The lost art of cooking

After seeing the great Madhur Jaffrey, who brought fine Indian cooking to the West, speak onstage at the Royal Ontario Museum, I am adrift in food memories.

The worst food I’ve ever eaten was in childhood, in homes where good ingredients were cooked with the cruelty of the era — boiled and mashed into extinction — and in fast food joints where it was not yet known that a burger could be a joyous thing rather than limp industrial matter.

Food wasn’t cooked, it was punished. This was the kind of cuisine that Jaffrey, now 85, endured when she arrived in the U.K. from Delhi in 1955. Her mother sent recipes to her horrified daughter. It was a food emergency.

In adulthood I began cooking, not too badly — I made Jaffrey’s Chicken Mulligatawny Soup and her (I think) lamb with spinach, plus a torrent of desserts — and then married a man who truly knew how to cook. I forgot how to do it myself.

I hope it’s not a trend. I see the advent of a new food emergency, with developers building ever-smaller condos without ovens. In Toronto’s Minto Westside building at Front and Bathurst Sts., 162 smaller units will have only small convection microwaves, whatever those are. Along with the approaching Doug Ford-allowed windowless bedrooms, it’s the modern version of bedsits and hot plates for the impoverished young.

I am now informed that we have a large microwave. I did not know that. I tried to use it to defrost a frozen dinner and it all went awfully wrong. We also have a barbecue, toaster oven and Instant Pot, but I only understand how to work the kind of oven that developers are phasing out. Press Bake. Press SelfClean.

This is not good. Owners, renters and Airbnb-ers should know how to cook, especially if they can’t afford that elusive detached home and must forever convect waves.

So I am regressing into former knowledge. I made a chicken sandwich, though it must be said, without roasting a chicken first. Next, cheese on toast. Probably not in the toaster, I’m thinking.

There was a food revolt in the 1960s when Canadians said no to Jell-O salads, minute steaks and meat with pineapple. Traditional French cooking and its polar opposite, health food, made its mark, though Jaffrey shudders and defines the latter as, “You eat it, but you don’t enjoy it.”

Then came nouvelle cuisine towering on the plate, followed by Alice Waters’ fresh California ingredients, whimsy, fusion cuisine, and now every kind of good food available to urbanites everywhere, including vegetarian at which Jaffrey is an expert.

It can’t be cooked well in microwaves, convection or otherwise.

Jaffrey is clearly uneasy with the wildly popular Instant Pot, though her publisher asked her for a cookbook, presumably because the current ones are fairly dreadful. “Indians are very familiar with pressure cookers,” she points out, “but this can do many more things.”

Rather than dumping rice straight in the pot, you will still have to soak the rice for half an hour, she warned Star food writer Karon Liu. “Follow my recipe,” she told the ROM audience, sounding fed-up. “Don’t read the pamphlet. Indians don’t eat al dente anything.”

Jaffrey, a famous actor as well as culinary idol, was asked about the difficulties women face in industries run largely by men but she was unable to answer. A breezy male TV chef also onstage had begun talking over her, as he had with the first question about the food history of Indian royal palaces.

There are few famous female chefs, further proof that when men enter an industrial sector — food, tech, streamed TV — it becomes overpaid and hyperinflated. But when women enter a male sector — medicine, politics, journalism — men lash out and the sector is made to appear diminished.

Why should cooking be masculinized or feminized at all? Perhaps we will only order out anyway. It is a strange progression, and it increases my admiration for Jaffrey, a woman who reached the peak of achievement against all odds.

The event was part of the ROM exhibition Treasures of a Desert Kingdom: The Royal Arts of Jodhpur, India, which will run until Sept. 2. See it now. And learn to cook.