Curfew Cuisine !!

Curfew cuisine:

Lockdown restrictions have made many discover, or rediscover, the joys of cooking

A cuisine is a style of cooking characterized by distinctive ingredients, techniques and dishes, and usually associated with a specific culture or geographic …The definition of cuisine is a certain cooking style or quality of cooking, or food from a certain region or country. A restaurant with excellent food is an example of a restaurant with excellent cuisine. Food that is considered to be “French food” is an example of French cuisine.A cuisine is specific set of cooking traditions and practices, often associated with a specific culture or region. Each cuisine involves food preparation in a particular style, of food and drink of particular types, to produce individually consumed items or distinct meals.

Curfew cuisine: Lockdown restrictions have made many discover, or rediscover, the joys of cooking.

When we lived in what was then Calcutta before we moved to Delhi, Bunny was an accomplished cook. But when we shifted to Delhi her job in advertising left her little or no time to spend in the kitchen. With no live-in domestic help, we lived several years almost exclusively on home-delivery food, unhealthy as we both knew it was.

We eventually got someone to cook for us and stopped relying on take-away food, but Bunny still seldom ventured into the kitchen for lack of time. Then came the lockdown and, along with everyone else, Bunny had time to spare, and she spent it, in part, by rediscovering the pleasures of cooking.

Far from being a daily chore which must somehow be got through, cooking can be a creative joy, and there’s plenty of help on social media by way of step-by-step recipes and culinary tips to help make it so.

India has the world’s most varied and flavoursome food and thanks to Bunny we are making a Bharat darshan through our taste buds. We’ve been touring the country from Bengal’s chholar daal, which properly made must include chopped up coconut, to Punjab’s robust rajma-chawal, to Gujarat’s khaman dhoklas.

The other day, Bunny unearthed a recipe for handvo which I’d last tasted as a child in a faraway and long ago Kutch. A handvo is a sort of savoury cake stuffed with vegetables, which is steamed or baked. It came out just the way I remembered it, bringing my boyhood back to me.

There’s another thing that curfew cuisine taught me: When a meal is well planned, well made, and eaten with leisurely relish I eat less than I would if I gobbled down a hasty helping of junk food.

It’s like the difference between reading a well-written book which makes you linger over each sentence and a page-turner pot boiler which one skims through and tosses away. Like a good book, good food is a delight, not a distraction.

So if you don’t already belong to it, join the growing community of amateur home chefs who are happy to share their recipes with all those who want them.

Bon appetit.

DISCLAIMER: Views expressed above are the author’s own.

Excerpts from a Blog in the Editorial Times of India newspaper