Stewing in one's own Juices

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"....George said it was absurd to have only four potatoes in an Irish stew, so
we washed half-a-dozen or so more, and put them in without peeling.  We
also put in a cabbage and about half a peck of peas.  George stirred it
all up, and then he said that there seemed to be a lot of room to spare,
so we overhauled both the hampers, and picked out all the odds and ends
and the remnants, and added them to the stew.  There were half a pork pie
and a bit of cold boiled bacon left, and we put them in.  Then George
found half a tin of potted salmon, and he emptied that into the pot.

He said that was the advantage of Irish stew: you got rid of such a lot
of things. I fished out a couple of eggs that had got cracked, and put
those in.  George said they would thicken the gravy.

I forget the other ingredients, but I know nothing was wasted; and I
remember that, towards the end, Montmorency, who had evinced great
interest in the proceedings throughout, strolled away with an earnest and
thoughtful air, reappearing, a few minutes afterwards, with a dead
water-rat in his mouth, which he evidently wished to present as his
contribution to the dinner; whether in a sarcastic spirit, or with a
genuine desire to assist, I cannot say.

We had a discussion as to whether the rat should go in or not.  Harris
said that he thought it would be all right, mixed up with the other
things, and that every little helped; but George stood up for precedent.
He said he had never heard of water-rats in Irish stew, and he would
rather be on the safe side, and not try experiments..."

 ....From: "Three Men in a Boat" by Jerome K Jerome

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Row row row your boat
Drinking in the view
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
Life is but a stew!

While my son was working for his previous Bio-IT firm, he and a few of his colleagues had to travel a lot to New Jersey and stay there for stretches of a few weeks by rotation. So, their firm rented an apartment and equipped it with all kitchen gadgets and a steady stock of ingredients for cooking South Indian dishes. 

One evening when it was late for their Anglo-Saxon US gent, a friendly fatherly soul, to travel miles and go home, they invited him for dinner and stay at their apartment. And they promised to feed him a sumptuous dish called Sambar with rice. 'Sambar' must have become a popular name in NJ by now...there is a Sambar Lane there ;-). The visitor agreed and was keenly watching the proceedings of making the exotic Sambar from cutting various vegetables like potato, onion, ladyfingers and pouring them all in a vessel along with cooked dal and spices; and finally quipped:

 "Your Sambar is nothing but our Stew!"

I had a similar experience when I first entered the side-kitchen of Durga Puja in Bengal famous for its Khichuri. And discovered it was nothing but what my mom used to make on rainy days and called: "Pulagam".

So I guess, as in other things, there is nothing profoundly new in cooking as well, like Bible says it:

What has been will be again

What has been done will be done again

There is nothing new under the sun

I can never forget the morning I ran to my Guide SDM's Qrs and showed him how I did what looked like an intractable integral. After I explained to him that I supply this extra term, integrate it, and subtract it out, he smiled and said:

"What you have invented is known as Integration by Parts"

When my mom was first told about the Pressure Cooker with its multilevel compartments, she smiled and said she saw a better version of it with her father who used to have a device that he took to his camps in the Nallamala Forests that I spoke of yesterday. She said it was called: "Rukmini Cooker" (Bless her soul!) by learned people and corrupted as "Ikmic Cooker" by their servants. It had three vertical compartments much like later day Meals Carrier (triple-decker):

 

http://www.brightexport.com/food-carrier-container.html

The big difference is that it had a bottom compartment that carried charcoal. So, people going on business with long working hours like the elite Railway Guards used to ask their wives to fill up the first compartment (railway jargon again) with rice and water, the second one with lentils and water and spices and the uppermost one with cut vegetables and gravy stuff. And a couple of hours before they were likely to feel hungry, all they had to do was to light the charcoal and forget it.

'Rukmini' did the rest.

Nowadays my son and I are managing the household and we have a neat sharing of duties: he is the chef and I the cleaner. And I find, compared to my eons of cooking, things are utterly simplified. Everything from packaged gravy, masala, pickles, paneer (so-called cheese pieces) are available in the Hyderabadi Supermarkets.

All he has to do is mix and heat them and reheat in the micro-oven when hungry.

And we have a Pressure Cooker which is used for cooking rice and dal and all we are supposed to do is to mount the cooker on the appropriate gas burner, light the thing, wait for the steam to hiss out, push the top in, wait for three whistles and shut off the stove. Wait for fifteen minutes and dismount the Cooker and open it chanting a secret mantra which our D-i-L forgot to tell us...ladies are like that!

The result is that we have an automatic ready-to-eat khichri, not in the vessels which look empty, but at the very bottom of the Cooker floating in the water down below which just needs to be drained out...

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