"Good food is like music you can taste, colour you can smell." Ratatouille gets us. In this series 'Food for Film,' we pick food films/shows that make our mouths water and our souls richer.
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Growing up in the Everest company quarters in the '70s and '80s in Podanur, a suburb of the industrial city of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, weekdays were about school, extended playing sessions on the ground, gymnastics on the swing, and homework. The weekends were another matter.
Boys and girls would gather twigs from dried branches early in the morning. Three bricks or flattish broken stones would be hunted down from somewhere, and a temporary fireplace set up. Some aunty would lend us her vessels, oil, and some camphor, another would give rice, a third dal, and someone else would give us vegetables, a brinjal or two, and an onion and tomato each.
The person living closest to our makeshift kitchen would get water from their home. And then, we would begin to light a fire in the midst of someone’s garden, and cook a meal.
Grown-up me can't really recall the exact taste or flavour of the porridge-like rice-dal mash we cooked — adding spices, salt, water, and tamarind (sometimes green tamarind crushed on a stone) till we were happy, but I remember it made our Sunday and made Monday more bearable.
On rare occasions, an aunty would lend an iron vaanali, and we would crisp-roast some potatoes, the only vegetable that handled our childhood enthusiasm well. However much you meddled with it, it turned out reasonably well.
I’m 46 now, and I still remember the smoke that wafted into the air, a group of us sitting on our hunches in someone’s garden, stirring away at a bubbling pot. The rice we served ourselves on banana or kalvaaazhai (canna) leaves was spicy, salty, and sour, and we ate it with the pride that we cooked it. This was our kootanchoru (community food). This was our Sunday routine for many many years till we grew up and discovered other things to do. But, even today, that’s a memory certain to bring on a smile.
During the lockdown, Facebook, for some reason, started recommending food videos shot in villages. Suddenly, I realised that decades later, I was getting to see others cook the way we once did, where the food was scented and flavoured by love and companionship. The initial fire was lit using a camphor before twigs were fed to help the fire sustain. It helped that most of these videos were shot in the open, amid fields and gurgling streams, and featured mud pots, aluminum vessels, and kan alavu (eye measure). No one told you to add so many grams of this or that — everything was eyeballed, and added to the pot with great enthusiasm. The result? Brinjals that glistened with oil and spices, meat that fell off the bone, fish that had just been caught and cooked with basic spices… basically food that did not call for too many ingredients, but one that celebrated the joy of cooking.
Most importantly, there was no mention of COVID-19, quarantine or death toll, and that was a relief when that is all we consumed over social media. This was escapist fare, and it helped.
While village cooking channels have been around for some years now, created superstars like the late Karre Mastanamma, and served as a lovely reminder of a time gone by and cooking traditions of the past, the new-age content creators diversified into regional specialities. Banana Leaf Cooking, a page on Facebook (644,986 followers) with a YouTube presence, features the Coimbatore Kongu Tamizh dialect, and has as subject a young girl who walks to the farm, carrying a thooku (container with a handle) of leftover rice mixed with curd, chillies, and onion. Some days, she cooks before heading for work. On others, she goes to the farm to cook everything from black chicken to flying fish (kola meen), after showing viewers how to clean and cut the flesh. Occasionally, on some festive days, when people choose to eat vegetarian, she makes a vegetarian fish fry — raw banana cut to resemble a fish!
The best part? This is one of the very few channels where a woman cooks and also eats food with enthusiasm. After getting used to pop culture where women eat daintily and pick at food, this is liberating. The food is not well plated, but that matters little when it looks and tastes lovely. That smile on her face when she eats the food — priceless.
There's a band of five men, part of Village Cooking Channel (537000 followers), who have a huge fan following for its enthusiastic culinary adventures. An elderly gentleman and four youth cook with relish, eat with joy, and more importantly, shout out instructions. They always begin their recipes by grinding manjal chaandu (turmeric paste) on a stone. Most of the greens are plucked near the cooking area. For meen pollichathu, for instance, where the fish is cooked after being wrapped in banana leaf, the fronds are cut on the farm, and the cooking is done over an open fire.
In between laughing and screaming out instructions and ingredient lists, they also pass on helpful tips — like the perfect consistency to grind the vada batter.
Why did someone like me, who stays away from any kind of cookery show, get drawn to these channels? I’d credit the utterly rustic background in the videos, typical farm sounds, and the glorious greenery.
During lockdown, when many of us were cooped up at home and in front of our computers, this was an escape into the world we had left behind. A world we never thought we would have to stay away from.
These shows were pure nostalgia triggers, and also calm balm for the eyes and the ears.
Did I try any of the recipes? Probably one or two, and I even used some of the tips they so happily handed out. But what those shows did was give me reaffirmation that food can heal. And somewhere, I time-travelled to when I was 10, when I first realised that food is more about experience than the end-result. A happy cook makes for a happy meal.
Subha J Rao is a consultant writer and editor based out of Mangaluru, Karnataka. There, she keeps alive her love for cinema across languages. You can find her on Twitter @subhajrao.
Read more from the series here
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