In the pot

It’s amazing how quickly you get used to having a whole kitchen full of pots and pans to create feasts in. It’s even more amazing how you get used to having just one pan in which to cook up a multi-course dinner. And it’s always astonishing to me how easy it is to forget that you had just that one pan when you get back to your large wardrobe of generations of cookware.

As I grew up in my parents’ home, I had many years’ worth of accumulated kitchenware to play with. There was stuff that they had been given by my grandmother – heavy aluminium pans and British-label silverware. Then there was stuff that they had collected on their first stint abroad, from coloured Pyrex to Revereware that is impossibly difficult to find today and almost unaffordable. Then there was stuff that we gathered over various trips to various parts of the world, from Arcopal to Robex to Corning to Silit to goodness knows what else, including a paella pan, an electric crepe maker, a very large non-stick wok and miscellaneous baking dishes that – I think- have even today never been used. Then there was stuff I bought when I was studying abroad, from standard-issue Corelle to more pricey Dansk – that was, frankly, a deal between a family friend and my mother – lovely flower-figured glass plates and heavy glass tumblers that people still covet.

And when I moved away to live for a while in Delhi, my kitchen trousseau got drastically reduced to a battered pressure cooker, a large and unwieldy frying pan and a small pot that did little more than just boil water and, occasionally and very temperamentally, boil rice. I managed to cook up meals for myself and my cat with happy equanimity and, once in a while when they came to stay, my parents or, rarely, a close friend. Anyone else had to either bring their own food, we ordered out or drove somewhere to eat. All my efforts were concentrated on that frying pan, which would probably have been relegated to the pan in which wax was melted to shape candles in my own parental home. But it managed to conjure up all sorts of feasts and treats, from wonderfully low-cal yet rich gajar ka halwa to esoteric stir-fries and even occasional batches of dosas and puris. Don’t ever ask how, I could not tell you. It was magic, a spell or two thought up by necessity, from which invention so serendipitously springs.

Once I flew home again, life expanded its horizons to cupboards full of pots and pans of almost every description. It was like having a whole new life, so much to use and so little to use it all for. But I got more inventive and yet more efficient, reducing the washing up to just one or two pans that went back into their home-recesses after doing their job.