Fed By Kali's Flame

One of my most salient memories of cooking is when, as a teenager, I planned a surprise dinner for my mom’s birthday. Armed with a recipe of vegetarian spring rolls, I meticulously picked out the ingredients at Wegman’s on her birthday weekend and then went to my friend’s house, where we cooked together. It was the first time I had purchased an avocado and I had no idea what to do with it. After studying the surface, I peeled the avocado like a hard-boiled egg, slowly chipping off the tough, scaly green skin. It took me a good 10 minutes; only years later would I learn the proper (and much easier) technique of slicing the soft flesh length-wise and then pulling the sides apart, around the large seed. The spring rolls took so long that, for the actual main course, my brother and I just heated up a bottle of Ragu tomato sauce and boiled some pasta. My mother, who, every night, rolled fresh roti as part of an elaborate homemade Indian meal, was elated by the gesture. The lesson I took away, however, was that cooking is hard.

The summer I turned 16, at the behest of my dad, my mom taught my brother and me how to make a full Indian meal—raita and curry and daal and roti and several vegetarian subzis, like aloo ghobi—but the knowledge was wasted on us. Part of my resistance to learning to cook came from the suspicion that in a future married life, it would be considered my job, just as it was in the household where I was raised. I would not reach for boondi or kala channa or hing or any of the recipes for my favorite food for another ten years, when I moved to the Lower East Side, my first time living alone in New York City, in an apartment where my stove, oven, sink, and fridge spanned the same length of my arms outstretched. After cockroaches invaded, however, I put aside the pressure cooker and for months subsisted mostly on the poke bowl place downstairs and frozen dumplings from across the street.

I moved into an apartment with a kitchen (an actual separate room) with new appliances that made me want to understand how to use them. I left behind the four-pot set from Target that I’d owned to since 2009, bought nicer ceramic ones, and, for the first time, owned more kitchenware than just a handful of glasses and free mugs. My theory was that, with new tools (and a nice kitchen), I might be more inclined to use them.

At first, I didn’t realize that I was cooking; I thought I was indulging. I bought Midnight moon cheese and crackers, but they were not enough. So I bought olives and charcuterie and hummus and feasted with wine. I ate so much hummus that I bought a food processor and found the tahini at the local grocery. My cousin taught me how to make pizza dough: yeast, water, and flour—a mixture so easy that even I could make it. My home became my sanctuary and, so that I could avoid interacting with people as much as possible, I began making pizza almost every week at home. From there, my repertoire grew to include my boyfriend’s recipe for tofu stir-fry and cucumber-onion-tomato salad.

In my search for comfort, I reached for the familiar: Indian food. But rather than reach for perfection, I sought simplicity. I learned my aunt’s shortcut to making Tandoori Chicken: marinating chicken with tandoori masala and yogurt for a few hours and then roasting it. I bought a used copy of Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian cookbook, the one I’d seen at every auntie’s house growing up. I found a recipe for khichdi—lentils and rice cooked in a pressure cooker and spiced with onion, oil, cumin, turmeric, and ginger—that tasted similar to what my mother had fed me when I was sick.

I used oil, onions, garlic, and ginger in nearly every meal. To save time: I bought ginger and garlic paste and a big bottle of lemon juice to reduce chopping. I kept rice in the fridge to keep weevils away; my pantry was perpetually stocked with the key ingredients I needed. I slowly developed andaaz, a sense of what spices and flavors I needed, as I learned recipes by heart. I invested in an Instant Pot, a small food processor, a blender, four cookbooks (and now own five, after a friend gifted another one to me for my birthday), three cast iron skillets, 48 spice jars and labels, a spice rack, an electric kettle, a hand-held strainer, a colander, pots, pans, and various types of glassware and dishware. They were each tiny revelations.

Rage thrust me into the kitchen. I lit a flame and heard the satisfying hiss of onions frying in the pan and somehow, the heat and the pressure transformed raw ingredients into complex flavors and whole meals that sustained me. In those next few weeks, cooking became something it never was: a way to express myself; a way to pass the time; a way to remind myself that I could do something—an accomplishment; a way to nourish my body, a way to delight and surprise myself; a way to unleash my rage and turn it into something productive; a way to progress and to create in the face of destruction.

But slowly, as my pantry grew, so did my confidence and ambition. I made Instagram-ready ramen, and by November 2018, was able to whip up my first full, authentic Indian meal: Arvi (taro root), raita, and Murgh Cholay (chicken and chickpeas in a spicy stew) for Diwali.

I don’t have ambitions to bake a cake from scratch or host large dinner parties. I will never be Samin Nosrat. I will probably never let my grandmother taste the Indian food I make, nor would I consider myself a “cook.” But cooking, for me, is controlled chaos, a way to harness manic energy and turn it into something tangible and comforting. It is a way for me to release my inner Kali.

Kali’s ferocity carried me to the kitchen. But over time, the rage dissipated and transformed into a calmness that comes from the reassuring passage of time and the slow realization that I could take care of myself. Now I feed myself the food cooked by Kali’s flame.