I may have unearthed the largest, most diabolical, culinary scam perpetrated on all of humanity since fire was discovered. Even bigger than that outrage called vegetable biryani that we have been enduring silently all these years. So pay attention.
Who hasn’t been there? We are at a get-together, and the hostess, a secretive smile playing on her lips, serves up something with, “Made from my grandmother’s recipe. It’s secret, by the way.”
And whatever the dish may be, ranging from karuveppilai podi to Coquilles Saint-Jacques, even before we so much as look at it, we react with whoops and hoots like we are being told we no longer need to link Aadhaar to our PAN.
That’s how Machiavellian this whole scam is; the minute a grandmother is mentioned in connection with food, we take it more seriously than Devdutt Pattanaik’s words.
For this is how we see the back-story of the dish on the table.
Back in sepia-toned days, a loving grandmother cooked this mouth-watering dish for an entire clan. So wildly popular was her tomato rasam , which she cooked on the second Tuesday of every month, that folk from neighbouring villages would hire bullock carts and travel across hostile terrain just to get a taste of it.
Tragically, this exotic spice mistress died one day. But all was not lost. On her deathbed, when no one else was within earshot, she summoned her granddaughter, pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from her blouse and handed it to the little girl.
“Guard this with your life, child,” she said, as a rivulet of blood escaped from the side of her mouth. “It has the recipe for my world-famous tomato rasam ... (cough, cough) ... Russian enemy agents have been trying to get their hands on it for years ... don’t trust anyone ... (coughs, dies).”
That grief-stricken little girl put away the recipe in a bank locker, along with her collector’s edition of The Godfather trilogy. And, today, after years, even though she risks being assassinated by Russian agents for it, she has brought it out. As a special treat. For our exclusive dining pleasure! Wow!
“Give me another helping,” we chorus, even before tasting it. “You are indeed a true hero.”
See, I’ve decided I’m not buying this nonsense any more.
Firstly, if you’ve noticed, whenever it is a famed dish made from a secret formula, it is always the grandmother’s recipe. Why is it that the mothers in all such cases have been bypassed?
Why did the grandmother hand over the coveted paper to her granddaughter instead of her daughter? Were there trust issues in the family? Was the old lady’s daughter a villain? Was she trying to kill her own mother for the recipe and sell it to Russian agents? In which case, do I want to eat tomato rasam with such a twisted history?
Secondly, okay, so the tomato rasam or cauliflower manchurian is based on a grandmother’s recipe. But what is the guarantee the grandmother was a good cook? Are we to assume that all grandmothers are good cooks? Mine wasn’t, I can assure you. But she was nothing compared to my cousin’s grandmother. After her demise, they burnt her recipe book just to make sure she wasn’t posthumously accused of biological warfare.
From now on, whenever I’m served anything that is from a ‘Grandmother’s Secret Recipe’, I am going to do a bit of snooping.
Did said grandmother have a criminal record? How long did grandfather thereof live? If he died young, was there a chance that it was due to intestinal trauma? Who were the guests who ate this dish before us? Are they okay? Is there a history of insanity in the grandmother’s family?
Krishna Shastri Devulapalli is a small-time south-Indian writer. He is currently working on a crime thriller called Murder By Tomato Rasam .
