I love cookery shows. I watch them in several languages, mostly to learn the authentic ways in which the dishes of a particular region are cooked. While I am not completely against tweaking a regional recipe to suit local palates, I want to learn how they are authentically made in that region. That said, I love cookery shows for their presentation. The shiny new pots and pans, the neatly arrayed little cups and containers of all the ingredients, chopped and measured, ready to be tipped into the cooking vessel at the appropriate times. It is for the same reason that I like cookery blogs too. Look at the beautiful picture below of the ingredients of a recipe from my friend Suman’s blog Everyday Veg Cooking! I would love to cook that way too, but who would sit and wash all those little cups after cooking, eh?  

That said, a measure of organisation is good not just while cooking, but also in the kitchen in general. Keeping vessels, bottles and jars of ingredients in a particular order saves time, even while making the kitchen look neat and well-maintained, making it a pleasure to work in. I have a particular order in which I store various ingredients, grouping them to make it easy to access — the tadka ingredients in one group, the dry masalas in another, and so on, that makes it easy to find stuff while cooking. My kitchen has always been small and compact, and I can find all the ingredients within arm’s length.

I love cooking, not so much for eating, but for the sheer pleasure of creating something from the raw ingredients. I don’t like to repeat dishes and try to make a variety of them throughout the week, watching the family enjoy them. And of course, I also see to it that I have all ingredients needed for a dish handy before lighting the stove! I learnt the latter lesson the hard way — when I made my near disastrous kitchen debut at the age of 14.

But before narrating that (mis)adventure, I must tell you about the stoves that most families used in those days, before the LPG gas stoves became popular. There were two types of stoves, one that burned with wicks and the other the ‘pressure stove’. The wick stove was silent but the heat was less than the latter. One of the chores we did periodically was to pull the wicks, trim them and fit the contraption back, to ensure a steady blue flame. We also had coal-fired chulhas and kumuttis, (Read all about them in this post), but these were used more and more sparingly, with the wick stove and ‘pressure’ stoves taking the major load of cooking.

Coming to the ‘pressure stove’, it was the trusted Primus stove. This came in two types, one which was comparatively less noisy with a round burner akin to the gas burners of today, and the other with better heat but with uneven flames and noise akin to a roar of sorts, which was very annoying. Thankfully, we had the ‘silent’ one. Now, lighting the Primus stove was a complicated affair. The nozzle and burner were first heated with a little bit of kerosene or denatured spirit poured into a concave cup-like contraption, and then a push-pump was worked to send up a fine spray of kerosene to make the burner start working giving out a blue flame with a hissing sound. One could reduce the pressure and thereby the flame by turning a key, but if switched off, it would be a pain to light it again, not to speak of the wastage of kerosene, which incidentally was rationed.

And now for the story:

Having convinced my mother that I could make sheera (suji ka halwa) all by myself (hadn’t I watched her do it so many times?), I told her, ‘You just relax, and I will bring you a bowl of hot sheera in no time!’

She smiled and asked, ‘Do you have everything you need?’

‘Sure! Now you go and relax!’ I replied breezily.

I lit the stove and watched it burn with admiration – for my expertise! Only then I realised that I didn’t have anything to put on it! Switching it off was not option, as mentioned above. What could I put on it, then? Ah, water! I put a vessel with water to boil on it and began looking for the kadhai and the ingredients for the sheera.

Mother’s kitchen was perfectly organised, and I didn’t have to search for anything, but which of the four kadhais to use? By the time I decided upon one the water had begun boiling. I still had to get the rawa and in my hurry I spilled some, well actually lots of it. Some mess was ok for a novice, right? I tried to hum to still my nerves as I roasted the rawa. And then suddenly I remembered the cardamom and cashew. Abandoning the roasting, I ran to look for them.

‘The rawa is burning!’ Mother called from the other room. How could she smell it from so far and I couldn’t? I ran back to the stove but magically the kadhai had been replaced with another one with fresh rawa!

‘Roast it, without pause,’ she said. I didn’t take my eye off the rawa this time and so didn’t see how things appeared magically near my right hand – the small tadka pan for frying cashews, the ghee, the cardamom and, voila! The sheera was ready!

Mother was sitting in the other room with a magazine when I took a bowl of the sheera for her, as if she had never moved from there! Was it really a genie then in the kitchen? And the sweetheart that she was, she told the rest of the family how I had done it all by myself!

Needless to say, that was the first and last time that I ever cooked without first keeping everything ready at hand. And I leave the lighting of the stove till the last, even when it is the gas stove that can be switched on and off easily! After all, I can’t count on a genie every time, can I?

Images: Homepage: https://www.pinterest.com/ This page: https://everydayvegcooking.com/