Apron Strings

My mom and I at a fam­ily wed­ding.  It’s a fam­ily tra­di­tion for one of the pre-wedding events to turn into a small food fight, and that’s what’s all over us.

I come from a fam­ily where the kitchen has been the domain of women for count­less gen­er­a­tions.  As a child, I remem­ber being in the kitchen with my mom and my aun­ties as they cooked our food, gig­gled, shared recipes, con­fided in each other and gos­siped about each other.  The kitchen was (and con­tin­ues to be) where the action was, the source of tempt­ing smells, the joy­ful cluck­ing of a group of women and deli­cious things to eat.  This team of women catered every spe­cial occa­sion and fam­ily gath­er­ing we had, fry­ing samosas, rolling rotis and mak­ing chut­neys with a sort of duti­ful generosity.

As I grew older, I was put to work in the kitchen too.  One of the first things I remem­ber doing was seal­ing samosas with a flour water paste and my lit­tle 6-year old fin­ger.  As a kid and teenager, I was the prep cook in this kitchen, peel­ing pota­toes, trim­ming chilies, grat­ing car­rots and grind­ing spices and aro­mat­ics for my mom and my aun­ties.  I say prep cook, because I never worked at the stove, where the magic really hap­pened. I was part of the labour force behind pro­cess­ing all those raw ingre­di­ents.  But there was always the thought/hope in my mind that at some point in the future, I’d be a mother and an aunty and would also know how to put veg­eta­bles, aro­mat­ics, meat and spices together in this same way.

When I was in my teens, I started to pay more atten­tion to the con­ver­sa­tions in the kitchen, and would be told sto­ries about how my mom and aun­ties were forced into work in the kitchen at very early ages by their par­ents, and didn’t have as much free­dom as I did.  My mom was cook­ing for her whole fam­ily at age 10, and one of my aun­ties was a bride at 16, and thus cooked for her in-laws at that age.  It was just expected that women knew how to cook, and would do it, the way their hus­bands and fam­i­lies liked it.

I would hear about how my aun­ties didn’t hang out with friends or take piano lessons like I did because it was expected that they would be in the kitchen, help­ing to cook.  My mom has sto­ries of tak­ing her book into the kitchen while she made tea, and of the series of times the tea boiled over the pot because she was lost in her read­ing.  I remem­ber mar­veling at the fact that I didn’t have that kind of respon­si­bil­ity, feel­ing simul­ta­ne­ously lucky and like I was some­how miss­ing out on a piece of tradition.

What was clear in the mes­sag­ing from those years in the kitchen with my mom and aun­ties was that they cooked because they had to.  Some of them liked it, while oth­ers, like my mom, would have pre­ferred to spend their time doing other things.  Luckily for me, my mom has a pretty solid work ethic.  She believes that if you’re going to do some­thing, you should do it well, and she always pro­duces deli­cious, lov­ing plates of food.

When I came home from liv­ing in India for a year, and started cook­ing school, I paid spe­cial atten­tion to those times in the kitchen, ask­ing lots of ques­tions, so eager to learn every­thing I could about my family’s cook­ing.  The cool, for­mal steril­ity of the pro­fes­sional kitchen I was learn­ing about in school was in very stark con­trast to the loud, fra­grant, use-every-bowl-in-the-house sort of action that was hap­pen­ing in my kitchen at home.  I’d watch my mom chop every­thing with a par­ing knife over the pot, and know the right amounts of spices by the way it looked in the palm of her hand.  (Side note: when I was younger, my mother told me that if I couldn’t chop with­out a cut­ting board, I was going to be use­less in the kitchen). There was a dif­fer­ent sort of intu­itive alchemy that seemed to be hap­pen­ing in the Indian kitchen, and I was deter­mined to under­stand and learn it myself.

Over the last 7 years, my love affair with food has con­tin­ued and grown.  My mom has enjoyed hand­ing the kitchen over to me, and leav­ing mag­a­zines open to pic­tures of things she’d like me to make.  For me, cook­ing is a source of joy and com­fort.  I find peace in the kitchen, and have become a com­pul­sive feeder.  I feel con­nected to the long line of women before me when I roll out rotis or fry onions, gar­lic and gin­ger into an aro­matic paste to build my cur­ries on.  But I also know that it’s dif­fer­ent with me, and I’m enjoy­ing this with a free­dom that my fore­moth­ers did not have.  Plus, I’m a professional…I get paid to do this, which is also a first.

In the spirit of duty with which my mom and aun­ties cooked for their fam­i­lies, I’ve cho­sen a really sim­ple, get-it-on-the-table-fast recipe to share.  On busy week­nights, or as a week­end snack, my mom would make toasted cheese sand­wiches for us.  In a nod to our colo­nial roots, my South African Indian fam­ily made lots of sand­wiches that were eaten with tea.  Naturally, an Indian flare was added to them to appease our spice friendly tongues.  Cucumber tea sand­wiches got a slather of corian­der mint chut­ney, and toasted cheese sand­wiches had tomato, onion and green chilies inside them (oh right, and cheese!)  The key to suc­cess with these sand­wiches is to slice the tomato, onion and chili as thinly as pos­si­ble, and put cheese on the insides of both slices of bread to sand­wich in the veg­eta­bles and pre­vent any sogginess.

Any bread, cheese com­bi­na­tion will do here, folks.  Today I’m lucky enough to have a lovely loaf of white bread from Dough on the Danforth, and some of Monforte Dairy’s Goat Tomme.  Traditionally, we’d use multi­grain sand­wich bread and medium ched­dar cheese in my house, but I like to mix it up and try new things.  I spent a few sum­mers with my aunt in California, and we made these sand­wiches with sour­dough and pep­per­jack cheese!

Here’s the bread, but­tered side down in a pan on medium heat.  I’ve added one layer of cheese, then the tomato, onion & chili.  Another layer of cheese and the sec­ond slice of bread go on top, and you cook it slowly until the one side is a but­tery golden brown.  Flip the sand­wich care­fully (some­times I use a small plate, or my hand to keep it together) and do the same on the other side.  Slice in half and serve with a green salad or a cup of soup.  The very fine onion pro­vides a nice tang, while the green chili gives a per­fect lit­tle sur­prise explo­sion when you bite into it.

I make these sand­wiches often, always delighted at the play between the rich cheese and the fiery chili in my mouth. Like the women before me, I cook to take care of peo­ple, and my mom and my aun­ties get a big kick out of how much I enjoy learn­ing those fam­ily recipes.  And as much as they’ve worked to give my gen­er­a­tion of women more choices and less oblig­a­tions in the home, I think they’re also pretty happy to know that at least one of us is inter­ested in keep­ing those food tra­di­tions alive.