Biting through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America's Heartland

17. Bishshwayya

17 Bishshwayya T he recipe cards I wrote that day felt like the sum of what I carried forward into my life from a previous distinct ethnicity. Six pieces of cardstock, small enough to fit in my pocket, were distilled from generations of my family. A month later, armed with my RECIDEX and a sun hat, I set off. At twenty-two in North Africa, I delighted in giving and receiving hospitality . I had never shared my Indian dishes, as my mother had, outside of my one high school dinner for friends, and yet in the hot Sahara, around a two-burner hot plate in a cement box kitchen, I began to actively shape my food narrative, to give and receive, to relish this exchange of food culture. Before leaving, I did share other foods, though. For Terry’s twenty-fifth birthday, I made my first attempt at a performance cake, one that was showy and tasty. It was our first birthday together and it was cakes that made birthdays in the Midwest, not my family’s milk-based Indian sweet, payesh. We lived at Hillcrest Hall in Columbia, Missouri, where Terry was the head resident for the dorm. I was finishing my undergraduate degree at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. It was just thirty-four days after our wedding, and I was primed. I found “Spice Layer Cake with Brown Sugar Frosting” in a dessert cookbook of my mother’s. My imagination bloomed with the possibility of spice cake magnificence. However, reality slid its two layers apart Bishshwayya 135 in the August Missouri heat as I carried the cake platter across campus for the surprise, resulting in a pool of brown sugar icing dripping messily around the sides. It was like a naked cake with a hoopskirt. Meals at my husband’s German/Swedish family events had distinct traditions , too, and included sweet Jell-O salads that surfaced as green and pink concoctions at the end of a table filled with roasts and chicken, rolls and green beans. Direct from Grandma Sanning to us without mercy, I always thought. Jell-O salad was not in my six cards. Of course, Terry’s clan also produced lovely dishes: beef brisket made to perfection, green beans with vinegar and bacon, mashed potatoes and gravy, Kathy’s cheesecake, Susie’s sweet potato casserole. They were such good cooks, in fact, that the first time I hosted them after returning from Tunisia I nervously practiced beforehand. In my trial run, I chose roast, thinking it was something they would like even though I had never made one in my life nor ever witnessed such a hunk of meat being cooked. The trial went well. I was shaky but gaining confidence. The day of the party, I carefully pulled off the tinfoil, plucked out the cloves, and poured the onion-soup gravy out of the crockpot. Dry as toast, but my sisters-in-law ate every bite. There are all sorts of ties between food and family. Every year at Thanksgiving , a local Columbia, Missouri, radio announcer talks about her family’s horseradish cranberry sauce, in its fourth generation. She, too, must have lost an elder with an accent, thick shoes, and perhaps German, Bohemian, Swedish, or Irish ways. She, too, is reduced to passing her ancestry on with a recipe. My husband’s family has also lost the mores, dress, means of work, language, and, in some ways, the religious customs of their ancestors. It has been a gradual change, like that of the culture in the United States as a whole, not some huge upheaval, like a tooth being pulled, the gum sucking at the lost root. Through all these changes in culture, my plate did speak to me. No matter where I was, the foods there revealed so much: the landscape from which they came, the trees that fruited, the methods of harvest. For me, India’s foods brought to mind vast valleys with square rice fields, drooping trees in hazy heated air, saffron colors of fabric, peacocks, even, strutting in a road. These foods were the stuff of love. “There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread,” Mahatma Gandhi said. Perhaps this feeling is the origin of the Bengali words like bhagwan and 136 Bishshwayya thakur that applied to cooks in Bengal. I know...