Chow: Wow and how!, writes Maria Goretti

I don’t know how my uncle and my dad learned to cook, but they were both pretty amazing in the kitchen. I remember that the sunny-side-up Uncle Casho made for breakfast was always just perfect, long before I figured what perfect really was. The white was perfectly cooked, the yolk was warm and runny, but thick.

We used to wait for my mom to go to visit her mom because, on that day, dad would cook. He would open this East-Indian cookbook and always try something from there. So, the food he made had a flavour that was always totally new. Also, most of the time, we were able to convince Daddy to get us usal and misal, local favourites.

In those days, we did not eat out too much. A trip to Linking Road, Bandra, was a treat, especially to eat chole-bhature.

I don’t think we kids had ever seen puris so big; and frankly, coming from a Catholic East-Indian family, our food was very different.

It mostly consisted of fish and meat, vegetables were few and the dal was really simple. It was only when I grew up and started going to my school friends Renita’s and Laxmi’s homes, that I got to realise how delicious vegetarian food could be. I am a sucker for well-prepared vegetables, but I somehow like vegetables to taste like they actually do, and not full of spices and masalas.

So, in that context, I still love the way my mom made vegetables. She and my dad would sometimes cook together, and there was this dish that they made, that they would call ‘chow’. We used to really look forward to that. It basically was spaghetti, carrots, peas, string beans, boiled eggs, ham, bacon, chicken sausages, butter, ketchup, salt and pepper. That’s actually all it was.

The vegetables were first par-boiled and flash-fried with flavour, while the chicken sausages and bacon were lightly sauteed. The spaghetti was boiled, drained, salted and then, butter was melted into it, ketchup added, and then all the vegetables and meat was tossed in and rolled into the buttered spaghetti. My mom would then serve it in a big tray, and we would devour it, steaming hot.

I think when I look back, there is no great recipe to this fairly simple dish — all the flavours of the meat and vegetables intact. So, what was it that made it the tastiest dish on earth for us? I think it was because it required all of us to pitch in. It’s not that my mum could not do this on her own. I think she did this mostly on a holiday and we all were expected to pitch in, whether by peeling carrots or pulling the strings of the gavar or add spoons of butter to steaming spaghetti and watch it melt.

The fact of the matter is that there is more happiness when you include, rather than exclude. I think what my mom was actually doing was getting us all to hang together at the end of the week and just enjoy each other’s company. Now that I’m a mom, I kind-of do the same, specially if I have been too hard on the ZZ’s. I just gather them and we cook together.

My parents live with me sometimes, and when they try running away, I try their tricks on them. I go shopping with my dad after asking my mom what she wants to cook, and then trick them into staying a bit longer. Remember, whatever you teach your kids will be used by them on you. And if the end-result is good, why not?