Getting gas

No, this is not a description of digestive processes gone awry, but a situational comedy of sorts. I had made big plans for my Sunday yesterday, deciding what I would make and then eat for lunch days before the lunch actually arrived. So I was busy cooking up quite a bit of a storm in the morning, in between coochieing with Small Cat and hanging up the laundry, humming quietly to myself as the dal bubbled away on one burner and the bhindi did its thing on another. I had one eye on the stove and the other on the strata I was assembling for a future dinner, layering old bread and grated cheese with a spicy blend of tomatoes, onions, garlic and, to add that Indian touch that Madhur Jaffrey (I just interviewed her, hence the reference) and others talk so delightedly about, some ginger and kothmir. Just as I was whipping up the eggs with some fabulously bland mustard I had acquired, I heard a gentle popping sound and looked over at the burners. The flame was perilously low and I ran to switch on the main and relight the fire. To no avail. We had run out of gas. Being brave and also having watched it being done so many times before, I went about getting the cylinder changed, having demanded Father’s presence, just to make sure that I was doing it right. But the alternative was also empty. Oops.

There was no major kitchen drama or disaster here. I finished my cooking on the electric range, skipped a couple of steps here and there and served up a more simple lunch than I had intended to. And dinner was even more simple, with poor Father given peanut butter and jelly on toasted soft white bread, while I ate toast and cream cheese with, mercifully, chocolate pudding afterwards for both of us to relieve the monotony. The gas cylinders arrived this morning and all is back to normal in our household.

But it gave me cause to think about life, the universe and cooking methods. While today I am lucky enough to have the alternative of electricity, what happened before that was available? I dimply remember Mother saying very rude and unladylike words in the days before we got our range, when the fuel source apart from cooking gas was not easy to get. She has to deal with an aged and recalcitrant kerosene stove, which I have fond memories of – not only did the food taste funny, it was very awkward to pick up whenever I helped clean the servants’ room, which is where it was stored for many years. It was also home to a large and curious spider, which popped its rounded head out of the kerosene storage space whenever I lifted the stove, which could explain to some extent where my dislike for the eight-legged creatures comes from – to get leered at and to have your fingers scraped rather painfully when you are only trying to help is all a bit much, don’t you think?

And then, of course, there was coal, or even wood, if you want to be even more primitive and eco-unfriendly. I have eaten many an American barbecue, where the host (or the cook, whichever came first) was proud of the fact that the grill was heated by ‘real wood chips’ and the coal was flavoured (albeit artificially) by the manmade essence of some exotic and perhaps endangered wood. It just tasted smoky and burned to me. I am afraid I had no discrimination in this. You see so many families in Mumbai, squatting by the railway tracks or living along the main roads through the city, cooking on scraps of wooden crate or twigs from a nearby timberyard or even old cardboard boxes. And you wonder what, in this day and age of microwave ovens and electric ranges, you are really complaining about.

Except that I was not complaining, just wondering what I would do if there was a power cut just when we run out of gas…