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I recall vividly the first Saturday Night in 1955 when mom tried making upma out of our Bombai Rava (wheat suji). She had heard of the simple recipe from her Nellore sister and thought it was a breeze.
She uplifted her kadai on to the charcoal fire and waited till it got hot. And poured a couple of teaspoonfuls of groundnut oil. And threw in a couple of red hot chillies. And waited till the mixture started fuming. And poured one tumbler of suji into the kadai and started ladling it to and fro.
It was then that she paused. She forgot precisely how many tumblers of water should be poured...2 or 3? for each tumbler of suji. And decided the more the merrier from her uppindi experience. And poured 3 of water. And added a couple of pinches of salt. And waited and waited and stirred like we did in our copper voltmeter experiments.
By and by she discovered that her ladle was getting stuck and refused to move easily. And she stopped ladling. And found that the upma was almost ready but it turned into a solid ball of gooey mass. And she took down the kadai and allowed it to cool. And the mass rolled out into her waiting dish soft and handsome like the pudding in our Faculty Hostel made by the western style expert cook, Naik.
She then found to her relief that her upma didn't turn into a hard ball on cooling. She plucked out a chunk of it in a side plate and asked me to taste it. It was wonderful...the salt and chillies were just right. These ladies know their basic stuff. But yet her maiden upma stuck to the palate.
And she wasn't happy.
Talking of salt and chillies which decide the basic taste of any of our South Indian dishes, mom told me that it was all in the head and not in the hands. For, there is this idiom in our Telugu called: "Hasta Vasi" which means, roughly, a golden hand. Apparently some renowned cooks have it...whatever passes through their hands tastes heavenly although the same ditto recipe doesn't work out as magically in others' hands.
So too our doctors: those who have this Hasta Vasi cure their patients like none else, while the same mixtures given by another doctor by hearsay don't work the same way.
But mom said that it is not really "Hasta Vasi" but "Buddhi Vasi". How much salt and how many chillies of what size and shape and make get decided by the brain not the hands. It is all in the proportions.
On her next trip to Nellore mom got her clarification...it ought to be 1:2 and not 1:3. By then she knew that these recipes don't work precisely as textbook prescriptions.
And the next Saturday Night she dismissed tumblers altogether and added water by and by instead of at one go...and kept a strict watch on the ongoing developments unlike the working ladies in Hyderabad who have no time to stay back and invigilate. They dump the things on their stoves and leave the kitchen for their makeup and return after talking on their cell phones to their heart's content and run to the kitchen, falling down here and knocking chairs there, only to find that their organic chemistry lesson were right...all our food is basically carbon.
And mom discovered on her own that adding a spoonful of pure ghee just before the upma is ready works wonders. Not only the taste got improved but its looks and feel...ghee acted like a churner. The upma was no longer one solid mass but became appetizingly fluffy. Mom might have learned this ghee-trick with her uppindi.
Nothing like experience.
But there was one catch with our upma...it didn't keep in the hot weather of Muthukur where there were no fridges.
As Jerome K Jerome wrote:
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...Harris proposed that we should have scrambled eggs for breakfast. He
said he would cook them. It seemed, from his account, that he was very
good at doing scrambled eggs. He often did them at picnics and when out
on yachts. He was quite famous for them. People who had once tasted his
scrambled eggs, so we gathered from his conversation, never cared for any
other food afterwards, but pined away and died when they could not get
them.
It made our mouths water to hear him talk about the things, and we handed
him out the stove and the frying-pan and all the eggs that had not
smashed and gone over everything in the hamper, and begged him to begin.
He had some trouble in breaking the eggs – or rather not so much trouble
in breaking them exactly as in getting them into the frying-pan when
broken, and keeping them off his trousers, and preventing them from
running up his sleeve; but he fixed some half-a-dozen into the pan at
last, and then squatted down by the side of the stove and chivied them
about with a fork.
