When author-caterer Kaumudi Marathe was born, the gifts her parents received included Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and Margaret Wise Brown’s The Whispering Rabbit and Other Stories . Not surprisingly, she got her first byline at the age of 11, when her mother sent a poem written by her to the local paper, The London Free Press . In her memoir, Shared Tables: Family Stories and Recipes from Poona to LA , Marathe mentions that her early success came at a time when she was not particularly fond of writing.
In her memoir, Marathe mentions that one of her favourite pastimes is to look through the windows of homes, around dusk, catching glimpses of, “...the glow of lamplight, a happy family at peace. I see a table set for dinner, an inviting arrangement of irises in a hall... I spy a woman bustling in the kitchen with sparkling countertops and fragrant aromas, a couple peering into a bubbling pot, anticipating a meal together...” This is exactly the sense you get as you turn the pages of Shared Tables — a rich telling of the influences that helped combine her twin loves of food and writing. She does not stop with visuals, but goes on to provide the history behind each image, speaking in detail about her roots, going back even to the arrival of her ancestors in India.
In providing the details of the lives of her parents, grandparents, great grandparents, Marathe brings alive the traditions and customs of a bygone era. While doing so, food is not far from the table, so to speak, whether she’s talking about her grandmother cooking her favourite foods, or about breaking bread with her new-found Armenian friend in the US, or sampling Chinese foods at a newly-opened restaurant.
Yet, her comfort food remains the tomato-coconut soup her grandmother used to make for her, “Santosh, because of the happy childhood memories it evokes. Santosh, hot rice and ghee would happily be my last supper!”
Through Un-Curry — her business centred around catering, teaching and writing about food — she wanted to bring the attention of the western audience to the varying flavours and textures of food in different regions of India. She says, “People here in the USA constantly mention chicken tikka masala , chai , samosas and naan to me. Then they are surprised when I give them tastes of India they have never had before! One of the most-asked-for dishes at Un-Curry is Santosh, others include cilantro (coriander) shrimp; pomegranate lamb; Kashmiri mushrooms with fennel and ginger; and shrikhand .”
Marathe writes, “My dream was for India’s cuisine to attain the level that Italian, Chinese and Thai food had attained in the American psyche.” She has gone all out to put that dream into action, and today has presented dishes from different parts of India to an audience spanning movie stars, artists and writers, college students and Supreme Court judges. A diner once confessed that she had never eaten the kind of Indian food as she had at Un-Curry, and loved it.
“My work was tough and backbreaking, there were moments during catering gigs when I asked myself why I had taken on that particular client or job. But I enjoyed my work so much that those moments were always fleeting. When my clients and their guests were happy with my food, it was gratification enough to make all the hard work worthwhile,” she signs off with a smile.
