Meditations on the comfort of childhood foods

“I feel feverish. A cup of piping hot Horlicks, that’s the only thing I want,” my brother said on the 'phone, from thousands of miles away, in north America, where he has been living for 30 years. Two days later he called again. “I’m better now, thanks to Horlicks.” Do American supermarkets stock this colonial delicacy, I asked. I almost saw his rueful smile as he confessed, “I found it in a dinky Indian store.”

I know that Horlicks is no febrifuge, it cannot bring your temperature down. Like Ovaltine of yesteryear fame, this maltish beverage was invented for British miners and soldiers. For several decades now, this nondescript drink has mysteriously come to signify health and energy to urban middle class India.

I also know that to my brother the Horlicks bottle is an reassuring image from childhood, of mother bringing a hot drink to your sickbed, or strengthening you with the same drink before an exam, making you believe that nothing bad could really happen while she was around. 

I have my own feel-good drink – the embarrassingly humble buttermilk. How can I forget the sight of Grandma going ssrk-ssrk with an ancient wooden churner dipped into a clay pot full of curd, never minding the of discomfort of a fidgety child leaning against her as she worked? She sang songs of little Krishna through the whole long drawn process, or told stories about his pranks, until the butter rose in all its glory.

But the best was yet to come. After scooping out the clouds of fat, Grandma got down to business. She crumbled curry leaves with rock salt and dropped them into the buttermilk. She then rubbed with her thumb a piece of asafoetida marinated in a ladleful of water, and dribbled the juice into the pot. A soupcon of sugar followed, some fresh lime juice, filaments of lemon rind, and finally, ginger crushed with a grinding stone. Seasoned with mustard seeds and topped with garden-fresh coriander leaves, this concoction spelt ambrosia. A gourmet visitor declared, “If Mahavishnu tastes your grandma’s chaach, he will abandon his ocean of milk and plunge into an ocean of buttermilk.”

As I surf masterchef programmes clogging the channels today, and listen to the professional and amateur cooks,I realize that their stylish jargon about tangy feel and teasing flavours hardly tells us anything new. When they discuss cuisine, they are not thinking of culinary delights but of comfort zones.

Our television serials abound in scenes centre-staging the dining table, never for a small, nuclear family – and not just with saas, sasur, pati, patni, devar and nanad either. Gangs of dada, chachi and phoophi mingle with mama, kaka and bhanji. And then making food becomes a rite of passage, a ritual of initiation. The test of a bahu is always about her ability to reproduce the taste of saasu ma’s malai kofta or matar paneer, to satisfy not the pati alone, but the whole clan. We know that every ma cannot be the desi avatar of a cordon bleu chef. So what the pati, and the clan want, is not perfect cooking, but the comfort of familiarity, the security of habit.

So, when my son comes home from London and asks in suave BBC accents for flame-roasted brinjal tohaiyal, a delicacy from my native Tanjavur-on-Cauvery, I know that what he really wants is a world where God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world, and ma will make all troubles go away.

The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician and journalist writing on the performing arts, cinema and literature