It seemed harassing work, so far as George and I could judge. Whenever
he went near the pan he burned himself, and then he would drop everything
and dance round the stove, flicking his fingers about and cursing the
things. Indeed, every time George and I looked round at him he was sure
to be performing this feat. We thought at first that it was a necessary
part of the culinary arrangements.
We did not know what scrambled eggs were, and we fancied that it must be
some Red Indian or Sandwich Islands sort of dish that required dances and
incantations for its proper cooking. Montmorency went and put his nose
over it once, and the fat spluttered up and scalded him, and then he
began dancing and cursing. Altogether it was one of the most interesting
and exciting operations I have ever witnessed. George and I were both
quite sorry when it was over.
The result was not altogether the success that Harris had anticipated.
There seemed so little to show for the business. Six eggs had gone into
the frying-pan, and all that came out was a teaspoonful of burnt and
unappetizing looking mess.
Harris said it was the fault of the frying-pan, and thought it would have
gone better if we had had a fish-kettle and a gas-stove; and we decided
not to attempt the dish again until we had those aids to housekeeping by
us...
...Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K Jerome
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I recall vividly the first Saturday Night in 1955 when mom tried making upma out of our Bombai Rava (wheat suji). She had heard of the simple recipe from her Nellore sister and thought it was a breeze.
She uplifted her kadai on to the charcoal fire and waited till it got hot. And poured a couple of teaspoonfuls of groundnut oil. And threw in a couple of red hot chillies. And waited till the mixture started fuming. And poured one tumbler of suji into the kadai and started ladling it to and fro.
It was then that she paused. She forgot precisely how many tumblers of water should be poured...2 or 3? for each tumbler of suji. And decided the more the merrier from her uppindi experience. And poured 3 of water. And added a couple of pinches of salt. And waited and waited and stirred like we did in our copper voltmeter experiments.
By and by she discovered that her ladle was getting stuck and refused to move easily. And she stopped ladling. And found that the upma was almost ready but it turned into a solid ball of gooey mass. And she took down the kadai and allowed it to cool. And the mass rolled out into her waiting dish soft and handsome like the pudding in our Faculty Hostel made by the western style expert cook, Naik.
She then found to her relief that her upma didn't turn into a hard ball on cooling. She plucked out a chunk of it in a side plate and asked me to taste it. It was wonderful...the salt and chillies were just right. These ladies know their basic stuff. But yet her maiden upma stuck to the palate.
And she wasn't happy.
Talking of salt and chillies which decide the basic taste of any of our South Indian dishes, mom told me that it was all in the head and not in the hands. For, there is this idiom in our Telugu called: "Hasta Vasi" which means, roughly, a golden hand. Apparently some renowned cooks have it...whatever passes through their hands tastes heavenly although the same ditto recipe doesn't work out as magically in others' hands.
So too our doctors: those who have this Hasta Vasi cure their patients like none else, while the same mixtures given by another doctor by hearsay don't work the same way.
But mom said that it is not really "Hasta Vasi" but "Buddhi Vasi". How much salt and how many chillies of what size and shape and make get decided by the brain not the hands. It is all in the proportions.
On her next trip to Nellore mom got her clarification...it ought to be 1:2 and not 1:3. By then she knew that these recipes don't work precisely as textbook prescriptions.
And the next Saturday Night she dismissed tumblers altogether and added water by and by instead of at one go...and kept a strict watch on the ongoing developments unlike the working ladies in Hyderabad who have no time to stay back and invigilate. They dump the things on their stoves and leave the kitchen for their makeup and return after talking on their cell phones to their heart's content and run to the kitchen, falling down here and knocking chairs there, only to find that their organic chemistry lesson were right...all our food is basically carbon.
And mom discovered on her own that adding a spoonful of pure ghee just before the upma is ready works wonders. Not only the taste got improved but its looks and feel...ghee acted like a churner. The upma was no longer one solid mass but became appetizingly fluffy. Mom might have learned this ghee-trick with her uppindi.
Nothing like experience.
But there was one catch with our upma...it didn't keep in the hot weather of Muthukur where there were no fridges.
As Jerome K Jerome wrote:
"But there, everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses"
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