food/memory post

I can't ever get the pastas right. Either I boil them for too long, or I drain them for too long. Something. Some little disaster always takes place when i am trying to cook them. Probably my MLM heritage doesn't go very well with Italian Anarchism!:))) My quick grad student food is rice. I put it to boil, go in to take a shower or check my email, come back after 10 mins, and it's all done. I am a perfect rice maker. And my comfort food happens to be bhat-dal-alu-dim shedhho, with a little bit of ghee/butter/mustard oil, green chily and salt. It's the simplest food one can think of. Just boil the potatoes, an egg, a cup of lentils, mash them all up together and with rice, eat with your fingers. Somehow, more than anything else, this simple mash reminds me of home and the quick meals my mother would often cook when an unexpected guest would drop by. Or those fever-filled days, when I would feel too sick to eat anything else. And of course, the boiled potato serves so many different functions in so many different kinds of Kolkata street food. It is one of the bases of phuchka, the basis of aloo chat, bhelpuri... and now that it's Pujas again, and my ninth consecutive year of not witnessing it, phuchkas happen to be one of the things I most sorely miss. Yes, my phuchka-memories are not devoid of people. But those are too complicated to write about in a food-memory kind of a post. But the thing is, I have never tried to make phuchkas at home. And I don't think I ever will. Phuchka-eating in the street signify to me a kind of public-culture of food which wouldn't really feel the same if made in the domestic space of one's home-kitchen. For example, phuchka is possibly one of the first street-foods which had always been associated more with girls and women than with men. know quite a few rabid male phuchka-addicts, true. But what I am trying to say is that, the kind of gendered norms that have historically prevented women from inhabiting the space of the street tea-shop or chayer dokan, for example, has never really been applicable when it came to phuchkas. Rather, it was always understood to be women's food.

A possible topic for exploration? A Cultural History of the Phuchka? Sounds quite scholarly, no?