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

Prologue

Prologue I am always combusting something. I learned this from Joan Ruvinsky, a meditation teacher. If you throw wood into a fire, it burns; put food into your stomach, it does the same. For years, I did not notice that I was a version of larger elements. Blood runs through veins like rivers, through capillaries like lesser tributaries, some unseen under the skin, just as the earth’s circulatory system trundles along into its vast, pooling heart, the ocean. The planet’s fluidity mimics the watery element in my mouth that intimately creates taste. Sound itself reveals secrets and animates air. I stand in twilight, the wind blowing over the Missouri farm where my husband and I now live. Soft, turbulent, whispery and still by turns, the wind moans between trees down the drive, snaps near my ear as an owl skims past just out of sight, mimics breath. In and out, my earth expands and contracts with all the breathers everywhere: a rhythmic pulsing that vibrates the world. I’ve heard meditators say you can hear that pulsing tone, and I routinely hear and break it by a stray thought about the dog’s shots or the milk forgotten or whatever is the matter with Aunt T—, until that pulse disappears, spinning away into mist and hope. And so, it seems to me, everything can be broken: into duplicity, into multiplicity. Science shows us molecules when we see whole people, neurons when there is blood, hydrogen particles in water. What, then, is irreducible, indivisible? I add my personality to those of a group and watch as the relationships settle into a new pattern, changing the surface of things like ripples on a great body of water. I use a kitchen dropper and mete out almond extract, or vanilla, or orange into a recipe. If it drops into liquid, it transforms itself xiv Prologue into the whole. Water to water. But a rock outside my door dropped onto the lawn stays separate. Our bodies are the same, separate, specious in life and assimilating to the great good earth at death, releasing our spirits at last to a nether place. Until then, all I have of indivisibility is secondhand knowledge. In my search for an indivisible future that works, I keep spiraling back to a connection between myself, the earth, and India. Ancient cultures have never abandoned this interconnectedness and now, at midlife, it keeps rising up to meet me, something writer and activist for ecology and culture Helena Norberg-Hodge once noted. I began by thinking that growing up Indian in Kansas was mine alone. I now see that all families are small pockets of culture that hand their rituals, personalities and gifts, heritage and love down to the next generation through food rituals. Food holds memory. It holds story. It can represent who we are. Usually, there are wider cultural events and habits that help shore up family traditions: Fourth of July celebrations mimic independence battles, and the food to celebrate (corn on the cob and fried chicken, perhaps) follows the farm cycle of pullets ready to become fryers and sweet corn planted in time to harvest and serve. Children in the Midwest learn that story early. For me, isolated in my pocket with no similar families nearby, food rituals became the only way my heritage was passed on. Northern Indian Bengali tradition came to me in Kansas via tomato chutney and keema curry, through the order in which spices were added to a dish and, indeed, which spices were selected. Northern India came to me through the use of whole grains for health stemming from Ayurvedic times: yogurt for digestion, vegetables combined in particular ways. In the founding texts of Ayurvedic medicine, written down in the first century BCE, the treatises decree that the body needs to be kept in a state of equilibrium with its environment. We should, the Caraka-Samhita and SusrutaSamhita say, adjust our diets to seasonal variations in climate and produce, and six principal tastes divided into two groups: hot (pungent, acidic, salty) and cold (sweet, astringent, bitter). While the principles of Ayurvedic medicine shaped Indian cooking across its many regions, gradually the modern idea of mixing hot and cold foods in the same meal or dish to create a sublime blend of the six essential tastes emerged. I had no idea that Ayurvedic medicine was the culinary foundation of what my mother did in the kitchen until I was an adult: that long...