The metallic tang of loneliness

and why I cook from scratch

There is something life affirming in taking the trouble to feed yourself well, or even decently.

- Jenni Ferrari Adler, Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone

It was an evening in September or October of 2006; I don’t quite remember the month very well but I do remember that the air felt like a wet blanket wrapped around my face. My one-room-kitchen flat still had the musty residue of the monsoon that had just left. I was preparing for the loneliest part of my day - cooking and eating dinner. I had decided to make paneer, something different from the usual dal chawal or lauki chawal (don’t even ask me about this one!) I had grown accustomed to cooking. Maybe changing my cooking pattern will lift up my spirit that seemed to be in the dumps, I thought to myself. After about 45 minutes of jostling in the kitchen, I sat on my folding bed with my plate of rice and paneer curry to eat. I took the first bite and gagged. The subzi was unpalatable. Something in it tasted off and I couldn’t really put my finger on it – the onions and tomatoes I used were fresh and so was the paneer. So, what was the problem? I sobbed a little standing against my kitchen counter as I threw the contents of my plate away – partially for the expensive paneer (a luxury on my measly income) and partially for my sheer incapability to feed myself decently. I ate Maggi that night while reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

A few days later, while browsing through the shelves of my neighbourhood supermarket, I saw a brand of ready-to-eat-curries – matar paneer, pindi chhole, dal makhni. Instantly, I was drawn to them. I decided that they would be my escape from the three basic meals I was cooking, and the putrid paneer masala that I was too traumatised to try again. Those tinfoil curries - yes, that’s what I call them now - also felt like a way to cut down the loneliness. I had spent my life until then either with family or in hostels where food, whether creating or consuming, was a communal act. I had cooked for friends and flatmates on a few occasions, a couple of basic dishes clubbed with order-ins. But friends, who prioritised their love lives over friendship, stopped visiting eventually, and flatmates moved away. I once cooked for a boyfriend who never showed up and now my weekday dinners and weekend meals were solitary. I truly wish that my life as a young single woman in a big city had been like the romanticised version in movies and TV where independent women stand at the kitchen counter eating ice-cream straight out of the box, or pickle from a jar, but I was no Carrie Bradshaw. Cooking for one and finding joy in it were not part of my vocabulary yet.

Solo meals today feel less lonely with all the OTT platforms and smartphones to keep us occupied, but it wasn’t the case back then. We were still in the pre-Netflix and Insta Reel era. Books were how I kept myself busy. Speeding through the cooking process and quickly getting to reading was one way for me to cut down that feeling of loneliness. On most days I even gulped my food down as quickly as possible. Tinfoil curries were easy to use – just dunk the sealed foil packet in hot water, leave it for 10 minutes and done. For a little while it did seem like they were working. I also started buying packs of chopped vegetables from the same store – bhindi, cauliflower, beans. They were expensive compared to fresh vegetables, but I was tempted to reduce my cooking time in every way possible. However, I soon realised that I was actually cutting corners. Half the time those vegetables were rotten or dry and the curries tasted metallic. My grand plan to zoom through the cooking and eating time was a fail. I was undernourished, unsatisfied and still lonely. I stopped buying pre-cooked curries and went back to making those 3 usual meals.

Things changed eventually and with time I transitioned from being an average cook to an excellent one. For the next 14 years I steered clear from tinfoil curries. I wouldn’t even buy a pack of ginger garlic paste. Making chicken curry meant that I would peel every single clove of garlic, crush them with ginger and then add to oil with onions to make the base. However, in the years following my first tryst with living alone, there were a very few instances where I had to cook just for myself - in the domesticated phase of my life that lasted a few years, I cooked for a husband and his family, then for and with my sibling who I shared a household with; I cooked for friends, lovers, and flatmates. While I cooked elaborate meals for them - litti-chokha-chana dal, or grilled chicken with rosemary potatoes and asparagus salad - cooking for myself usually ended with me rustling up something super quick, which I didn’t mind. Life was happening to me. I was on a high of creating things, building myself up and had no time to feel lonely.

But then, the cycle of life repeats. 14 years later I was heartbroken and alone again. This time in a bigger and more unfamiliar city - London, where I had moved as a student. Cash and time-strapped, I found my way back to tinfoil curries. This time through Morrison’s ‘meal deals’ – ready-to-eat noodles, chopped vegetables and a stir fry sauce for 3 pounds - cheap, quick to be consumed, and it sufficed me for two meals. For a few weeks, I tried out meal combos with different sauces. But it didn’t last long and I decided to cook from scratch, just for myself. But my meals this time around weren’t the quick-to-rustle-up kind. I cooked myself pasta in a sauce I made from scratch, cooking tomatoes down till they turned into a tangy mush; I made myself Turkish eggs for breakfast and even attempted to poach the eggs for it; I made noodles, but I chopped and sliced vegetables and mushrooms for it. In that shared kitchen in my student accommodation where I just had one small cupboard for a pantry, I even made the Japanese chicken karaage with tamagoyaki, and roasted pumpkin salad with feta cheese. I unabashedly fried bhajiyas when I felt like it, made chutneys, and skillfully added Lacinato kale to my dal with dollops of butter to make sagpaita. Kid you not, but I even made misal pav, from scratch; well, ok, I had some help from the packaged farsan I found at Holland & Barrett.

