Feeding oneself, an act of self-love

As a full-time working mother with no access to childcare and cooking help, preparing meals in the short span when I am home alone is challenging. Viewing this task as more than a chore helps

One of the most understated luxuries that most middle-class Indians living in India have access to is the ability to hire a home cook. It is understated because it is not perceived as a privilege, given the easy accessibility of labour and the ensuing low cost because of the supply-demand nexus. It is also often a necessity, given how much time working professionals in cities spend commuting to work and back, and the inability to do regularly stock up on groceries. It is not unimaginable to consider finding someone who will come to your home and make chapattis, some vegetable or a rajma chawal. I have, however, always found it challenging to tell someone what to cook for me. It runs counter to my conditioning. I like to decide for myself after consulting what I have in my fridge. I enjoy the process of buying vegetables and considering at that moment how I would use them. I am ever conscious of the intuitive logic at play in the whole business of meal planning.

During the decade I lived in Delhi, my female friends and I mused a lot about what Carrie Bradshaw had termed ‘secret single behaviour’. Many of us were the first women in our families to truly live independently, not in hostels but in apartments. We were running our households for ourselves and not in the service of a husband. We wore this as a badge of honour. Still, many of my friends had home cooks long before I could afford to and even long after I could. In the beginning, I felt envy, but then I realised I simply didn’t have it in me to make demands on another person, even if they were being employed by me. My friends could ask their cooks to cut fruits for them, to fill up their water bottles in summer, to make them tea or coffee. Me, I felt programmed to do all this myself. Because my upbringing didn’t accommodate any forms of entitlement. I had learned, through cooking with my parents, that you needed at most an hour to cook a full-fledged meal. If you planned well, you needed even less. Why pay someone to do what you very well can do yourself? My father would spend a few hours every alternate week making all the Goan masalas for our curries and freezing them, so that prepping only involved chopping an onion and defrosting the masala. The prawns would have been portioned off in the fridge, too. The rice cooked itself. The key to eating well was learning to organise one’s kitchen, knowing where things are, and keeping track of what needed replenishing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the significance of such culinary inheritances as I currently navigate cooking our meals as a full-time working mother with no access to childcare, cooking help, and with my in-laws currently travelling. I often wonder if it would all be easier if I could only settle for more basic meals—chicken nuggets and fries? I’ve been exploring the various manifestations of the ‘girl dinner’ trend on TikTok that has adult women showing off what they eat at home, a way of normalising the partaking of unexceptional food for solo dinners, like bread and cheese, or pasta with olive oil. Of course, since the trend became viral, around May, it has gone through an intense arc and many current videos reveal almost unhealthy eating habits. I am trying not to arrive at a verdict about it. Instead, I plan to continue to observe how the trend pans out and monitor its different offshoots. I will admit, though, that I often feel smug about my prowess in the kitchen. For me, putting less pressure on myself to cook delicious meals means that instead of pureeing the bagar to make butter chicken, I will let it be as is.

Instead of making a pulao, I will settle for jeera rice. Sometimes I go rogue and make dal without a tadka, or a tadka that’s just mustard seeds, jeera and hing. But if I’m making just dal and rice, I’ll still make a cutlet on the side, or a vegetable fritter. Unlike back in Mumbai and Delhi, where I live now in Italy, ordering in is not a feasible option. Our worst-case scenario for dinner on a Thursday or Friday evening is pizza at a pizzeria. The challenge, for me, is cooking lunch and dinner in the three-hour span when I am home alone in the morning working. It feels like a personalised version of MasterChef. I’m getting better, though. Last evening, I already roasted sliced date tomatoes and paprika and boiled gnocchetti pasta. All I need to do is mix them with the stuffed olives I bought and warm it in the oven. Instead of a sauce, we will eat burrata, the ‘butter’ component of mozzarella. It’s creamy, rich and has a texture that is silky and buttery. It’s nothing fancy. And I would have spent a total of ten minutes prepping.

I wonder if substituting the word dinner with ‘feeding oneself’ causes a shift in perspective, transforming it from a chore to a gesture of self-love.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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