The Internet Personified: Mistress of spices

when it's cold, outsiiiide, and i'm heeere in bedddd

Summer was supposed to be here by now. Oh, we’ve had a few golden days, that’s what K and I call them—Golden Days—when the sun comes out and it’s not too hot, but not cold, you’re perfectly comfortable in your skin, you’re wearing one of your nice summer dresses, dresses you can only wear a few weeks out of the year…

Anyway, it’s been cold. Since I deleted the Instagram and Facebook apps off my phone, my morning routine includes looking at the weather. Our bedroom faces the back garden, no sun, so I can’t tell through the cracks in the curtains. Is it grey outside, is it raining or will I be in a good mood? People always told me the worst thing about living in Berlin was the weather, but I thought they meant the winter. That’s easy to understand, the sun goes down at 3 pm, there’s no light before then anyway and everything is so bone chillingly cold that you can feel it everywhere. But in the summer? When I’m supposed to get my three months fill of parks and lakes and sunshine on my skin? It feels like something’s been taken away from me, withheld. And I can’t make myself feel better by thinking, at least I’m not wearing my thick jacket and my hat, because I wore those last week.

What I can do is cook. Do you know that Germany has the largest rising number of Indians across Europe? There’s some new visa laws that makes it easier to migrate here, and so they—we—are everywhere. Often I hear Malayalam at the S Bahn station, Bhojpuri as a cycle delivery driver passes me, Hindi from a family crossing the road as the same time as me. I don’t want to gatekeep, even if I could. More Indians means only one thing to me: better food.

I live above a fancy organic supermarket, am across the road from another large chain and down the road, only a few steps more is the cheaper version. I’m surrounded by supermarkets, and yet the only place I can find fresh green chilli and coriander is the little Asian shop. Dosa batter is, of course, a more specialty food, and for that I go to the large Indian supermarket about a 15 minute walk away who are flexible with their prices, by which I mean, a product could increase in price by the next time I visit. For everything else, I improvise. All of us who cook Indian food here use tinned chickpeas and tinned rajma (and good lord, if I never have to see another channa dish at a potluck it will be too soon). Flatbread for rotis. Tinned sardine and mackerel for fish curries. For curry cut meat, I look for goulash. That kind of thing.

Today I thought I’d eat bhagara baingain. Eggplants are widely available in all German supermarkets, proudly marked with a little German flag sticker. But none of the shops had the little ones—not the organic shop, not the regular one. I realised I’d have to go down to the Turkish shop a few blocks away. And since it’s the only Turkish shop in this area, I can’t be sure if they’ll stock it. So I did what I always do, stuffed a shopping bag inside my purse and put off my craving until I find a store on my wanderings.

My second option was a dal makhani, but looking up recipes showed me I’d have to soak the dal for about seven hours before I cook it. I could soak it, but I won’t be able to eat it tonight.

Another thing I haven’t mentioned is how many Indian restaurants exist in this city. SO MANY. On my street alone there’s THREE. I don’t eat at any of these places because a) there’s this awful overdone garam masala smell in the air like something out of a cheap dhaba each time I pass, b) the menus look awful, for eg: lamb curry with pineapples, lychee and coconut milk. and c) when I walk past sometimes I see people eating at these establishments and the food does not look good. (Note: I am still curious about one of them across the main road because the bar is lit in orange green and white LED lights with a giant OM in the centre.)

I’m apparently a good cook now? No, I’ll stop being modest—I’m actually a pretty good cook, especially for someone who taught themselves using the book Instant Pot Indian Cooking as baby steps during the pandemic. Before that I dabbled, but I really only got confident a few years ago. The trick is to be a really picky eater and moving to a city where the restaurant food isn’t really that great unless you want a pizza or a döner, and realising you’d rather spend your funds on two drinks and maybe some Vinted shopping instead of bad outside food. I can make Italian (ok ok pasta) and Chinese and Mexican but I’m really good at Indian because it’s what I crave the most. A grey day is rasam rice with fried fish (Berlin is also awful re: fish, very hard to find, so I have been scouring the frozen section for something not too prohibitive and also tasty. Recently I found a few cheap(er) (fish is expensive) cuts, what they call sea salmon which I’d never heard of, but which is a v nice white fleshed fish, which when cut into smaller fillets at home makes a damn good fish fry) or my aunt’s chicken curry. I teeter between my histories, Telengana to Malayali, Malayali to Punjabi.

I used to think I had no actual skills to keep me alive in an apocalypse. I think about apocalypses a lot, I’m only recently learning that not everyone else turns on their phone after a long plane ride and wonders if the world has ended while they were in the air. ANYway, so I used to think well, I can’t nurse (first aid, not breast, but not that either) or hunt or build shelters or any of those things so no one will want me in their Apocalypse Team, unless they love me, and we know that love will only take us so far when there’s a nuclear fallout and everyone’s competing for food. Or zombies are attacking. Or the moon has come a little closer to earth and all the electricity is out and we have to make our way to safety and a colony in the country by walking. Like no one wants a novelist, even if they are a funny and charming novelists whose books are also funny and charming and full of the poignancy of LIFE. (sorry, I have to, hard times.) But now I can cook! And I have a masala dabba and everything so if you have me on your Apocalypse Team I will make you very nice Indian food out of whatever ingredients we have handy.

I’m getting to be one of those unbearable creatures who reads recipe books and blogs and bookmarks things and has speciality ingredients. My spices are mostly imported from India, when I go someplace new, I like to buy a new ingredient to cook with. I know. I’m sorry. I used to be cooler.

But now I can cook and I use it to make friends. Come on over, I say. I’ll make you a nice Indian meal. I can bribe people with food—unless it’s channa, everyone sees through channa. (I make a really nice choley-kulcha style channa but choley has become ubiquitous so I only make it privately when no one’s coming over, and only when I’m uninspired and have nothing except these tins of beans.)

It just thunderstormed violently. The cobblestoned street outside is shiny with rain. Tomorrow it goes up to 26, but with storms again. The day after it goes down to 21. I’ll eat my mum’s recipe for vindaloo, she does it with mutton, I use pork. Maybe I’ll soak some urad dal, make my dal makhani after all. Maybe I’ll find my little eggplants. Maybe I’ll defrost some fish, make a fish curry using the Lulu Mall fish curry masala mix I brought back from Kochi.

But today I bought frozen pizza—ham and mushroom—and poured out some wine from a bottle I opened ten days ago, still good if you put it in the fridge. Today I’m watching The Good Wife and writing this to you because I’ve seen it before so it can stay on while I do other things. This is what happens when I don’t look at Instagram or Facebook while I watch TV, I have more time to write to you. It’s cold outside, but at least I can cook.

BONUS: here are some of the recipes I have on regular rotation off the internet. (Most of my old faithfuls are from cookbooks or asking my mum to send me something on Whatsapp and screenshotting it and adding it to my Keep Notes app):

1. Khatti daal

2. Pasta puttanesca (I use tinned sardines because I can’t find anchovies)

3. Kerala egg curry

4. And okay, okay, since I’m never going to make it for you unless you specifically request it, here’s the choley recipe as well.

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Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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