Fishy.

“Something smells good, Mom”, my eight year old son calls out over the music of “The Adventures of Tintin” that he is watching with his five year old sister. The smell interrupts my husband’s Saturday night semi-fugue state, induced by old Hindi movie songs, ghazals and single malt Scotch. My industrial grade Viking hood is doing the best it can, but is no match for the heady fragrance of dinner, cooking in bubbling oil on its way to a heavenly state of golden brown crispiness. I am frying Pomfret.

Wikipedia says pomfret is a perciform fish belonging to the family Bramidae. It is found in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. I say, they have no idea what Pomfret is.

Pomfret is my mother, announcing on a Saturday morning, that my brother and I were to watch out for and stop the local fishmonger  as he made his way through the neighborhood. The object of our attention for the rest of the morning was a short, dark man with round eyes and a quick smile. His bushy mustache apologetically made up for a receding hairline. He usually wore a mundu, a long rectangular cotton garment worn at the waist, and a shirt, with a scarf-like piece of cloth wrapped around his head.. He would ride into our alley on a bicycle with a basket tied precariously to the back seat. He announced his presence with a loud horn – the sound a cross between a duck’s quack and a broken reed. It was in this basket, over a thin layer of ice, under dark green banana leaves, that he presented the manna from local rivers and the Arabian Sea, occasionally his prized catch, the pomfret. It is an exciting day for us because cooking fish at home was a show of culinary bravery for my mother. She had grown up with strictly vegetarian, staunch Hindu parents and had tasted meat only after she got married .She was adventurous enough to cook fish but was not confident about buying or cleaning it. That was Amma’s job.  “Amma” is Malayalam for mother and to us, it seemed like the whole town called her Amma. She was a stern lady of indeterminate age, who worked in our house as a housemaid/translator/spreader of neighborhood information. As soon as the fishmonger stopped in front of our house, Amma was dispatched to do the needful. She wiped her strong and heavily wrinkled hands on her work cloth and walked up to him. She gave the man a once-over as if silently warning him against any mischief. Then she peered into the basket and moved back the banana leaves. She picked up the plumpest, whitest of the fish and gave it a good sniff. If it passed her olfactory test, its gills were pried open. If it was nice and pink inside, Amma gave the man a slight toothless smile and picked a few more. The care with which she picked fish for us made us feel like royal children, whose food was tested for poison before it was served. After the necessary payment was made, all of us followed Amma to the back of the house where she proceeded to clean and prepare the fish and hand it over to my mother for further processing.

Pomfret is my father, ordering fish for me, at every restaurant that we went to, even when it was the most expensive dish on the menu. The love on his face, having ordered the best dish for his favorite child, in my opinion, was returned with a grin on my face, when the waiter brought the plate of crisp golden fried fish, head intact, eyes open, garnished with red onion rings, chopped cilantro and a lemon wedge. For my brother and I, eating out at a restaurant was a luxury, a status symbol. To have a special dish ordered just for me was hence, a momentous achievement. Over time, the restaurants changed from a “dining hall” of five or six tables covered with white table cloths over worn out reddish brown carpets lit by shabby chandeliers to avant garde restaurants in five star hotels in Mumbai but the ritual never changed.

Pomfret is little fingers, peeling off the crisp skin to reveal firm white flesh held together by a skeleton of long bones. The fingers do not have find and remove tiny bones that hide inside other kinds of seafood. The fish has been fried whole, with two short slits on each side where the marinade of garlic, ginger and turmeric, green chilies, cumin, coriander and salt has made its way inside. The skin is a crispy golden brown, while the flesh has cooked in a fragrant steam of the marinade, giving it a flavor even the finickiest of eaters cannot ignore.

The smell reaches deep inside me, taking me back to the land where I grew up, thousands of miles away from this beautiful prairie that we now call home. It is the link from my childhood to the life that I am trying to create for my children. It inspires me to make memories with them, which they can turn to, when they grow up. I hope that this fine specimen of the Bramidae family thrives and multiplies for generations in the saline ocean waters so that my children can share the joy of a perfectly fried pomfret and steaming rice with their loved ones, for years to come.

Follow that scent..

It is a well-researched subject - the connection between smell and memory. It is believed that the olfactory bulb is a part of the brain's limbic system, which is closely associated with memories and that is the reason why smells are associated with certain memories. I have been credited with having a keen sense of smell, almost akin to that of a dog-which if I was not such a die hard dog lover, would have been insulting. But it is true, I am very sensitive to smell. I do not mean that even slightly strong odours upset me. On the contrary, I have quite a high tolerance for noxious odors. I am senstive to the good kind of smells. You know how the advertisements claim the sweet scent of the soaps can tranport you to a tropical paradise or the lavender oil can instantly calm your stresses - well, it sure works on me! And the most memorable smells of all are that of food. I remember telling my mother after coming home from school one day that I could smell tandoori chicken while I was in the class! Today there are some memories so strongly intertwined with smells that even though I am far away from the places where these events/memories happened, for that instant i get a surge of familiarity rushing through my senses that takes me to a very special place.

