The notebook of time travel

The pages of the hard-bound, lined notebook are starting to yellow, the binding is beginning to unravel, and my memories about what’s written inside have already faded.

Some detective work is in order.

On the cover it says “Sophia High School", Bangalore, 200 pages. The cover label is blank, but the first page provides early and late ownership details. “Samar P," it says in an uncertain, wavering hand, clearly mine, scribbled in pencil. I can guess how old I must have been because I see a similar wandering style employed by my five-year-old as she struggles to master cursive writing (yes, cursive, and I am so happy that her kindergarten insists they learn it in this age of keyboards).

Below my name is dramatically more self-assured writing. “Shailaja P. Halarnkar," it says, inscribed neatly by a ballpoint pen, decorated with waving daisies and falling snowflakes. Indeed, my mother was in her 30s then, her handwriting round and orderly.

Inside, as I turn the pages, the clues coalesce. There is a “Hindi test" in my wavering hand, although the Hindi letters are firmly inscribed. 13/15, my teacher has written in red, with her signature—undecipherable—and the date: 22.2.73. I was eight years old.

The notebook has no further academic exercises. The rest of it is given to recipes—just recipes and more recipes. Most of it is in English, some of it is in Marathi. I understand that a few have cultural connotations, such as dalichya peethache dhokle (lentil dough, um, dhoklas), but why is “French dressing" in Marathi? My mother cannot remember, but I realize that all the Marathi recipes are vegetarian. Perhaps there was a logic that she used at the time.

My recipes are a record of my pre-teen years, further clues coming from receipts and things carefully tucked into the book, recipes scribbled behind them, of course. I see a “Mysore State Arts & Crafts Emporium" receipt from 1979 (what’s behind? Alu wadi, in Marathi, colocasia-leaf cutlets). I see a flyer, in Chinese—possibly the dialect spoken by the Hakka people who formed Bengaluru’s Chinese community—saying, “Good life, instant Chinese chow, egg: Recipe on the reverse."

To me, the notebook is a time machine. The wavering handwriting begins to gather itself and, eventually, becomes much like my mother’s: round, confident and neat. I know my mother—a working physiotherapist—did not particularly pamper her two boys, putting them to work at home and equipping us with skills that allow us to cook, clean and keep us grounded.

Now, more than four decades later, I utilize my ease in the kitchen to preach the gospel of male culinary ability and self-sufficiency. I evangelize, I hector, and I lecture. Regular readers of this column know the sermon from my mount: Get your sons in the kitchen, scrub their minds and lives of male privilege and watch this country transform.

Obviously, the home-making skills I was imbued with laid the foundation for my thinking. But it all began with this school notebook, converted into a recipe record and shared over the years by my mother and I.

Some recipes are cut out of magazines and neatly pasted with Sellotape. I recognize the tremulous fonts of the magazines printed on letter presses, the type set by hand: Femina (“alive") and Eve’s Weekly (“dead"). We snipped recipes from both. There is no butter paneer or malai chicken kofta. Instead, you will find fried fish (a la Bertole), guisado of oysters and steamed lobsters—this being the 1970s, even a seemingly healthy entrée like the lobster prescribes half a cup (yes, cup) of salad oil.

Recipes fill half the book, about 100 pages. Some of the older ones, written in ink, are fading. Most are neatly written, a few are scrawled hastily on small notepad pages, probably gathered in the course of languid conversations during evening visits to so-and-so “aunty" and “uncle"—in the days before television, when the roads were empty, dropping in on friends was a leading form of entertainment, and life was gentler and kinder. One such note (mayonnaise) offers a clue to the last recipe: 2 August 1983. It is in my mother’s hand. I am 18. My last entry is long done.

Until recently, I never really thought too deeply about this book. It was just there, travelling across India and our combined lifetimes. Sometimes, we gave it attention; at other times, we tired of it. It spent years packed away in a black trunk. When I wrote a book on my kitchen adventures, I used it chiefly as a prop, an actor, in my story. I never looked very closely at the recipes, which we thought were outdated, and I can see why.

There’s the “Satin pie", with a cup of maida, 2 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp sugar. There’s a “Sunday fling", with a dozen sausages (pork, of course, no one had heard of chicken sausages), half cup of cheese powder and 12 rashers of bacon. There are salads of cheese and ham and lots of basic recipes—richly laden with “2 cups of oil" or “2 cups of mayonnaise"—that a 10-year-old can attempt to make and eat without genetic retribution.

And so it goes.

I have the book with me today because I want my daughter to eat what I once did—and eat what I once cooked. I pick the simple “Fish and eggs", with a few modern modifications, cutting back on the 2 tbsp of oil and 2 tbsp of butter that my recipe prescribes. When I take the notebook away from my mother’s library—stored with other yellowing, loose recipes in a ziplock—she frowns: “Hey, where are you taking that? It has precious recipes." Oh, relax, I’ll bring it back, I say.

But she is right. It is precious to both of us.

Here’s my dilemma though. I would have liked to pass the time machine on to my son, to teach him what I learnt about cooking, running a home, ensuring there is good, fragrant food on the table and making sure his wife—that is, if he were to be a heterosexual—could really spread her wings. I do not have a son though, so I will pass our notebook on to my daughter, and she will learn all that I know. But I don’t want her to cook for a man every day.

Perhaps I should make sure she does not start a recipe book.

Fish and eggs

Serves 2-3 (or 4 children)

Ingredients

450g fish fillet—pomfret, sole, singhara or any other fish with firm flesh

1 medium onion, chopped finely

2 tbsp fresh coriander or parsley, chopped

4 eggs, beaten

3 tbsp flour

2 tbsp vegetable or olive oil

Salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste

Method

Wash and pat the fish dry. Cut into small pieces. In a brown paper bag (or ziplock), place flour and mix in salt and pepper. Put a few pieces of fish at a time in the bag. Toss well so that the fish is coated evenly, and take out. Heat 1 tbsp oil in a non-stick pan, fry the onion until golden. Separately shallow-fry the fish in 1 tbsp of oil until golden on both sides.

Grease a shallow baking dish. Place the fish and sprinkle with fried onion. To the beaten eggs, add a pinch of salt and black pepper, coriander or parsley, and pour over the fish, making holes in the fish with a skewer for the egg to seep in. Bake for 5 minutes in a pre-heated oven at 200 degrees Celsius.

This is a column on easy, inventive cooking from a male perspective. Samar Halarnkar writes the fortnightly column Frontier Mail for Mint and is the author of The Married Man’s Guide To Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures. He tweets at @samar11.