Pandemic gives fresh purpose to solitary cooking | Economic Times

In the 2019 indie film Axone about young Northeasterners in Delhi trying to cook a dish that many people in the city find offensively smelly, they finally find refuge on a terrace after being denied access to most kitchen spaces. As they cook the makeshift way, as many tenants of Delhi’s barsatis have done, the smells dissipate in the open air, allowing them to finish making the dish.Katharine Whitehorn would have appreciated this solution. In 'Cooking in a Bedsitter', her best-selling book from 1961 for young people learning how to cook in their first rented accommodations (bedsitters, or bed-cum-sitting rooms, were the UK’s cramped equivalent of Delhi’s rooftop barsatis), she wrote that smells were “almost the worst problem of all — and there are no foolproof answers”. It helped to open the windows right from the start, not just when the smells became overwhelming, to put lids on pots tight, keep chunks of stale bread to absorb smells and to keep checking stored food to make sure it wasn’t going bad.This might seem a rather dismal way to cook, but Whitehorn knew it was not. When she died last week, aged 92, she could look back on a career as one of the first prominent women journalists in the UK and one who had seen profound changes in society.Those bedsits might have been cramped, but they represented freedom for a generation of women who could aspire to leave home for the first time, live alone (not in strictly run hostels) and even have men visit them unsupervised. The first section in Whitehorn’s book covered basic cooking, but the second was titled “Cooking To Impress” and included a section on “Asking Him Up.”80304385Whitehorn also had advice for male bedsit occupants, although a bit more perfunctory: when “Asking Her Up”, make sure the room was warm beforehand (for obvious reasons) and, if a meal was involved “DO NOT ASK HER TO WASH UP” (caps in the original). In her preface to a special 2008 edition, she admitted being surprised to learn that the book “was also useful to older people who found themselves on their own and didn’t know the quantities for one person”. At a naval club she was thanked by officers who said they were given copies of her book to use, perhaps because galley kitchens on boats are also cramped cooking spaces.An earlier book, Kathleen Le Riche’s 'Cooking Alone' (1954), which is dedicated “For those who wish to and those who must find solace in solitude” is actually structured for different types of solitary cooks. While one section is for the Bed-Sitter, others are for the Old Lady, Bachelor, Happy-Potterer, Grass-Widower, Career Woman, Convalescent, Student and Lonely Mother. The recipes are rather haphazardly spread across these types — fish for the Grass-Widower (a husband temporarily without his wife), eggs along with the Convalescent, chicken and pasta with the Career-Woman, but they all show how well one can eat by oneself.Perhaps the most satisfaction in Le Riche’s categories is found with the Happy-Potterer, someone quite happy to be alone, since the regular rules of life no longer need apply and they can live as they wish, even experimenting with dishes like Fried Rabbit with Aubergines and Prunes. In her essay “Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant”, the American novelist Laurie Colwin also extolled both that versatile vegetable, and how “cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest”. Get people to admit what they make for themselves and “they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep-fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam”.Solitary eating has always seemed rather suspect in India. Depending on one’s perspective, those who do it are seen as sadly alone or dangerously unattached from family responsibilities. And yet it happens — in hostels where you learn to cook papads between two towels heated by an electric iron or in paying-guest rooms where a hot-water kettle allows instantnoodle innovations or the heights of barsati biryani cooked on kerosene stoves on terraces. Indian students abroad once learned how to do it with recipes written on aerogrammes from their mothers.80304411There are also perhaps questionable cultural quirks, where people learn how to cook because of menstruation taboos that prevent the women of the family from cooking or because they can’t find foods appropriate to their caste or community diets. In The Days of the Beloved, Harriet Ronken Lynton and Mohini Rajan’s evocation of the Hyderabad of the sixth Nizam, they write about how Maharaja Kishen Pershad, a senior Hindu noble at the court was once travelling with the Nizam when a rail accident separated him from his Brahmin cook. Unable to eat with the rest of the court, he managed to cook plain rice for himself and ate with pickles procured from a nearby village: “He determined then never to allow himself to fall into another such predicament, causing anxiety to others as well as discomfort to himself. As soon as he returned home, he set about learning cookery.”In rather different circumstances, the pandemic has given fresh purpose to solitary cooking. In April, soon after the first and most severe lockdown was imposed, Mumbai-based journalist and blogger Peter Griffin put out an appeal on Facebook for good cooks to come to the aid of those who “rely on either cooks who come to our homes or restaurants, take-away and delivery. And we, if we are being sensible, are asking our cooks to stay home (and not cutting their salaries) and not going to restaurants… So, people of the first kind, would you like to share simple recipes for people of the second kind?” Griffin suggested they focus on “one-potone-shot dishes” with few ingredients and little prep needed, and also “please do include some recipes for people who don’t have full kitchens, like paying guests, who may just have an electric hob in their room”.Griffin was soon flooded with recipes, and tips like all the ways an electric rice cooker could be used to make meals of different kinds. It was the kind of resourceful cooking that Whitehorn and Le Riche had profiled in their books, even if there wasn’t much chance of Asking Someone Up. As new waves of Covid-19 threaten to rise across the world, and countries go into lockdown again, it is a good time to be remind oneself of the lessons to be learned from solitary, yet satisfying cooking.