A recipe book is all things love

It’s a Saturday morning and the air wears lighter than weekdays. There is time to listen to the occasional barbet calling from the thicket and observe the flaming top of a Gulmohur in the distance. I dust an old diary of the year 2002 (back in the day when diaries were part of New Year hampers because people still wrote by hand). It is my recipe book, that I have been maintaining for more than two decades. It is a compendium of cakes and puddings I make most often, and 1001 recipes of appam, that Malayalis never tire of (millet appam being the latest addition).

Today I am on the coffee banana loaf page, written down by my daughter when she was eight or nine, in her scraggy, pre-teen style. Stuck on the other side is a leaf from my mother’s note book, recipe of another cake in her familiar, slanted cursive in both Malayalam and English. On top is my butter conversion table, cup to stick to cup to grams. I pause at this page for two minutes every time I open my recipe book. It offers me connection and love. There is tactility and familiarity. Most importantly, focus on the process than distraction at the aesthetic of dishes, voice over stories and polyester frills of many Nara Smiths on the socials.

In my shelf are also Malayalam cookbooks of my mother and grandmother, Pachakabodhini of YWCA, Thrissur, and Pachakarama by Mrs K M Mathew. Nobody makes food from it any more but it has successfully fed many silver fish and now resembles a half-eaten burger. They have hence delivered the promise of deliciousness, albeit to class insecta. But cook books do not charm me as much as hand written recipes in a notebook.

Handwritten recipe books, splattered with batter and turmeric are a treasure. It is a relic of the lived experience, a pointer to the food habits and evolution of a family. Ginger lime in summers to homemade dough nuts, in our case. Squash laced with citric acid and candies with Cream of Tartar, that sounded like a queen when I was a child. She resided in our refrigerator and I used to fetch it for my mother with reverence.

I have watched my widower uncle make food from recipes, that my aunt lovingly wrote for him before she succumbed to cancer. How to turn okra into a stir fry to one with gravy for chapathis, quantities enough for just one person. The intimacy of a conjugal life lives on, long after one had passed. There is something deeply comforting to see the handwriting of a loved one, more so, when it is of food-nourishment at all levels. Soul food as they say.

From the earliest known cuneiform tablet recipes for stew in ancient Mesopotamia to cooking demonstrations, there is a prescriptive quality about teaching to cook. From levelling the teaspoon to heaping it, adjusting the weigh scale and checking the temperature, it is careful calibration and balancing. Butter at room temperature and chilled butter can produce different results, which is why, like a medical prescription, recipe should also start with an Rx, or the recipere. Crush is not mince and dice is not julienne. Words need worshipful obedience. Stirring, ladling, folding in, serving-action words with a spoon that are worthy of an NYT connections grid.

People who eyeball quantities would disagree that there is even a need for a recipe, forget a compendium of them. I have an aunt who famously narrates her cooking saying take a ‘palmful’. But her palm is not my palm and when recipes fail, she would remonstrate us for lack of care and attention. She famously skips ingredients while sharing her recipe, for none shall cook as perfectly as her, her cakes the most moist and crumbly, her appams, the finest filigree. Long before gate keeping was even a thing, she famously refused anyone to come into her kitchen.

A recipe book holds more than recipes. After the Bible, recipe books are the favourite place for keeping records. I once found a black and white photograph of my second birthday party in my mother’s recipe book. There were smocking dot transfer sheets for one; embroidery designs, on tracing paper-- a curling paisley and a sprig of snowdrops. I also found old letters written on aerograms and blue inlands of India Post, by my aunt and uncles, who were abroad when we were younger. Recipe book was a more private storage place unlike the family Bible that was common property.

In contrast, if you were to open my recipe book it has boarding passes, and alongside handwritten notes, print outs are stuck. Unlike my mother’s book, there are no recipes cut out from newspapers and women’s magazines. There are no photographs, which are now mostly in phone galleries or old letters and postal addresses written on page corners. We, the women of different generations.

My recipe book has people living in it. Susie Ammai’s Chocolate cake and Shipra’s Mutton curry for instance. I like to tag people who have handed me over their secret sauce. Wealth is not always to be measured in money and gold but also relationships that are built around food and dining.

I believe there is no rule for organizing a home recipe book. Like a personality, it evolves. Early pages have baby food recipes for my daughter, carrot and chicken mash and milk of ragi reduced in jaggery. She is now 20 and seeks protein like it is the truth. My recipe book now has tofu cocoa souffle, hemp chutney powder and amaranth upma to satisfy her palate and fascination. I have post it notes that flag my most repeated cakes. Over the years, ingredient list has been tweaked to cater to health trends-- substituting white sugar with palm sugar, maida with jowar flour and butter with coconut oil.

Food is the new fashion, and people are mixing and matching-- a gulab jamun tiramisu, vodka with Rooh Afza and other postmodern cocktails that implore you to discover, experiment and exist as many and beyond the ordinary. Taste, they say can be cultivated. But you have to be born with an appetite for organization, if you have to build a recipe book. Also heaps of optimism.

Recipe books can only be maintained by optimists. They are futurists, who live with the hope that one day they will make a Baked Alaska or a Pavlova. They imagine themselves waking up a Sunday morning to the coos of Koel and telling themselves that today is the day for a Pineapple Upside down cake or a Caesar’s Salad. In the pre-internet days, how else would one make exotica if not for these compilations. A recipe book is a comforting promise. It is a careful token of intimacy built over time, slowly and patiently, like how one cooked food till a while ago-- to nourish and sustain, than photograph and perform.