************************************************************************************************************
It was in Muthukur that Father's family grew by leaps and bounds resulting in one son and six daughters, period. The son was second born and so knew well the youthful times of his parents and their travails and triumphs.
But our food bill didn't grow that exponentially. The reason was that those days every village and its surrounding hamlets were self-sufficient in their food...they ate what they grew in abundance. The concept of export-import in food items was yet to be born. If you don't reap and eat what you sowed, the crops will rot and you will starve.
Our Nellore district was very fertile and was then the rice granary of the state. Indeed 'Nellore' comes from the Tamil word Nell meaning rice...Nellore meant rice-village. This led to a controversy, avoidable as usual, when the Madras Presidency was divided into what is now (for a couple more months) Andhra Pradesh which is Telugu-speaking and Tamilnadu which spoke Tamil. During the labor pains that ensued, the wily Tamilians claimed the bordering district of Nellore as theirs since its name itself was derived from Tamil. To this the clever Telugus retorted that they could as well claim the city of Madras which was once Chennapatnam (hence Chennai now) and was ruled by a Telugu king.
Wisdom donned late on both parties who quit their respective demands...like Dennis said, "I withdraw mine if you withdraw yours" when his mom asked, "What about a bath?" in response to his, "What about a cookie?"
So we ate tonnes of rice which was our staple food and could be had, within my knowledge, at 5 kg a rupee. And our staple tiffins like idlis and dosas were rice-based. We used little oil in our cooking. Most days our vegetables and dal were boiled in water and salt and then drained. To this was added what we called Popu (Tadka). This was prepared in an iron ladle in which a teaspoonful of oil was heated along with a little of urad dal, a bit jeera and a couple of broken red chillies and seeds of mustard. The mustard seeds acted like the litmus solution used as an indicator in our chemistry lab titrations...when the black mustard seeds were just breaking up with sounds like tup-tup-tup-tup each, it was time to remove the iron ladle from the chulha and add the scorched contents to the vegetable which then became a curry...or dal for that matter...and close the lid tight so the flavor didn't escape.
Deep fries were a delicacy reserved for monthly feasts. So our cooking oil consumption was minimal...none of us was fat. Indeed the glutton of the house, myself, was as slim as a dragonfly and as fast on its wings. I don't recall having ever walked as long as I was at school...I was always in a hurry and ran like a rabbit chased by a cat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByytN87-IfE
And our surrounding hamlets raised sumptuous vegetables, and village belles used to sell them calling and crying house to house with their produce in baskets on their padded heads. And haggled. They brought many varieties of leaves which were full of dirt and were dirt cheap...we had to clean them, wash them, cut them and boil them and temper them with Popu. And they retained their unique taste and we had a cheap food that was full of fiber and vitamins and minerals...no constant consti...
When the crop of a vegetable like brinjal or bhendi was over-abundant and would rot, the vending ladies would beg us to buy ten or fifteen kilos at a rupee. And we would cut them into tiny pieces and add salt and dry them in our abundant sunshine. They then lost all their water and became bone-dry and mom used to preserve these dehydrated vegetables in huge tins which would be brought down in the lean season and re-hydrated and cooked as good as new. Like this Mulliner who was perplexed when his fiancee demanded, as a token of knightly love, strawberries in the middle of winter:
My grannie on my Father's side, Mangavva, would have laughed at this silly task and produced them from her attic on the Coromandel Sunshine in a moment...there was no foodstuff that she didn't dehydrate and preserve for a whole year. And fifty years later, at KGP, I saw a brand called Hima dehydrated peas and bhindis packed in attractive sachets selling at a hundred times the price that Mangavva made them...after all Hima was a Hindustan Lever branded product lynching city-slickers who deserved it...and more.
And we had annual pickles.
I mean to say, Father didn't go broke at his growing food bill. But he did wince when confronted with the fast-escalating milk bill. Cows at Muthukur were as slim as I was and yielded as little milk. That was the reason we were brought up on steaming coffee...understand, Laxman?
Greenish coffee seeds were bought in the Nellore wholesale market and roasted at home till they turned just brown like me. And ground in a manual grinding machine attached like a vice to Father's table for the nonce. Rest was easy...put a couple of spoons of the coffee powder in a coffee filter overnight and go to bed and by morning mom had a rich and thick decoction that lasted the whole day till it turned sour in the evening, when it was served to the slurping servant maid ;)
The milk needed for the coffee was diluted like in the Kohlrausch experiment on infinite dilution.
Sugar was expensive and wisdom and pocket declared that the less the sugar in coffee the better it tasted. Indeed at KGP when we Southees used to visit the Nair Canteen in the 1960s, he would jump up and shout into his kitchen:
"Paanch cup coffee...kam cheeni!...kam cheeni!!
That of course explained why we never had any sugar complaint either...touch wood!
