The transformative power of cooking

I grew up eating Indian food. Only at my house, we just called it food. Fast forward a generation, and my children’s culinary experience is completely different to my own. The Indian staples my husband and I grew up with are the exception in our household, not the norm.

I started thinking about this because it’s Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting and spiritual reset. The fasts are long — more than 17 hours in Toronto — which leaves me with a lot of time to contemplate meals. My kids are fasting a few days, mostly on weekends, and our experiences are completely different.

As a child, I ate a steady stream of rice-plus: Rice plus meat curry with veg. Rice plus chicken curry and potatoes. Rice plus fish curry and more veg. Everything cooked in a base of fried onions and garlicginger paste, seasoned with cayenne pepper, turmeric, garam masala spice mix: delicious, home cooked, pungent.

An ongoing joke for South Asian children growing up in the ’80s and ’90s is that we all had to keep our bedroom doors closed when our parents cooked so our clothes wouldn’t smell, “ethnic” food being the height of uncool. Until suddenly, it wasn’t.

Still, eau du mustard seed isn’t an alluring scent for most.

My mother rarely made “Canadian” food, and only if my brother and I begged. Pasta and sauce, pizza, tacos — all a rare treat we wolfed down while my parents complained about the blandness or excess cheese.

In contrast, my kids’ experience is the complete opposite. For example, this week our dinner menu consisted of lasagna and Caesar salad; fried chicken, boiled green beans and corn on the cob; eggs Florentine; meatball curry with naan. Three- quarters of our meals were not Indian at all.

This means my children’s spice tolerance is well below my own level at their age.

They start crying at the sight of a green chili; I pop it in my mouth and carry on.

Though every culture has its own traditions, my Indian family had plenty of Ramadan staples for the sunset iftar meal: samosas (meat or vegetable-filled pastry, deep fried), dhai vada (fried lentil balls soaked in yoghurt), chaat papri (fried dough tossed with chick peas, potato and tamarind and mint chutney), pakoras (various vegetables deep-fried in chickpea flour batter — are you detecting a pattern?), all washed down with falooda (impossibly sweet rose-flavoured syrup in milk; definitely an acquired taste).

When I first started fasting, the iftar appetizer meal was even more important than actual dinner. Today, the iftar appetizers I make are very different — mostly fruit salad and sugar dates, the usual deep-fried goodness relegated to an occasional indulgence.

I know my heart is thanking me, but sometimes the ghosts of all those uneaten, unfried samosas haunt my dreams.

It is ironic that a month about not eating food draws the act of eating — or rather, the spiritual, nourishing purpose of food — into sharper focus. Families eat the morning pre-dawn suhoor meal together and sit down at sunset to break their fast. Every day spent fasting reminds me about the transformative power of food cooked and shared. It is a portal of love, tradition, family, comfort.

So I wonder what Ibrahim’s lack of cayenne pepper tolerance or Mustafa’s disinterest in biryani means. Will they grow up craving the chili, cheeseburgers and homemade pizza from the dinners of their childhood, the way I crave my mom’s Hyderabadi tomato chutney and shami kebab with buttery basmati rice?

Every Saturday when I go to my parents’ house for dinner, it’s like visiting those childhood meals, the ones I didn’t appreciate when I was young. She makes pasta for my kids, but there are often some other familiar staples — beef cooked with spinach, shrimp biryani, fried okra, dhal cooked with squash.

I reach for the meals of my childhood, while Mustafa and Ibrahim reach for the food that is most familiar to them.

But we all sit down together, a fusion of taste and shared experience, relished side by side. Uzma Jalaluddin is a high school teacher in the York Region. She writes about parenting and other life adventures. Reach her at ujalaluddin@outlook.com

BERNARD WEIL/TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO As a child, Uzma Jalaluddin ate a steady stream of what she calls rice-plus meals, a diet that differs from what her children are growing up with.