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Hearth of the matter: Transformation of Indian kitchen

What was once a cauldron bubbling with a delicious soup of rituals and cultural symbols, the Indian kitchen today is a factory-like organ, entertained solely because of its pragmatic appeal for the urban Indian couple. Sonal Ved tracks the changes that have taken place in what was once the most hallowed room of our home

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(Above) Once a sacrosanct space, the traditional Indian kitchen was to be entered into only after the mandatory bath. Sanitised and clean, today’s kitchens have no place for grease, soot or stains. Both cooking and dining happen on a raised platform—Illustrations by Uday Mohite
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You are what you eat, goes the adage, establishing the age-old connect between cuisine and culture, pantry and people. After all, it is only in the kitchen that elements as varied as the five senses combine with rituals and regulations, heritage and history to give insights into peoples and civilizations.

Don't believe us? Raid a friend's pantry, preferably one from a community different than yours, to see the way they store their groceries, which masalas are kept at arm's reach, the utensils they cook in, the pulps and pastes being stocked and how they dine – all of which are instant giveaways to the family's upbringing, choices, habits and other factors that make them who they are.

"Kitchen is a space that reflects the culture and economic status of a family," says Kolkata-based anthropologist Barun Mukhopadhyay.

The kitchen as it has evolved through the ages is also indicative of changing times, with the old giving way to the new.

Once upon a time, the traditional Indian kitchen was sacrosanct, to be entered only after the mandatory bath. A room which housed the gods, where they were not only worshipped but offered the first helping of what was cooked, where the cooking and the eating happened at the same level.

Sanitised and clean, today's kitchens have no place for grease, soot or stains. Both cooking and dining happen on a raised platform and the aim is ease of operations and also comfort while eating or entertaining. So how and why did this change happen?

In Mukhopadhyay's view, it was in the late 70s and early 80s that change started taking place in people's lifestyles. With globalization in the 90s, the entire character of the kitchen changed, giving birth to new-age designs, layouts, formats and functions.

Pantry and preparations

Till not so long ago, maintaining the kitchen was the sole responsibility of the woman. With the pressures of modern-day living, however, today's urban kitchen calls for shared responsibility between the working couple. It is designed in a way that aids the dining and the entertaining habits of the household – with a good fridge, dishwasher, microwave and other accessories that make life easy.

"A major change in the preparation and the kind of things we stock on, took place in an urban-middle class home 10 years ago," says food historian Pushpesh Pant. The Delhi and Ranikhet-based expert adds that kitchens today are not meant for cooking per se, but merely for assembling semi-cooked food. Take, for instance, things such as ready-to-eat desserts that only have to be topped with fruits or ready-to-eat dosa batter that simply has to be plonked on a hot griddle.

Pant feels that in order to show peers that they are not country bumpkins but world citizens, couples have moved on from traditional recipes to international fare. "And that to niche cuisines like Korean instead of Chinese or Lebanese instead of Mediterranean."

"This is also a result of disposable incomes and time pressures that these couples face. They don't have the skill to make a good shami kebab, so instead will go for something like a quinoa or a couscous pulao to impress their friends."

A similar change is taking place in our pantries as well. "Everyone is stocking on good cheeses these days. Fruits too are moving from apple and watermelon to ones that require an acquired palate. Like durian or rambutan," he points out.

Apart from this, there is also the increasing demand for pasta and noodles, two ingredients that are on every urban mom's kirana list each month. So much so that they have become as ubiquitous as tea and milk. "Kid's have their own pressures," says Pant. He thinks that mothers feel they have made a rational choice as they can camouflage a good homemade sauce with lots of veggies and serve it along with pasta or noodles.



The khisni is an old-fashioned coconut-scrapper which has now been replaced by a manual machine to give us fuss-free fresh coconut snow

Convenient cooking

Have you ever wondered why your mother's dal is better than yours and her mother's better than hers? When it comes to preservation of recipes, historians feel there has been a fundamental loss of skill over the years. According to Delhi-based author and food historian Ashish Chopra, the advent of education and economic development got a sense of professionalism around the early 60s and the 70s. This led to the neglect of home and consequently the kitchens.

"This was also the time when the culture of eating out, home delivery and takeaway was on the rise, leading to a shift in the food culture. And with everyone having a choice of multi-cuisine, why would anyone want to eat at home?"

