Stories enact a form of mutual hospitality. What is story if not an enticement to stay? You’re invited in, but right away you must reciprocate and host the story back, through concentration: whether you read or hear a narrative – from a book or a person – you need to listen to really understand. Granting complete attention is like giving a silent ovation. Story and listener open, unfold into and harbour each other.
A RECIPE IS A story that can’t be plagiarised. Compare cookbooks by cuisine and you’ll find recipes that are almost identical, distinguished by minor variations of ingredient quantity or slight deviations in procedure. Debts are gladly acknowledged, sometimes in the name – ‘Julia’s Apple Tart’ – or in a sub-line – ‘Adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi’. Recipes represent one of the easiest, most generous forms of exchange between people and cultures, especially nowadays, with online food blogs abounding and all kinds of once-exotic ingredients available at your local supermarket. Recipes are the original open source, offering building blocks that may be adjusted across time, place and seasons to create infinite dishes. You only need to successfully make a recipe once to feel it is your own. Make it three more times and suddenly it’s tradition.
No wonder different societies claim the same food as their definitive, national dish. Hummus in the Middle East may well be the most contested case in point. Fed up of the endless, inconclusive debates about the true origins of this popular chickpea dip, a group of Lebanese hummus-aficionados decided to settle the matter once and for all by setting the record for making the largest tub of hummus ever in the hope that the feat would irrevocably associate hummus with Lebanon above all. The idea of consolidating their ur-hummus credentials by producing such an excess is fitting in the context of the famously profuse Arab hospitality, summed up in the half-joking warning to guests: you’ll need to fast for two days before and two days after eating in an Arab household. A year after the Lebanese set their hummus record, the title was taken by a group in Israel who filled a satellite dish with four tonnes of the dip. Months later the Lebanese managed to top that and reclaim the Guinness World Record title. The dispute continues, a mild incarnation of the greater, more intractable regional conflict. I should probably refrain from dipping my finger into such loaded contests about the humble chickpea, but I adore hummus, and my favourite version is one made by a Palestinian friend – without a trace of garlic. And, of course, she is certain hummus was invented in her village.
IN THE EXTENDED FAMILY household in Nairobi where Mumji lived with Papaji during the first years of marriage, there was culinary competition of a very different sort. Food was complimented as people never could be. Papaji’s family were a reticent bunch. Their approval, if it came at all, took the form of a cheeky pinch or punch. Fortunately, appreciation of edibles did not need to be expressed in words, it could be conveyed in sighs of satisfaction and second helpings and – from the ladies – sidelong requests for recipes. The latter were never obliged: Mumji evolved a repertoire of tactics for rebuffing them. ‘Forget the recipe! I’ll just make it for you again,’ she promised her preferred people, while those she liked less, but dared not risk alienating were told, ‘There is no recipe, you just have to watch me make it.’ Needless to say, the occasion would never arise. Even in the communal family kitchen she contrived to guard her methods from her in-laws. If she was ever cornered into explaining how to make a dish, she deliberately left out key ingredients or crucial steps. Even – especially – with her own daughter, my mother. Recently Mum asked Mumji to show her how to make gulab jamuns – small, deep-fried balls of milk solids soaked in sugar syrup. ‘You can buy the ready mix at the Indian shop,’ Mumji said. ‘Have you ever done that?’ Mum wondered. ‘Of course not!’ Mumji replied, and changed the subject.
There’s someone else in our family who can’t share recipes – Mumji’s youngest son, an exceptional cook in his own right. The difference is, he’ll do his best to tell you, but he’s so inventive he can barely keep up with himself. He’s one of those people who can rustle up a magical meal from the most mundane ingredients, all without planning ahead or consulting a cookbook. When he founded Foodloom, a catering company he ran with my mother in the early 2000s, they carefully noted details for every signature dish they developed together and still no recipe was ever definitive. However perfect it seemed to us, my uncle had another idea for how it might be improved. I spent periods working for the company while writing my first novel. Whatever job I was assigned, I felt my ultimate duty was simply to eat that exquisite food. I was the kitchen assistant who licks the smidgen of sauce left in the pan, the waitress who gobbles the last samosa on the tray.
Mumji, amazingly, has never even owned a cookbook, which might also account for her caginess about recipes. Alongside her reluctance to share details of her dishes, she is averse to any assistance with making them. Even now, in her late eighties, she doesn’t want help in the kitchen. This is not simply down to control-freak tendencies and a fierce habit of independence. It’s because she needs to commandeer any praise that the food will elicit. Every compliment and thank you has to be hers. All of it. Every last word, every sigh, every burp. All hers. Only hers. And there’s never, ever enough.
‘She’s an amazing cook,’ friends and family say about Mumji, before grudgingly adding, ‘but she never shares a recipe.’ Perhaps for this reason, Mumji has no really close friends. It’s probably also why she finds it hard to ask for recipes. Instead, she eats with sharp attentiveness, turning food over with her fingers, scanning, sniffing and sucking in search of spice traces. Sometimes, she delves deeper with seemingly casual questions: ‘Some people put ajwain in everything because it’s good for digestion – what do you think?’ Afterwards, she’ll remark to us how disappointing the dishes were: ‘Jassi has no idea about what flavours go together! Who puts sweetcorn with fish?’ Or, ‘John really fancies himself a chef, but he doesn’t have a clue! Did you see the number of cloves in that chicken?’ Soon, if not the very next day, the family might be treated to a variation on a dish recently tasted somewhere . . . at Jassi’s or John’s?
You can feast on Mumji’s food, but rarely do you get to do so with her. The first time my husband dined at her table – an invitation that finally came more than a year after we’d met – he followed the example set by the rest of us and filled his plate from the spread laid out for his welcome. But when we started tucking in, he waited. ‘What about Mumji?’ He pointed to the empty chair. ‘She’s not coming yet,’ I told him. ‘Just start,’ the others said. Still he hesitated, disabled by a decorum that dictated you don’t begin eating until everyone is seated and served. A few minutes later, Mumji entered the dining room bearing a fresh batch of chapatis. Apron sprayed with flour, cheeks red from heat, she went around offering the rotis, but stopped short at the sight of my husband’s untouched food. ‘Eat!’ she ordered. And when he tried to explain she cut him off: ‘I’m working hard so you getting everything hot hot hot, and you letting everything go all cold. Eat!’ He obeyed and, ever after, reluctantly accepted her peculiar protocol.
Part of Mumji’s purpose in serving is to survey how much people are ingesting. She keeps a mental tab on the amount of helpings taken, the bowls of dhal re-filled, the number of rotis eaten. She remembers how much you had last time and is upset if you don’t outdo yourself at each subsequent meal. When my brother and cousins were teenagers they could easily consume many rotis apiece. Mumji would gloat and report, as if some world record had been broken: ‘He dupped eleven!’ There is a special word for it because, of course, nobody just eats her food, they dupp as if it were their last meal on earth.
Dupp, a slangy Punjabi sound, which I like to believe Mumji invented. To dupp is to eat with abandon and to excess. It’s a wonderful, reckless activity that often comes with the high price