Cooking Up A Storm

As the pandemic gathered storm and she found herself locked down at home, Kaveri Ponnapa –  veteran food and travel writer –  turned to her passion, food. She laid out a table so elaborate and made it a space for solace and togetherness

Bangalore, my home of 24 years, turned into an alien city overnight. All the familiar markers – its pushcart vendors with heaps of fresh fruits and vegetables; the flower sellers; the restless young IT crowd constantly on the move; even its notoriously bad traffic disappeared as if they had never existed. Its iconic markets, surging with life on every day of the week, simply withered.  As supply chains collapsed, we scrambled to stock up on staples, and endless phone calls were made to local stores, vegetable and fruit vendors. Food – the procuring and cooking of it – edged out almost every other thought. As the world rotated on a different axis, my focus turned to, and remained fixed on, creating three meals a day. A focus that narrowed to the everyday: the kitchen and the dining table. The faster events spun out of control across the country and the globe, the more inexplicable they became, the more steadily I pursued food.

The table, always important, became the focal point where we met to comfort ourselves that things would get better. Good food made it seem possible. I know that cooking a meal will never be the same again. Over the decades I have cooked for pleasure, out of curiosity, from necessity; the abrupt disappearance of these and other choices during the first weeks of the lockdown changed everything.

My sometime-cook had a family emergency and left. I began to map each day from beginning to end through meals. Every Sunday, I covered two sides of an A-4 sheet with carefully crafted menus for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I did deep dives into my scores of cookbooks, emerging with recipes from cuisines across the globe even as country after country closed its borders to all but its own citizens. Old kitchen companions – Jamie Oliver, Marcella Hazan and Diana Henry – came back with their easy, imaginative recipes for ordinary as well as extraordinary meals. I had endless conversations with them as I cooked, and tailored and trimmed their recipes to fit the ingredients that were available. I trawled the internet for ideas, and Instagram held me in its thrall like never before.

On those sheets of paper, held within the pencilled names of dishes is a kind of intensely personal diary of daily life: a record of successes and breakdowns, of unexpected links with other lives. Every dish holds a story that reaches out of my kitchen, out of my own existence into other worlds; every ingredient that was available or missing carries an account of the lives of farmers, fishermen, vendors and truck drivers, and the events that took place over those weeks.

Bangalore could not make up its mind what to do. One week we were able to get passes that allowed access across the city. Then abruptly, it became impossible to move out of your immediate locality. The quality of produce fluctuated wildly. From the snarls and snags of requiring passes to even step out for groceries, life emerged. People – just ordinary people – tracked down farmers stranded with their produce and set up networks to help them market vegetables and fruits. I live in a part of Bangalore which still has farms, fields and orchards in the nearby countryside, and fresh produce made its way to us. Friends had always grimaced and made a terrible fuss at the idea of visiting me, considering my home too far from the city centre. When I read their unhappy social media posts about wilted vegetables and erratic supplies when deliveries could not be made, it seemed like I had the best address in town. Living close to the source of at least some of your food sounded like a good idea.

A tiny organic food store, a few kms down the road from us where we had shopped for years became a lifeline. The owner, an intrepid woman who makes magnificent millet batters of every description that bubble and pop fiercely, always in a perfect state of fermentation, set up her own supply chain. It consisted of one of her assistants on a bicycle, who delivered groceries, homemade snacks and organic vegetables to your doorstep. As choices telescoped, food – and its sources – emerged intimately and deeply connected to our daily existence, our relationships, and the politics of a much wider world.

Slowly, the city began to breathe again. After a few showers of rain, the skies emerged in an almost unreal shade of blue. The parks blossomed, unfettered by traffic, and all the trees for which Bangalore is famous, flowered. Everyone spoke of the clean, quiet roads, the glorious avenues of trees ablaze with colour. The first vegetable and fruit carts appeared at street corners – it was like reclaiming a lost city.

I looked for easy, delicious ways to cook whatever came into my kitchen – locally grown vegetables: tender Knol-khol with coconut and coriander became a favourite; soppu, leafy greens typical of Karnataka's cuisine, was on the table almost every day. There were the workhorse dishes of dal and crunchy vegetable poriyals; a favourite egg curry in a base of tangy tomatoes and green coriander to be mashed up and eaten with rotis and often, a comforting stew of lobia with mushrooms swimming in earthy flavours. A large pot of slow-simmered chicken stock made once a week, rich and aromatic, worked wonders for many meals. Each day was suspenseful, surprising and rewarding in turn. Birthdays and anniversaries were celebrated around the table and we drank wine every day, finding reasons to turn routine into an occasion. My husband drank a lot of stellar reds, while I, for whatever reason, drank one memorable white after the other. A lot of champagne was drunk. It was a complex time, trying to focus on the everyday joys of the table while the world impinged, in a continuous state of collapse.

There were luxurious windfalls: the local fishmonger called about a batch of superbly fresh calamari. I cooked it with a fistful of fresh herbs – parsley and coriander – bird's eye chillies from the back garden, olive oil and tinned chickpeas from one of Jamie Oliver's immensely helpful and friendly cookbooks. We scraped up every last bit with chunks of bread.  

As much as my gaze was directed inward, each meal held a bit of the outside world – in the early weeks, I watched devastating TV footage of desperate fishermen off the West Coast flinging their catches back into the sea: ice plants had shut down without warning and they had no storage facilities. If calamari reached my table, it told a story – that perhaps things were just a little better in the wider world. I cooked with awareness, and an increased sensitivity to the value of each ingredient that came my way. A certain frugality set in. Leftovers stayed until they were consumed.

Our own plantations in Coorg seemed light years away as travel restrictions lingered. The monsoon approached and I grew nervous and fretful, doubting whether the season's produce would reach us. One day, a friend drove all the way to Bangalore with tender bamboo shoots, dried, smoked meat, fresh colocasia leaves, citrus, jackfruit and an overwhelmingly generous bag of wild mushrooms still in bud. He and his family had imagined that we might miss the season altogether and decided that they would not let that happen. I cooked in a frenzy of gratitude: bamboo shoot curry, mushroom pickle and burnt orange chutney, thinking all the while that food, in every form, even the simplest produce or a meal, is a gift.

My lime trees produced a bumper harvest as if in response to all the uncertainty in the air. I made a classic Coorg lime pickle and put the rest into a mouth-puckeringly salty preserve spiked with bird's eye chillies. My tiny kitchen garden handed out huge bunches of fresh herbs and Malabar spinach, and the avocado tree rained fruit. All of this was shared with friends, and anyone who would welcome it. Baking brought contentment. A batch of intensely flavoured passion fruit – from a family in Coorg – was used to make a spectacular cake. When I posted pictures on social media, friends in Australia, Canada, the United States and one right here in my city all ended up making the cake and loving it.

An act of cooking that cut across boundaries, connecting us in a web of shared delight and comfort
In the determined frenzy of our routines just a few months ago, this daily, intricate relationship between food and all our lived lives might have been overlooked.