************************************************************************************************************
It was in Muthukur that Father's family grew by leaps and bounds resulting in one son and six daughters, period. The son was second born and so knew well the youthful times of his parents and their travails and triumphs.
But our food bill didn't grow that exponentially. The reason was that those days every village and its surrounding hamlets were self-sufficient in their food...they ate what they grew in abundance. The concept of export-import in food items was yet to be born. If you don't reap and eat what you sowed, the crops will rot and you will starve.
Our Nellore district was very fertile and was then the rice granary of the state. Indeed 'Nellore' comes from the Tamil word Nell meaning rice...Nellore meant rice-village. This led to a controversy, avoidable as usual, when the Madras Presidency was divided into what is now (for a couple more months) Andhra Pradesh which is Telugu-speaking and Tamilnadu which spoke Tamil. During the labor pains that ensued, the wily Tamilians claimed the bordering district of Nellore as theirs since its name itself was derived from Tamil. To this the clever Telugus retorted that they could as well claim the city of Madras which was once Chennapatnam (hence Chennai now) and was ruled by a Telugu king.
Wisdom donned late on both parties who quit their respective demands...like Dennis said, "I withdraw mine if you withdraw yours" when his mom asked, "What about a bath?" in response to his, "What about a cookie?"
So we ate tonnes of rice which was our staple food and could be had, within my knowledge, at 5 kg a rupee. And our staple tiffins like idlis and dosas were rice-based. We used little oil in our cooking. Most days our vegetables and dal were boiled in water and salt and then drained. To this was added what we called Popu (Tadka). This was prepared in an iron ladle in which a teaspoonful of oil was heated along with a little of urad dal, a bit jeera and a couple of broken red chillies and seeds of mustard. The mustard seeds acted like the litmus solution used as an indicator in our chemistry lab titrations...when the black mustard seeds were just breaking up with sounds like tup-tup-tup-tup each, it was time to remove the iron ladle from the chulha and add the scorched contents to the vegetable which then became a curry...or dal for that matter...and close the lid tight so the flavor didn't escape.
Deep fries were a delicacy reserved for monthly feasts. So our cooking oil consumption was minimal...none of us was fat. Indeed the glutton of the house, myself, was as slim as a dragonfly and as fast on its wings. I don't recall having ever walked as long as I was at school...I was always in a hurry and ran like a rabbit chased by a cat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByytN87-IfE
And our surrounding hamlets raised sumptuous vegetables, and village belles used to sell them calling and crying house to house with their produce in baskets on their padded heads. And haggled. They brought many varieties of leaves which were full of dirt and were dirt cheap...we had to clean them, wash them, cut them and boil them and temper them with Popu. And they retained their unique taste and we had a cheap food that was full of fiber and vitamins and minerals...no constant consti...
When the crop of a vegetable like brinjal or bhendi was over-abundant and would rot, the vending ladies would beg us to buy ten or fifteen kilos at a rupee. And we would cut them into tiny pieces and add salt and dry them in our abundant sunshine. They then lost all their water and became bone-dry and mom used to preserve these dehydrated vegetables in huge tins which would be brought down in the lean season and re-hydrated and cooked as good as new. Like this Mulliner who was perplexed when his fiancee demanded, as a token of knightly love, strawberries in the middle of winter:
...Clarice thought for a moment. Then she said:
'All my life I've wanted to eat strawberries in the middle of winter. Get me a basket of strawberries before the end of the month and we'll take up this matrimonial proposition of yours in the spirit of serious research.'
'Strawberries?' said Mervyn.
'Strawberries.'
Mervyn gulped a little.
'Strawberries?'
'Strawberries.'
'But, I say, dash it! Strawberries?'
'Strawberries,' said Clarice.
And we had annual pickles.
I mean to say, Father didn't go broke at his growing food bill. But he did wince when confronted with the fast-escalating milk bill. Cows at Muthukur were as slim as I was and yielded as little milk. That was the reason we were brought up on steaming coffee...understand, Laxman?
Greenish coffee seeds were bought in the Nellore wholesale market and roasted at home till they turned just brown like me. And ground in a manual grinding machine attached like a vice to Father's table for the nonce. Rest was easy...put a couple of spoons of the coffee powder in a coffee filter overnight and go to bed and by morning mom had a rich and thick decoction that lasted the whole day till it turned sour in the evening, when it was served to the slurping servant maid ;)
The milk needed for the coffee was diluted like in the Kohlrausch experiment on infinite dilution.
Sugar was expensive and wisdom and pocket declared that the less the sugar in coffee the better it tasted. Indeed at KGP when we Southees used to visit the Nair Canteen in the 1960s, he would jump up and shout into his kitchen:
"Paanch cup coffee...kam cheeni!...kam cheeni!!
That of course explained why we never had any sugar complaint either...touch wood!
************************************************************************************************************
1 comment:
O Tempora O Mores !
Post a Comment