Cooking Class

Today I had my first cooking class of the semester. The woman I'm learning from is an elderly woman named Achee, and is part of the Chetiyar caste. I'm learning at her house, which is about a half an hour bike ride from the program house.

A note on biking in India:
So, when we got to Madurai the program gave us each a cycle and told us that we had to pay for the upkeep of these cycles. Sounds fair, right? Well, I think the longest my bike has gone without needing to be fixed is probably four days. Mostly I've been either desperately trying to balance on the back of Emily's bike, or borrowing whatever bike isn't being used when I need one. So, this week I went to the cycle fix-it man who works on the side of the road (the larger-scale shop this time. Before I had been messing around with going to the guy who works under the tree near my house, but now I actually am investing in the man who sort of has a covered area on the side of the road), and I asked him to give me two new tubes and two new tires (my old tires were cracked actually). So, now I finally have a cycle that actually works.

Anyway, today I followed Sekar to the cook's house. This was a little complicated for me because it's a fair distance from the program house, and I was biking on much bigger streets than I'm use to. It was mostly not a problem except that Sekar was on a motorcycle, and we made a lot of right hand turns around five point intersection/roundabouts. After a few times of thinking I was going to die we got there fine and with a little confidence gained on my part. On the way back I had to go without Sekar, so it took a little more work on my part. Mostly when I got to really big intersections I'd watch the other people around me to see how they handled it. In general in India I've found that if you want to make a right hand turn (equivalent of a left hand turn in the USA) then you just turn right into oncoming traffic and go there for as long as you can before you have to dodge into the left side of the road. This works especially well if you're a bus or semi, and not so well if you're a cyclest- but I'm managing.

Anyway, Achee is really nice. She lives in a really really nice house- complete with furniture and fans and quite a few rooms from what I could see. She lives with (i think?) her daughter in-law and her son and their two children (a girl who's four, and a little baby who turns one in a week or so). They have two servants (that I met) who, I think (?) live with them. One is a girl who is probably about fifteen and helped out in the kitchen the whole time. The other is a girl who is probably about ten and took care of the baby the whole time I was there.

She started out by showing me all the different ingredients we were going to be using. We made three dishes using pretty much the same or similar simple ingredients. They were all dhal dishes that could go with either chapatee or rice. At one point she said that we would normally be just using a mixer, but she would show me that traditional methods. so we went outside, and her kitchen-helper servant ground all of the ingredients on this granite slab using a granite rolling pin. She told me it wasn't very hard, but that it just takes a lot of practice. They also said that because of her posture while she's doing it, and the way her arms, shoulders, and hips move- it's really good for your health. But people aren't using that technique anymore, and so they lose some of the benefits of cooking.

Throughout the entire class she would sit me down and we would go through the ingredients together and the process together, and I would write it all down (In English, but with the names of the dishes and some of the ingredients in Tamil- By the way, it's interesting when someone tries to teach you how to spell in Tamil. It's not like in English when someone says letter after letter until you have a word. In Tamil they just tell you the sounds. It would be like spelling words out based on their syllables instead of the letters. like: SOW- UUN- D instead of S-O-U-N-D).

Then she would go through all the ingredients we had used and would tell me all of the different properties of the ingredients. This was my favorite part, probably. She would first tell me what vitamins and minerals each thing was high in. She would then tell me what types of people those foods were best for- babies, elderly, pregnant women, people with fevers, etc- And would explain the different ailments that the different ingredients helped cure. She would then tell me different old wives tales about them- like wake a baby up and give it a table spoon of honey right away- and then the baby will learn how to talk earlier and will be extremely articulate. She also said honey is a health food? Sounds good to me!

In the end I sat and ate an Amazing meal while she and the girl who had been helping her out watched me. That was a little awkward. But, they were really nice. At one point I mixed a side dish with the main rice dish and the girl started laughing- but they were really nice and explained that you don't traditionally mix those at once. Just eat a mouthful of one, and then a mouthful of the next.

All in all, it was really really fun! I told her about my family's general interest in food and cooking and the relationship between food and culture and she seemed really excited about that. She was also excited to get American recipes and dessert recipes from me. We'll see how I do!

--- catie