My favorite food smell is that of frreshly made rotis - unleavened Indian bread, being puffed over the open flame. That for me is the smell of my mother's kitchen. Throughout my growing up years, when I finally got interested in the kitchen (much to my mothers relief) the thing that amazed me the most was how my mother would make perfectly round, evenly puffed rotis, day in and day out, as if traced with the back of a bowl or made in a mould. It took me years to perfect this craft and even though most of the times my rotis do turn out round and evenly puffed, they still cannot rival my mother's. The earthy scent of wheat getting roasted over open fire is as close to nature as you can get, sitting in your dining room.

Another very strong scent that floods the oxytocin receptors in my brain is that of warm ghee - clarified butter. If you think the smell of butter is irresistable, wait till you get a waft of this heavenly perfume, when ghee is pured over anything hot - usually steaming rice or when put in a hot pot to be used for cooking, like my ajji (grandmother) used to do. She didnot let the minor fact that ghee is 100% fat, free of all annoying milk solids, ever get in the way of her cooking. Ghee was (and still is) a mandatory addition to most of her dishes. But the one dish which I absolutely devour and one that cannot be replicated is her Kadhi - a hot soup usually used as an accompaniment to the main course; made up of yogurt and gram flour, flavoured with green chillies, ginger, cilantro and tempered with hot ghee, cumin seeds and curry leaves. The smell of cumin seeds sputtering away in hot ghee is the stuff of my childhood dreams!!

A scent I was introduced to after coming to America was that of vanilla...ummm..just the mention of the name brings to my mind visions of perfectly kept, beautiful houses or quaint boutiques with candles and glasswares in tiny town of the West. Yes, even though this is a food fragrance, my immediate memory associated with vanilla is our first attempt at house hunting in California and innumerable visits to the model houses. Since then I have lived in a number of houses and have never ever achieved that level of vanilla-scentedness, no matter how many candles or chemicals I have burned.

The memories are innumerable. The whiff of teriyaki chicken being grilled outdoors on cold, fall saturday mornings in the Strip district of Pittsburgh, the magical essence of lavender oils floating through the streets of Ojai, CA or the pure unadulterated fishy ocean smell of the Hawaiian coast - every memorable experience has a smell to it. I realized I was helping my son form his own memories when, on sniffing a handful of fresh basil leaves, he remarked, "Oh this is the smell of the pasta from yesterday!!"

Kadhi

1/4 cup Low-fat Greek yogurt

2 tbsp gram flour (besan)

1 cup water

2 tsp ghee or butter

1 tsp cumin seeds

1/2 tsp turmeric

1 tsp salt

1 tsp grated ginger

1/2 serrano/jalapeno chilly seeded and chopped

5-6 curry leaves torn

handful of chopped fresh cilantro

In a bowl, whisk together yogurt, water ginger, turmeric and salt. To it, add the gram flour slowly and mix it well. Whisk it well and break up any lumps that may form. Add the chillies (if using). In a thick-bottomed sauce pan, heat the ghee or butter over low heat. Add the cumin seeds when the butter melts. When the seeds start to crackle, add the curry leaves. To this add the yogurt mixture, making sure that the heat is turned down to low to medium low. Stir the mixture and let it come to a slow boil. Do not let the mixture thicken. You will need to add more water, upto 1 cup to keep the consistency of the soup. Cook over low heat for 1-2 minutes. Add the cilantro leaves and serve hot as soup or as a side dish with steaming white rice.

Gram flour or besan is found very commonly in Indian grocery stores. It is light yellow in colour and smells of chick peas.

The first time......

The thrill and excitement (and subsequent memories) of doing something for the first time cannot be beaten. And along with the most obvious ones like the first kiss, the first car, the first house, the first childbirth, the first time you ever ate a good dish also makes for some wistful thinking. And for me, the memories usually include the taste, the place, the company and best of all, the smell of what I ate.I am going to try to catalog some of my fondest food memories, yet.

- Kahlua coffee - spring break 1999, charleston, south carolina with K and E

- Long Island Iced tea - nobody makes it better than the Outback Steak house on Thousand oaks Blvd in Thousand Oaks, CA and that too with the Kokkaburra wings...Friday nights after work, just me and my honey!!

- Tandoori Chicken - from some iranian cafe at Crawford Market,Bombay with my aai sometime in June/July 1993. Nothing better to wash off the depression of seeing your lifelong dream of becoming a doctor shattered to pieces than polishing off a whole chicken sitting inside a pure veg udipi Hotel Sadanand.

-to be continued.