even kozhakattai?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Okay, I still think you’re doing a lot of work for dinner though.”
I’ve been working on this essay for a year now, simply because I’ve been considering what (anything too personal) to include and what to leave out. In that year, I’ve read and reread both Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart that made me cry so much! and Rebecca May Johnson’s exceptional Small Fires, prompting me to rewrite and replace parts of this essay with passages I’ve been attentive enough to note down on my phone, scraps of paper, five various notebooks, the back of a grocery store bill, and on my palm.
Does this mean I’ve created a Ship of Theseus-style thought experiment on this essay? I don’t remember what this essay started out as—unfortunately, I wasn’t as attentive in backing up the replaced parts, which means this essay stands out in form and not matter. The paradox got me thinking about recipes in the same way.
In Small Fires, Johnson writes, “my body is changed by the recipe… There are so many possibilities. Each time I encounter the same thing, the same ingredient, I find that it’s different again, again, different again, so the recipe is always a method for seeking.” I’ve made the same stir-fried tofu rice bowl recipe countless times now, maybe 50(!), maybe every week(?), and each time the ingredients have been the same and different, measurements not once followed precisely, onions and garlic not fried to perfection but sometimes burnt, brands of soy and vinegar that I do not remember purchasing, switching chilli-garlic with lime-lemongrass sauce… you get the gist. Last week, it was sharp and bright. Two nights ago, peanutty and sweet. The last flavour I can recall is from last month — just perfectly savoury. Each time I make the dish anew, I find that it remakes me instead.
There are so many possibilities.
A popular conclusion to the Ship of Theseus paradox is to accept that both ships—the one with all its parts replaced and the second one made with the discarded parts from the first—occupy the same space at the same time. I am reminded of something else now: my grandfather rebuilt parts of his original cycle (that he used for my school drops) with parts that he bought at a hardware shop, and gave the discarded parts to a mechanic who used it in another customer’s cycle. Both cycles existed in our neighbourhood for a while, both methods of navigation and seeking like variations of a recipe that can live in thoughts and texts, methods and minds.
I ask my mother about this: how has all of her sambars differed from one another? The dosais she made this week, hardly fermenting as opposed to a few months ago, bubbling over and making the kitchen smell like a sour paradise. Does she think while cooking? Does she set about making sambar differently or does it turn out that way irrespective of her approach? Naturally, I don’t get a reply for a while—my mother is far too immersed in her challenging game of joining dots across a screen. Eventually she replies, that the recipe is the same as it is different, the iteration is same and different, the moods different, the vegetables different, but that “you never know what the sambar will be like until you actually cook it that day”.
💌 SATURDAY, 10 FEBRUARY 💌
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Obviously, I do know that cooking is work, time, effort, patience, and privilege, but I forget about it as soon as I make something really lovely for myself and bask in the afterglow of the most wonderful meal ever, till I have to do it again.
I started this essay in May 2023 and revisited this only in Jan 2024, so the temperature recorded here is untouched.
What a lovely essay! Really enjoyed it
this was beautiful! love the dynamic you captured between you and your mother in this piece