A few years into my marriage (having successfully learnt how to boil water), I began to develop an interest in cooking - much to the fear of my family.
I was spending more and more time poring through cookbooks and magazines (yes kids, magazines). It meant I was also experimenting with new dishes everyday. I drew all my motivation from my big, hungry family who, although filled with trepidation, were always ready to be guinea pigs for any of my kitchen experiments.
Sadly, a majority of the time the guinea pigs remained hungry. Post ‘dinner’, some real food would be picked up from our friendly neighborhood kathi-roll wala - a cute restaurant called “Papa’s” down the road from our house. To give you an idea of my capabilities at the time, we usually had to call on Papa’s at least four times a week.
Every member of the household deserved an award for their patience and perseverance. Since I was also subjecting my own taste buds to my creations, I could always tell when I was getting fake smiles through gritted teeth and full mouths. My suspicions were usually confirmed when I saw anyone sneaking into the kitchen later on to fix a makeshift meal of condensed milk and bread. All those who did this, you know who you are!
One of the sections in Papa’s menu was ‘Papa goz Chinese’. It became a running joke at the table when, halfway through the meal, everyone at the table would look at each other at the same time and say “papa goz?”
For the sake of my family, I decided to put my interest in cooking dinners on the back burner (pun intended) for a little bit. Instead, I tried my hand at baking. My mother-in-law had the entire set of Time-Life cookbooks, and I started leafing through the ones on cakes, biscuits, confectionery.
I remember experimenting with homemade fluffy marshmallows. These were usually followed by visits to the dentist to get our fillings redone since no one in the 90s knew how much gelatin was too much gelatin. I made sickeningly sweet lollipops that shattered into pieces, just like my heart when I missed Engelbert’s first concert in Bombay. The lollipop stick used to routinely get stuck on the tray, much like a child (i.e. Rahul) clinging to their mother on the first day of playschool. When my family had to resort to prising crushed and broken lollipop bits out of the tray with a knife (no silpat then, kids) to eat sadly from a katori, I finally decided to seek help.
I enrolled in a three month Bakery & Confectionery course at Sophia Polytechnic College. It couldn’t have been more fun to go back to school. Loved every bit of it. It was nostalgia baking at its finest. Of course, at the time, almost 30 years ago, it was just called baking. The nostalgia part came later.
Jam Tarts, Banana Bread, Apple Pie, Macaroons, Melting Moments, Doughnuts, Chelsea Buns, Swiss Rolls, Traffic Light Biscuits, Doughnuts, Macaroons…goodies that you’re likelier to find in a scene from The Sound of Music than a restaurant menu in Bombay today. I looked forward to my classes everyday, and my family looked forward to me coming home with satchels full of baked goodies for everyone to gobble. It was the most welcome I had ever felt in my married life!
The bakery used to have these huge professional ovens. Us students would make the cake batters, roll the doughnuts, slap the bread dough into tins, and hand them all over to the assistant who would line them up in the oven to be baked. Our job was done and we were free to chit-chat and clean up our work spaces and basically do nothing. Faf around, as it’s called now. (On a side note, I wonder what Faf du Plessis’s parents were thinking?!)
Anyway, post Faf, our cakes, breads and cookies would soon appear before us. If ever there was a situation that merited the phrase, “hot from the oven”, this was IT! Round sponges, rectangular loaves, square biscuits, concentric circles of chelsea buns and swiss rolls, straight lines of breadsticks…THIS is how geometry should be taught!
I think I’d probably go back and do that course again just to revel in the aromas from that kitchen! The scent of fresh loaves of white bread baking patiently in their moulds, just like newborns wrapped in warm, fluffy blankets. The joyous fragrance of hot vanilla sponge just coming out of the oven. The heady aroma of cinnamon escaping the apple pie surrounding us like a warm hug. These are happy memories that will stay with me forever. And us students got to inhale all of that at the same time (and so did our deprived eager-beavers waiting patiently at home).
This course gave me my first intro to the world of cream cakes (still my favourite desserts to this day), black forest cake, pineapple pastry and orange nougat pastry. I bought a small oven at home so that I could prove that my baking skills were better than my cooking skills.
I started baking every day. My ‘helpful’ family came up with a rating system for my early efforts that ranged from:
- Failed
- Failed badly
- Inedible (yes, it was a steep learning curve)
My melting-moment cookies were renamed to ‘the dentist in a moment’ cookies. My choux pastry was referred to as ‘shoe’ pastry after one bite (hardly creative). My announcements like “today I’m trying Bachelor’s Button and Vatrouchka” were met with peals of laughter (hey I wasn’t the one that came up with those ridiculous names).
Slowly but surely I got better at baking and started honing my skills (which, in those days, just meant reading more cookbooks). Friends who had been “poisoned” by my cooking early on began eating their words. In the days of yore, all you had was validation in the form of words from friends and family (no encouraging ‘likes’ on Facebook or Instagram). That’s what got me excited to get up and cook some more.
I attended another bakery class where they taught us how to make cheesecakes. One of the main ingredients was something called chakka. I had no idea what it was and how it was made. It was news to me to learn that yoghurt that was hung for couple of hours could turn into something that looked like an ugly lump, and that ugly lump could then turn into this delicious creamy dessert! Apparently chakka was a substitute for cream cheese, which was considered an ‘imported’ item, very scarcely available in Bombay in those days.
When one of my aunts got me a block of Philadelphia Cream Cheese from the US, my excitement level was through the roof! Imported cream cheese! It was worth its weight in gold (and maybe even more). I called up my instructor at Sophia to ask exactly how to use it in a cheesecake because I didn’t want to ruin the one precious block of cream cheese that had come all the way from America. Spoiler alert - I did mess it up and was very deflated. No one had told me I needed to reduce the quantity of gelatin (because the chakka version needed more gelatin than the one with cream cheese one). Oh well, I lived and I learnt.
Now you can get every kind of dessert or chocolate or cheese at your doorstep, but where’s the charm in that? Where is the thrill of getting a box of Ferrero Rocher that someone brought for you from ‘abroad’, rationing them, coveting them, hiding them from your loved ones and savouring each piece because you didn’t know when you would get another box.
I am grateful for my struggles with confectionary, but what about the kids today? Too much, too soon, too fast. Now what? Does this lack of embargo lead to lesser appreciation for everyday pleasures? What will nostalgia mean to this generation 20 years from now?
I, in the meantime, will sit with my vanilla sponge cake, my Brooke Bond chai, and my Malory Towers (yes, I still sit with my worn out, dog-eared, torn book from my childhood).
I will continue to bask in the smooth-like-satin tones of Arnold George Dorsey…also known by his fans as Engelbert Humperdinck - the man from Madras😊.
Superb Reshma! Nostalgia for me is the Ferrero Rocher stickers by your bedside mirror!! Who does that??!!😅😅😅