While every Christmas past has been filled with traditional sweet-making and time with close family, this year, on another continent, I am making new memories with my partner and his family's traditions
On the left is the Vanillekipferl, a traditional Christmas cookie in Austria, where I currently am, and on the right is a plate of traditional Goan Christmas sweets, collectively called Kusvad
As I prepare for my first Christmas away from my family of origin, I've found my thoughts compulsively returning to the word 'repertoire'. Yesterday the word 'exile' showed up thrice on my Instagram feed. It is a word which is embedded with poetic immediacy. The utterance of the two syllables is enough to connote a wide register of emotions that hinge on loss, non-belonging, and forms of separation between where one is and where one ought to be were the circumstances more ideal.
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Hazelnut fudge made by me
I am exactly where I would like to be. But this doesn't mean I am immune to the gravity of the experience of exile. It is not a permanent feeling that is entrenched in my body. I am eager to be where I am. Yet, especially during this festive season, I am confronted with the enormity of the difference between this world I am still learning to inhabit and the worlds that have informed my memories. It occurs to me how so little is made of the sense of exile experienced by women who left their maternal homes for the elsewhere homes they were instrumental in setting up. Across the centuries, this form of marital migration must have reshaped so many intangible aspects of the historical mundane.
Bratapfel or roasted apple made by my father-in-law
For instance, on Tuesday morning, as I was sitting at the table of my partner's aunts Monika and Maridl helping them decorate their home-made Zelten, a composition premised on dried figs, nuts, mulled wine, rum, star anise liquor, and sour dough, I thought about how every Christmas of my girlhood and adolescence, and adulthood, until now, was defined by the ceremonious making of Christmas sweets. This year my sister sent me photographs of my parents' recipes which have been fine-tuned through the years.
Nankhatai made by my sister in India
Our family took great pride in our kusvad repertoire. Each year my mother recounted the same stories as the year before... how, when they moved to Kurla, into the apartment they bought, into the predominantly Catholic colony, she didn't know how to make many of the sweets. Some of our housewife neighbours initiated her into the art of it. Each year she would remember each one of them, calling out their names, so it felt like we were repeating gestures we had inherited from them. We were doing 'in memory of' them. Over time they became our gestures.
More Zelton made by Aunt Monika and decorated by Aunt Maridl and me
These legacies were successfully entrenched in our DNA, and have already been transmitted to the next generation. Our recipes were being constantly tweaked and modified, and this practice continues. My father's legacy is his dodol and perad recipe. Especially with dodol, it is magical to witness the confluences that account for the thick, fudgy end result that owes its substance to two textures of coconut milk and requires a continuing connection with Goa so as to source the palm jaggery that accounts for the unique silky black colour.
The Zelton made by Aunt Monika and decorated by Aunt Maridl and me
My father devised his recipe to cut down the traditional cooking time. A part of it involves having the fan on while the mixture is in the vessel on the flame upon the stove. A percentage of every Christmas was spent with each of us taking turns stirring the dodol, and the perad, so that the warm fragrance of rice-coconut-jaggery-ghee and guavas came to predominate our memories of Christmas.
This year I am performing many substitutions. Because I am aware I am possibly the only person of Goan origin across the region. Not being within a community of other Goans means that the sweets that are part of my family's repertoire either don't translate well within Alpine circumstances or the ingredients are hard to find. Instead of trying to reconstruct what is familiar to me, I have decided to embrace the newness of everything. This means I will have no Kusvad platter to flaunt. Instead, I'm merely experimenting with different recipes in an attempt to expand my repertoire. You could call it a gap year. So far I made some hazelnut fudge (which is over), date rolls, and vanilla kipferl, essentially cookies with lots of butter, ground almonds and hazelnuts, flour and sugar. I am completely overwhelmed by the boxes of kekse (cookies) that keep entering the house, gifts from friends of my in-laws. I'm relishing legends lavishly narrated to me about certain women who are known for making between 20, 40, and even 60 different types of cookies. I'm preparing to mentally savour the fine details that make my mother-in-law's Stollen different from the one the aunts make. I'm eager to finally taste the Zelten I helped decorate. Monika made 50, for her family, friends, and extended social circles.
I may attempt Anita's, my sister's mother-in-law's coconut cake recipe, since I managed to get hold of dessicated coconut. And I may try my hand at her sister-in-law, Daphne's cashew nut rocks recipe with almond flour instead. I'm not putting too much pressure on myself to dazzle anyone. I'm busy feeling deeply floored by the continued ingenuity of housewives the world over, who, by persistently performing the emotional and physical labour of broadening their repertoires, have managed to transform their exile into culinary legacies, invisibly shaping history.
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. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper
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