The box of delights

The ontological desire to carry your home everywhere is at the centre of all culinary practices. Be it your appetite for ghar-ka-khaana or yearning for feedback on a homemade dish, what you’re really craving is a slice of the household you grew up in. In our straight-laced post-Internet age, nostalgia isn’t cool anymore, but the aroma of food in tiffin boxes still evokes memories. The kitchen is where the tales of grandmothers come alive: their innovative recipes, their concern for one’s health, cleaning lunchboxes in the company of old film songs and sometimes, lamenting the gradual death of culinary excesses. After all, who can resist a skilled granny’s piping hot, creamy soup on a chilly winter evening?

Grandmothers were often our first intimate friends and the food they served (even the bland stuff) tasted like heaven. When Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti was about to set off on a globetrotting assignment, his doting grandmother asked how he would feed himself. Galimberti swore that he would only eat in other grandmothers’ kitchens. The result was an award-winning coffee table book — where grannies from Ethiopia to Latvia to America were photographed, alongside their special recipes — called In Her Kitchen: Stories and Recipes from Grandmas Around the World . Clearly, grandmothers and their food are powerful cultural markers, a function they fulfil by being memory catalysts.

When author and television chef Rukmini Srinivas (aka Rukka) first shared her family anecdotes about tiffins with her daughters, they replied, “Amma, send us more recipes”. Srinivas tells us, significantly, that this was a demand for “more stories”. In the quest to assemble these stories, she has created an heirloom of recipes. Her cookbook Tiffin takes us on a gastronomical jaunt, tracing the various branches of her family tree.

It is not an autobiography per se, but its structure is firmly in memoir territory. A typical chapter consists of notes collected from diaries, cookery classes, vignettes from her erstwhile hostel mess and family experiences: all of which culminate in the recipe for a vegetarian snack. Unlike in a typical recipe-book, here Srinivas is not overly smitten with glossy food photography. Her detailed culinary memories find a better companion in Mohit Suneja’s meticulously cross-hatched illustrations. Perhaps the author’s intention is to remind the reader of the importance of personal touch. The names of the recipes emphasise this fact too. You won’t find cutlets here, but you may learn how to make Appa’s vegetable cutlets. Srinivas’s father taught her how to make them, and she remembers having them with Amma’s green chilli relish.

The story of these cutlets is, as is usual for this book, a tale of how an exotic culinary style/procedure was indigenised. Inspired by the silver-coated Victorian metal grinder (and Victorian meat recipes), Srinivas’s father decided to experiment with vegetarian cutlets. In the franchise food ethos of contemporary times, the overriding concerns are uniformity and standardisation. Srinivas, however, wants each of us to remember our meals, and bond over what we eat.

Ties that last

Family bonding over food has been known to be therapeutic. Where I come from, in Assam, tiffin is known as jolpan , a snack consisting of pitha (rice-cakes), laddoo , payosh and so on. During folk festivals like Bihu, jolpan would kick-start a host of other events. My tiffin for school would consist of Bihu jolpan , a welcome relief after the monotony of the first four classes. My mother would insist: “Don’t eat them all by yourself, you must learn how to share your tiffin”. Our school captain, another glutton, would declare, “Ask not how many assignments are due, ask what’s in my tiffin.” Today, in retrospect, this reminds me of Stanley, the boy without tiffin in Amol Gupte’s film Stanley ka Dabba . It explored the inner faculties of children who were terrified of their Hindi teacher (aka Khadoos, meaning ‘grouch’), who would greedily hog the “four-compartment wala ” tiffins. To escape him, Stanley and his friends devised a plan: they trick the teacher by eating at a spot where he can’t find them. When they eventually get caught, Stanley is suspended from class, because he doesn’t carry food. Yet, somehow, his friends manage to sneak in food for him so he wouldn’t go hungry.

First bites

Srinivas’s culinary experiences in Queen Mary’s College in Chennai quickly made her dependent on the tiffin. She made it a point to subsist mainly on the breakfast menu: idli, sambar, dosai, utthapam. She skipped other meals because they were “potatoes in one form or the other”. Now this is true for hostel food everywhere, isn’t it? In such a scenario, tiffin carriers are a saving grace. Very soon, she became a fan of the mouth watering bonda , golden dosai and brown coffee available at the mobile canteen van in Beach Road, Madras. The vendor, happy with the hostel’s feedback and business, began cooking tiffin on demand, with his vehicle loudly playing Tamil songs for good measure. Srinivas and her friends began to feel at home once again.

There is a saying that family gossip never ends, not even after the food is over. Coming from a middle-class Brahmin family, with strict rules about feasting and fasting, Srinivas’s aunt (Annam athai) would often indulge in lengthy conversations with her. She had tremendous discipline and observed all the fasts in the Hindu calendar.

