From my grandma's kitchen

Grinding stoneThe flat, harsh black stone that today takes ornamental centre stage in my son's garden was once my zen master. My mother felt I needed to get my nose to the grindstone. Literally. So when the chillies and coconut and spices were placed on it, the lessons began. It taught me forbearance. Patience. Concentration. It increased the threshold of pain and as mothers of those days hoped, skilled their daughters for marriage. However, it also instilled huge doses of resentment, irritation, brought forward PMS and a general disregard for authority. Until Sumeet came along, whirring, grinding, spitting and chewing. What the grindstone did in hours, this mixer-grinder did in minutes. Even today, Sumeet is my old best friend. It restored my spirits and made me a better person.PS: "But a mixer grinder will never give you 'that' taste," say old wives. While I agree, I am happy the grindstone is a relic.—Amy FernandesBell metal utensilsFor pre-teens glued to the TV, aita's (Assamese for grandmother) insistence that we eat our cereals from a kanh (bell metal) banbati (bowl) whenever she would come visiting was a tad incredulous to us. We were annoyed, of course, but would do so out of respect. She would repeatedly tell us the benefits of using kanh utensils long before Baba Ramdev extolled the virtues of storing drinking water in copper jars.The moment aita would leave, we would fish out the usual plastic bowls. Kanh utensils have a lot of significance in Assamese society. We use them during prayers, marriages and at other auspicious events. Days before I got married, my mother joked that had I married an Assamese, she'd have had to shell out a fortune on the kanh utensils alone. My parents, never the ones to stock kanh utensils, brought out all the plates, pots and pans a week after aita passed away in 2007. They use them to this day.— Amrita MadhukalyaWooden coconut scraperThe family kitchen in Trivandrum was a sanctum sanctorum for achamma (father's mother). Time stood still within its four corners as stone and wooden equipment, right from the mighty ulakkai (heavy stone grinder) to the charming chiratta thavi (coconut shell ladles) made themselves as much at home as the copper vessels hanging from the walls. But the kitchen relic I was enamoured by was the wooden coconut scraper. Reminiscent of a polpat or low, flat stool, the grater was a carved, rectangular wooden board with a serrated, cobra-shaped blade on one end. Achamma would sit hours on the bench, breaking coconuts open and scraping them with a swift rotating motion. Hers was a dexterity no one in the family could match. Achamma's arthritis and failing health eventually kept her from using this scraper. Its 'bench' or peeta offered no back support, after all. Which was how the portable coconut scraper found favour in our household. Chutneys haven't been the same ever since.— Roshni NairThe tandoorMy tryst with the tandoor started after I stepped out of home for higher studies. In those days, I would spend a lot of time at JNU, and lunch at the Sabarmati mess was incomplete without the matron dishing out scrumptious, piping hot tandoori rotis. Being unaccustomed to the tandoor, I would talk my way inside the kitchen just to see how one operates a hot clay drum to cook food.My mother-in-law often tells me of the times biji (my husband's grandmother) would work her way around a tandoor, which was very much within the kitchen from which we now function. The rotis, the baigan ka bharta and kebabs would taste heavenly, with the smoked flavour of the coal seeping within. Eventually, a reluctant biji had to let it go, because the soot and smoke became out of place in a kitchen giving way to modern changes.— Amrita Madhukalya