Ready-to-eat meals had become a reminder of desolate dinners, of the loneliness and heartbreaks of my 23-year-old self, of my incapability to make a life out of my existence and feed myself with a certain care, and of a city that had rejected me as a youngster trying to find her footing. I did make friends with and in Mumbai, but those early years were hard lessons in the transactional nature of relationships in big cities. Friendships existed only from Monday to Saturday from 9am to 6pm and romance was a delusion. There were people all around me – at work, on buses, on trains and yet I felt empty. Eating those curries out of the packets felt like that. I was full yet empty. My relationship with my food was the same as my relationship with Mumbai – disengaged, detached, dispirited. I was living a life where I was largely absent. It’s a strange thing to say, but back then I felt disconnected - from myself, from the world around me, even from what I was putting in my mouth.

So, when I found myself in a similar place 14 years later – alone in a new city – I decided to choose differently. I was still eating my dinners alone in my room, in front of my laptop either reading a paper or watching a documentary, but it was a meal I had interacted with, right from picking up the kind of tomatoes I wanted to cook the sauce with, to deciding how I would store the leftover half-cut onion, I was present at every step.

All the years of living by myself had taught me what I didn’t know at 23, that nourishing myself with food made with care was like grounding for me. An act of love and kindness towards myself. And, it did not come from ready-to-eat meals. I had to make it myself. Most of the time, if not all of the time. Cooking by myself and for myself is how I kept myself present and centred, even if it was a basic act of chopping onions to make an omelette. My anxieties were soothed by the sound of tomato sauce bubbling away in the pan or the aroma of freshly steamed rice. It needn’t be anything complicated, but it had to be something I chopped myself, stirred with my own hands, created myself. Many times, during the pandemic-enforced isolation, I have jolted myself out of dazed nothingness through a carefully cooked meal. At 23 I skipped cooking to escape loneliness, at 37 that same act of cooking made me feel less lonely. I had learnt to engage in this act with my whole body.

One night, while looking up literary references for cooking and sensory engagement, I revisited these lines from Midnight’s Children;

What my aunt Alia took pleasure in: cooking. What she had, during the lonely madness of the years, raised to the level of an art-form: the impregnation of food with emotions.

I could fully understand what Rushdie meant here; why the paneer had turned awful that evening in my musty Mumbai flat; why the ready-to-eat curries tasted metallic; and why, finally, my food had started to give me joy. That food absorbed the emotions of the one cooking it, was an empowering thought for me; focusing towards cooking for myself with my whole body and senses was emotionally calming. No way was I ready to eat my own melancholy anymore. I had found pleasure in cooking for myself; my meals didn’t have to be elaborate, or big, or fancy; they just had to be cooked with dollops of joy.

Editing support - Ajay Ravi Varma, who read and re-read multiple drafts and helped me make it perfect.

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If you’ve reached here, thank you for sticking around and reading. I started Deep Fry in 2021 with a different idea, but couldn’t sustain for various reasons. I am now reviving it as a space where I experiment with my writing, which is centered around food but wouldn’t always be about food. There will be personal essays - long and short, commentary on food, stream of consciousness writing and maybe sometimes I will cook or eat something phenomenal and write about it. So please read, leave a comment and let me know if any of my writing makes sense to you. Tell me even if it doesn’t make sense to you.

And, if you like it please share it.

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As was the case earlier, I will also share what I am currently reading or have read/loved in the recent past;

• A couple of months ago I was looking for writings on cities and came across this beautiful essay by Joan Didion titled ‘Goodbye to All That’. It’s an essay she wrote about new York and her relationship with the city years after leaving it. Some day I wish I could write about Mumbai with the same lucidity.

• As part of my '“I want to learn how to write personal essays”, I read In ‘The Kitchen - Essays on food and life’ and particularly loved Rebecca May Johnson’s Against Roast Chicken: An Hors d’Oeuvres Theory of Cooking where she writes about domesticity, femininity, the kitchen and the 1990 Hollywood film Mermaids. Joel Golby’s Who are you when no one is watching? is strangely dark and humorous. Ella Risbridger and Ruby Tandoh’s essays about food, romance, heartbreaks hold wit and tenderness.

• I finished reading Asako Yuzuki’s Butter a few days ago and while I loved some parts of the novel that delved into more twisted psychology of its characters, and liked the overall theme of addressing fatphobia in Japan, I felt the end to be slightly underwhelming and translation to be a bit dreary, I hope the original is better than its translated version.

• I am reading inspired writings lately, in all formats possible. And The Locavore’s recent newsletter Walking With You written by Mukta Patil stood out for me. I loved how she wrote about walking, Mary Oliver and millets all in one cohesive essay. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.

• In the process of writing the above essay, I came across this book Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone; I have quoted from it too. It is an anthology of essays on cooking and eating alone by the likes of M.F.K. Fisher and Nora Ephron. I still have to read the book, it is expensive and I can’t find the Kindle version. But, the introduction by Jenni Ferrari Adler is inspiring in itself. What a dream it would be to put together a book like this for Indian readers. There, I think I am manifesting.

I am also constantly looking for reading recommendations so if you’ve read something - a book, an essay, an article - that has changed your life, please share titles/links in comments.

Hope to meet you soon here!

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