Inside, it was dark and warm, at least most of the time, perhaps from the glowing bellies of the row of clay ovens built along the wall at the far end. The ovens, fuelled by ghute or sun-dried cakes of cow dung mixed with wood charcoal, rice husks, etc., were fired twice a day. At the time, the entire floor would be engulfed in smoke, although much of it was carried from the first-floor kitchen to our third-floor terrace and beyond by a chimney that billowed charcoal-black smoke from its crown, reminding me of a ship’s funnel.
Ours was not a kitchen where mothers and grandmothers stirred the proverbial love into pots of daal or fish curry, or spent hours creating ornamental patterns on stone to make aam shotto moulds or fill fat, glass jars with pickles of a myriad kinds. Our upper-middle-class family kitchen in a posh South Kolkata neighbourhood was therefore devoid of the ‘element of affect,’ or the ‘preoccupation with aesthetics’ quintessential to domestic cooking as a female act, which had been crucial to the construction of the Bengali, urban middle and upper-middle class identity, forged in colonial Calcutta, based significantly on taste. Our family’s kitchen was run by hired professional male cooks. In it, dhoti-clad men toiled over roiling pots of food cooked in large batches - temperatures and tempers both soared. A kitchen manned by hired cooks has been a source of middle-class anxiety in both colonial and post-colonial Calcutta. As Utsa Ray elaborates in her book Culinary Culture in Colonial India, “The colonial middle-class considered public cooking as well as cooking done by the male cook within the home as forms of standardised cuisine, something they never cherished. On the other hand, women, through their love and affection, brought novelty to the food they cooked.” The women in our family had certainly breached those stereotypes, even if it was the upshot of privilege rather than rebellion. Nonetheless, had they been born in the previous century, they would have been among the kind of women chastised in the award-winning 1894 essay by Kumudini Ray in the Bamabodhini Patrika, a monthly Bengali journal, for their extreme dependence on hired cooks. In the essay titled Hindu Narir Garhyastha Dharma, the writer laments, “Nowadays even a clerk's wife needs a cook, but Draupadi, the great Hindu lady was a skilled cook and took delight in culinary art.”
In our household, hired cooks, or rannar thakurs, were indispensable. This kitchen cooked three meals a day for a household of 15 or so people, a large domestic staff, and a steady stream of guests who often appeared unannounced but never felt unwanted, and always left raving about the food. Our rannaghar was as adept at making innocuous curries of pointed gourds and potatoes, with a few tiny shrimps thrown in merely to scent the dish, or watery stews of fish and vegetables that one could swim in, to feed a crowd on a strict budget as it was at making unctuous pulaos, kofta, and kalia for massive feasts. Some of these recipes have remained ensconced within our family kitchen - we claim them as exclusively ours. Every family has such recipes. Amader Barir Ranna - our family cookery - is an oft-repeated phrase, steeped in memories and uniqueness.
But what is it that roots these dishes so firmly in the specific spatiality of our family kitchens? Was it the water, slightly sweet perhaps from the lime leeched off the walls of the massive concrete tank, that was used to cook our food? Or, could it be the material of the kitchen itself - the smoke and fumes of cow dung-fired clay hearths, the mingled smells of smoke, soot, sweat, and kat chapa flowers, the cooking utensils - decades-old and resurrected multiple times through multiple trips to the tinning man. It was perhaps the spices, always ground on a hefty slab of grinding stone, that my grandmother had carried with her from our ancestral home in the town of Serampore in West Bengal, when her husband, my grandfather, moved to Calcutta to build a business. Or could it be the phantom sense of someone’s hand that generations strive to emulate? Domestic kitchens, of course, are themselves unique localities with their own scents and sentiments, moods and memories that translate to flavours, tastes and textures. But these moods, memories, and sentiments often also tell larger stories of places, people, and identity.