The merrier side of Annam athai was revealed in the bawdy folksongs of weddings, childbirth and puberty ceremonies. The food she cooked during her fasts, like her brand of gossip, could be imitated only with great care. Athai’s puli aval (flattened rice with added rasam flavour) made with freshly roasted/pounded spices and kesari aval (an uncooked, aromatic sweet dish) were two of them. Annam athai was a rebel in her own right. In those days, when more and more officers were succumbing to ‘British tastes’, it was the tiffin that allowed her to resist colonial imposition.

An intriguing story of Indianising the master’s taste, the word tiffin comes from the word ‘tiffing’, which meant eating and drinking in between mealtimes. It is also known to have originated from the light snacks that the British were fond of. Tiffin was their way of coping with the sultry Indian weather. ‘To tiff’ is also a common slang for afternoon sexual encounters. This is not as outlandish a connection as it might appear at first: remember Shah Rukh Khan’s triumphant tiffin-holding in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi ? His colleagues understand that now that the marital tiffin has arrived, sex can’t be far behind.

Dollops of life

Packing food for your husband is an old trope, if you go by popular films and ads in India. Taken with a pinch of salt, this romanticisation may well be to silence the problems that come with the middle-class obsession with the institution of marriage. Ritesh Batra’s 2013 film The Lunchbox departs from this romanticisation. Ila, a woman whose husband is having an affair, thinks she can rekindle her conjugal life with a new recipe (provided by the older ‘Auntie’, Mrs Deshpande, whose own husband is in coma). As luck would have it, her tiffin is delivered to widower Saajan Fernandes. They exchange letters inside the boxes, each sharing tales of loneliness, sorrow and failed marriages. These exchanges become a kind of release from urban inhibitions for Ila and Saajan. And though the film’s ending doesn’t quite satisfy the romantic lot, it substantiates the many realities of modern-day marriages. It is also a fine documentation of Mumbai’s dabbawalas .

Flavours of the past

Srinivas and her father were flexible in their approach to culinary traditions. This was partly because of their tiffins moving all the way from Poona, Madras to Jabalpur and intermingling with the culinary cultures of these places. In Jabalpur’s Gol Bazaar, she was introduced to Bengali delicacies. Mrs Ghosh, maker of a delicious malpura ( malpua ), shared the committee with her Amma and they both traded recipes over a Holi tiffin.

Srinivas later modified Mrs Ghosh’s payosh (rice pudding) by adding less jaggery and more condensed milk. This is also why her recipes are so user-friendly, and less rigid. She compiled these memories in Boston, where she taught courses on South Indian vegetarian food.

Learning to re-use leftovers is, for me, the hallmark of a good cook. Srinivas’s book shares several efficient ways of using leftovers, like kuzhi appam, which is made of overripe bananas, a South Indian version of Danish aebleskivers. This chewy snack when served hot with tea or coffee is very refreshing indeed. Another such recipe is bread upma, which doesn’t need deep-frying and can be garnished with green vegetables as per your taste.

The challenge of cooking lies in mastering the art of patience. After her marriage to the noted sociologist MN Srinivas, she moved to Berkeley. Due to the improbability of finding good vegetarian food at Berkeley, Srinivas preferred, once again, to skip meals. With time and research, her husband and she found Greek stores in San Francisco that sold spices required for her tiffins. It is a happy coincidence that author RK Narayan (‘Kunjappa’ in the book) was a close friend, and he wanted ulundu vadai (deep-fried, spongy doughnuts of split black bean batter) for an afternoon bite. (As an aside, we are told that Narayan was still sceptical about the fate of Raju and Rosie from his iconic novel Guide .)

When her daughters Lakshmi and Tulasi grew up, Srinivas taught them how dosai, the “trump card of South Indian tiffin”, is much more diverse than is generally made out to be. Nothing can match having the perfect dosais in tiffin along with a cup of filter coffee. I agree with Srinivas here, when she talks about the heterogeneity of dosai in India; the English translations — pancake and crêpe — don’t capture the nuances that this dish has to offer.

Taste is the winner

The tradition of tiffin in our country is exhaustive, because we build memories inside these little boxes. But, just like all traditions, the dabba is undergoing changes. A Google HWGO (Helping Women Get Online) commercial shows a mother finding a snack recipe online. Similarly, children are full with glucose biscuits and instant noodles in their lunchboxes. In a television ad for refined oil, a grandmother gets into an argument with the hospital nurse, for wanting to feed her injured grandson ‘daal ki do chammach’ (two spoonfuls of dal). The problem is that the grandmother’s tiffin still counted as ‘baahar ka khaana’ (food from outside), prohibited to the patient. The old woman doesn’t give up, and brings an extra tiffin for the nurse on her grandson’s birthday. No prizes for guessing what happens next.

Srinivas has led a full life: both in her own considerable achievements, and as a wife and a mother; Tiffin is a testament to the same. Her accounts and recipes remind us to keep that elusive corner of our minds alive: the place reserved for love, stories and that necessarily abstract notion called taste.

Rini Barman is an MPhil student at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi

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