Labour-intensive recipes, from yakhni pulao to kucho gojas, were my grandmother’s speciality in a culture where cooking can be a form of artistry and self expression for women
I never learned how to eat an orange. It is a shameful admission. But it is because every winter, when oranges arrived in the Mumbai markets, my grandmother would make her kheer komola – sweetened milk condensed over a stovetop for hours and then cooled and mixed with fresh orange pulp. That’s how I consumed oranges through most of my childhood, with all the goodness of the fruit forked out and mixed with condensed milk. Why would I eat an orange any other way?
Bengalis are infamous for their consumption of sweets. A dessert after every meal was a requirement in our Bengali household – yes, even after breakfast. Ingenuity was sought. The rains brought a variation of the kheer. My grandmother, who I called Didu, would take on the task of peeling and deseeding a dozen custard apples for the family, coaxing out the hard black seeds from each fleshy white globule with her fingers. I often asked her why she couldn’t pick an easier fruit and she would always tell me to ask her the question after I’d had my first spoonful.
