Food is one of the most fascinating and interesting topics for a large majority of people, whether it is eating, cooking, or sharing the experiences. Which is why there are so many food shows on television and YouTube, and social media platforms. I hear that Instagram is inundated with food photography. I like eating my lunch watching some cookery show on YouTube. Apart from being appetising, they also give me new ideas for recipes, teach me new hacks and more.

So here I am, sharing some food tidbits, pun intended. It has some nostalgic tids and opinion bits.

It was the first solo meal I was cooking for my new family. As a new bride I should have been nervous especially since the house was teeming with relatives including grandparents, sundry aunts, uncles, and cousins, but I was not. Having been considered a very good cook in my parental home I was used to finger-licking appreciation for the dishes I turned out. It was therefore natural for me to be not only confident, but even smug about making a success of my endeavour.

The menu included lauki with dal, crispy raw banana roast, a tangy tomato chutney and creamy rice kheer. I was smiling as I tipped in a piece of jaggery into my piece-de-resistance – a tamarind-based onion dish, spiced with sambar powder and flavoured with curry leaves and sesame oil, sending out an inviting aroma to the members of my family. I could sense the anticipation building in the dining room.

To make a long story short, my family loved all my dishes and waxed eloquent, but my ‘masterpiece’ just fell as flat as a pancake! They had been clearly expecting something else — a variation of the dish that my MIL was famous for – her uber-tasty and flavourful vatha kuzhambu! My creation smelt like the traditional dish, and had justifiably raised their expectations, but the jaggery had clearly spoilt it all. I explained that we added a little jaggery to the dish in my home to enhance the flavours, with my face turning all shades of red!

Suffice to say that for years, my ‘jaggery kuzhambu’ as it came to be called, was part of family lore.

Over the next months as I learnt some, unlearnt some, and experimented with my own version of some dishes, I realised that there is no one method of making a dish, and that recipes vary from one region to another, one community to another and sometimes even from one family to another, if not from one family member to another! Read my post about ‘authentic’ foods.

And that brings me to some of the dishes that seem to have a global presence, albeit with different names. Let’s take pancakes, for instance. There are hundreds of its variations the world over. They are typically cooked with fat on a hot griddle and that makes our own dosas and its variants pancakes too. Chillas, dhirade, adai, appam, hundreds of varieties of dosas, pesarattu and even crepes are some examples. Some of them even look alike.

In fact, pancakes are believed to have been the first cereal-based food item cooked by prehistoric people!  I am sure we can find such references to the versatile flatbreads. Call them roti, pita, tortilla, or any one of the dozens of names they are known by, and one can find that they are all close cousins if not actually siblings of each other, even separated by oceans and continents! I have written a series on Food cousins.

It is due to the regional and cultural variations and innovation that we have so many varieties of the same dish. Thanks to the television cookery shows, sharing of new variations of dishes on social media and specialty restaurants and more, there is a lot of awareness of newer and lesser-known regional cuisine and its dishes.

Above all else, our palate craves variety and constantly seeks out newer tastes even while hankering after the familiar dishes. How else do we explain such fusion dishes like paneer achari pizza, Chinese bhel or chicken tikka masala dosa? Not to speak of using ingredients to impart a ‘healthy twist’ to traditional dishes. While it might add an interesting variety, the puritans bristle at the sacrilegious tweaks the original dishes have been given. With tweaking going all places, we have vegan ‘eggs’, garlic sauce without garlic and more. You have to just browse the net to find them all!

But hey, let us not forget the original version of any dish in our enthusiasm to tweak a traditional dish to come up with novel variations, for they are repositories of the culture and traditions of the people and place of their origin. As for me, while I am not a food Nazi, I still prefer a dish that sticks to the original recipe – well, more or less!

Before I end, let me tell you about my childhood fantasy of eating scones, thanks to Enid Blyton, and how it came true some years ago. I had absolutely no idea what they looked or tasted like. Decades later, I finally got to eat them with clotted cream on a trip to Scotland. It was also there that I came to know that the correct pronunciation of the word is supposed to rhyme with ‘gone’ and not with ‘prone’!

Ah, I seem to have meandered all over the globe starting with the first meal I had cooked in Mumbai! And all that rambling has made me hungry. Bring on the aloo parathas with some Chinese chutney and Mexican kachumber on the side, will you please?

Images: Chinese bhel- https://www.amazon.in, , Pizza: https://www.youtube.com/