As food became less and less central and the lady of the house looked for liberation from the kitchen, easy-to-cook meals, frozen foods, pre-cooked food packets filled supermarket shelves and home-cooked meals were outsourced to maharajs and part-time cooks. "While cooking became less leisurely, it still suited the palate partially and was good enough to fill the stomach which is why people opted for it," explains Chopra.

The concept of maharaj too has shifted. In the ancient days only people of the higher caste were allowed to touch sacred ingredients such as ghee and oil, these, if touched by lower caste mortals, would get polluted. Today's maharajs can be from lower castes, but he/she will be treated with neutrality like other home staff.

All these changes led to increasing standardisation of tastes with everyone's dal makhani or biryani tasting the same, thanks to the ready-made pulps, purees and masalas that many city-dwellers stock.

This also points towards the loss of exclusivity of recipes and even recipe books. As anyone can make the most complex of Hungarian baked dishes or Japanese sushi by clicking on a few buttons of their phone, why would they bother preserving recipe books? "On the flip side, restaurants began going out of the way to preserve exclusivity. Especially the five stars and the fine dines who are reviving old recipes to cater to select customers," observes Chopra.

The  idiyappa ural is a wooden and cane equipment used to make steamed idiyappams - rice-flour noodles. Today, consistent-textured idiyappams are made using a stainless steel gun​

Back to tradition

But there are those purists who are going back to old, time-tested traditions and rituals to preserve heritage, the authenticity of the process and the food itself.

Like Gitika Saikia, who feels that the reason to stick to traditional methods of cooking, equipments and ingredients is so the cuisine's rich heritage can be taken forward. The Juhu-based Assamese chef whose focus has been preserving and serving diners authentic tribal cuisine via her food pop-ups in Mumbai and Pune does so in various ways. "I swear by authentic ingredients such as banana stem, fiddlehead fern, red ant eggs and silkworms which are important to get the flavours right. Secondly, I diss aluminium and steel utensils and cook only in earthen, bamboo or cast iron ones," she says.

There are many like her, who shun non-sticks and prefer to cook in traditional vessels known to preserve the flavour of the food better and give it a more well-rounded taste.



Noisy mixers have replaced stone sil battas. While mixers help us churn smooth pastes, sil battas were known to produce potent, coarse chunteys and pastes

Changing equipment

An offshoot of this revolution is the invasion of nouveau utensils and equipment. Take for instance the jagged makkhan phirni. The old fashioned butter churner is almost extinct and has been replaced by hand beaters. Noisy mixers have come in place of rough-textured sil battas, the stone mortar and pestle; khisnis, meant to manually scrape coconut, lie mutely as sleek electronic scrapers take their place.

Jyotsna Bhosale, who specialises in food production and regional cuisine and teaches at the Institute of Hotel Management in Mumbai, feels that a gradual change began around four decades ago. "With the breaking of the joint family system, the responsibility of the lady of the house increased and so these time consuming equipments came to be replaced with electronic ones."

While many would diss the excessive usage of technology for something as skillful and nuanced as cooking, Bhosale disagrees and feels that there is only a marginal difference in taste in what is created by a new machine. "Taste is a dicey subject," she says. "It varies depending on the ingredients as well. So to say that a sil batta creates better chutney than a mixer is subjective."

While appliances such as makkhan phirni and the sil batta were shunned for practical reasons, there were others that simply didn't fit into new-age kitchen designs. Like the phookni, used to blow air into live fire, or the pirhi, a small table woven with jute used by women to rest their ankles on while cooking on a sigdi.

The changing times also brought with them niceties such as aprons and serviettes that have become a quintessential part of the urban Indian dining space. While earlier the matriarch's sari pallu would double up as a cloth to lift around hot pots or to wipe the child's face after a meal, education brought with it hygiene rules. "Table manners, eating with knife and fork, serving apparatus are all a part of this revolution," concludes Bhosale.

All this means, there is also the loss of a slice of life in our way of storing ingredients. With the advent of the refrigerator, air-tight containers and cling film, everything is neatly wrapped and stored in the fridge. So, off went traditional methods of storing ingredients like basting grains in castor oil, airing them, infusing them with neem leaves and other modes of preserving.

"So have pickle and pickle making," says Pant. He explains this whole change as a lack of one generation's ability to pass on these tricks to another. "Also, these days people don't want to appear passe by bothering with these traditional things. One would rather talk about low-fat and low-sugar rice," he says in a hushed tone.

Makkhan phirni was an essential kitchen tool used to smoothen curd granules while making buttermilk. Today, beaters are used to whisk chaas, beat eggs and cake batter

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