Eating off leaves
Parties in India have become super fancy nowadays. Every wedding looks like it's part of a Bollywood film. Bars to serve alcohol are set up even at kids' birthdays. In our days things used to be a lot simpler. Also environmentally friendly.
In Kolar, every public feast had the exact same menu - goat biriyani cooked South Indian / Hyderabadi style (strongly flavoured with mint), accompanied by a raita made with yogurt, cucumber and tomatoes, followed by a warm lentil payasam. In my mind, still, that is the ultimate feast menu - the reason why I keep eating biriyanis and saying to myself, "no, not this one." The eager diners would sit cross-legged (or with knees bent to one side) in long lines, on folded cloth or mats laid on the ground, and be served on disposable plates made of sal leaves stitched together with twigs. Some of the liquid raita or the payasam would leak through small gaps in the leaves. But that did not detract from the eating pleasure in the slightest! (Nowadays there are fancier moulded - and non-leaking I'd bet - versions of these leaf plates).
People all over India eat on different kinds of leaf plates but somehow I associate food on banana leaves with Bengal. That may be because I'd read somewhere of an ancient manuscript that described a good Bengali wife as someone who feeds her husband hot rice with ghee served on a banana leaf along with some other good stuff (maybe alu-posto). Unlike the sal plates, these don't require any stitching since eat banana leaf is big enough to be a plate. These run the risk of leaking as well, since the fibers tend to split along the lines running across the width of the leaf. Also, if the ridge running through the middle of the leaf is high, it can create slopes on both sides that will make the dal and curry run off the plate.
In the old days, when you sat down to eat, someone would come round and plop a small mound of salt and piece of cut lime on one corner of your banana leaf, another person would pour water from a metal jug into a clay cup (disposable and more crude than the fancy ones you get nowadays). In the first round there would be some luchi or radhaballavi with alur dom or cholar dal. Watching me pounce on it with enthusiasm, my mom would say "Don't eat so much of that! Save some room for fish and meat!." Then various delectable curries (including fish and / or goat meat) and rice / pulao would come round in large aluminum buckets. In the end there was papad with chutney and mishti doi with rosogolla or other sweets. Once, when I was just two or three and too little to eat all of that, I sat by my mother and, when the servers came round, my mother waved a hand over my plate to stop them from dropping a huge ladle full of curry in front of me. I watched every bucket carrier start at the beginning of the line of eaters and then pass me by, moving on to the next person. When finally the mishti doi bearer with a huge earthen pot of doi came into view, I spoke up in desperation, "ma, don't do this (hand-waving) this time!"
Another recycled material used for holding food was paper, mostly newspaper. A paper buyer would come round the neighbourhood every Sunday, calling out "khata, boi, kago--z" and buy all the paper you had saved at home by weight. This paper was used to make wrapping in which people would sell you peanuts or other snacks (in rapidly folded cones) or your grocery items in more permanently crafted bags. Every year, during exams, there would be horror stories about how ungraded class X or XII board exam answer sheets had been accidently sold to the kagojwala and had turned up as bags in a snack seller's cart. (In those days, board exams would be graded by external examiners who would take bundles of answer sheets home to mark. These were the examiners for whom we all had to have neat, perfect handwriting with wide margins and good spacing because - in the imagination of teachers and parents - when the examiner took out your paper to grade, they would be having a bad day with a stomach upset or a sick kid or both and would be reading by candlelight due to a power cut and the moment they set their eyes on your illegible scrawl, their day would get significantly worse and they would absolutely hate you and refuse to read a thing you wrote and put down a 3 out of 10 or something bad like that.)
Food was not the only thing packed in these natural or recycled wrappers. Flowers for the temple or to wear in your hair could come carefully nestled between large leaves, loosely tied with a string. The last time someone brought me one of those was in 1994. I was visiting India after completing grad school and stopped in Bombay, on my way to Kolkata, to meet some relatives. I was given many beautiful gifts but my kakima (the one I talked about at the end of the Santiniketan story; the one that could break into song, no matter the state of her voice, at the slightest encouragement; the one who lost jewellery on the train because she was carrying it carelessly on the top of her bag while her favourite brand of tea was stowed carefully at the bottom) brought the gift that I still remember, mostly because of the way she presented it to me. "Look what I brought for you!" she said, producing a leaf packet from her purse with a flourish, "I had to carry it really carefully, the train was so crowded." Then she handed me the packet and looked at me with shining eyes, waiting to share my excitement when I opened her gift. To this day, the memory of my kakima, who is long gone, is perfumed by the fragrance of those exquisite strands of perfect, white, scented jasmine buds that she brought for me to wear in my hair.
In Kolar, every public feast had the exact same menu - goat biriyani cooked South Indian / Hyderabadi style (strongly flavoured with mint), accompanied by a raita made with yogurt, cucumber and tomatoes, followed by a warm lentil payasam. In my mind, still, that is the ultimate feast menu - the reason why I keep eating biriyanis and saying to myself, "no, not this one." The eager diners would sit cross-legged (or with knees bent to one side) in long lines, on folded cloth or mats laid on the ground, and be served on disposable plates made of sal leaves stitched together with twigs. Some of the liquid raita or the payasam would leak through small gaps in the leaves. But that did not detract from the eating pleasure in the slightest! (Nowadays there are fancier moulded - and non-leaking I'd bet - versions of these leaf plates).
People all over India eat on different kinds of leaf plates but somehow I associate food on banana leaves with Bengal. That may be because I'd read somewhere of an ancient manuscript that described a good Bengali wife as someone who feeds her husband hot rice with ghee served on a banana leaf along with some other good stuff (maybe alu-posto). Unlike the sal plates, these don't require any stitching since eat banana leaf is big enough to be a plate. These run the risk of leaking as well, since the fibers tend to split along the lines running across the width of the leaf. Also, if the ridge running through the middle of the leaf is high, it can create slopes on both sides that will make the dal and curry run off the plate.
In the old days, when you sat down to eat, someone would come round and plop a small mound of salt and piece of cut lime on one corner of your banana leaf, another person would pour water from a metal jug into a clay cup (disposable and more crude than the fancy ones you get nowadays). In the first round there would be some luchi or radhaballavi with alur dom or cholar dal. Watching me pounce on it with enthusiasm, my mom would say "Don't eat so much of that! Save some room for fish and meat!." Then various delectable curries (including fish and / or goat meat) and rice / pulao would come round in large aluminum buckets. In the end there was papad with chutney and mishti doi with rosogolla or other sweets. Once, when I was just two or three and too little to eat all of that, I sat by my mother and, when the servers came round, my mother waved a hand over my plate to stop them from dropping a huge ladle full of curry in front of me. I watched every bucket carrier start at the beginning of the line of eaters and then pass me by, moving on to the next person. When finally the mishti doi bearer with a huge earthen pot of doi came into view, I spoke up in desperation, "ma, don't do this (hand-waving) this time!"
Another recycled material used for holding food was paper, mostly newspaper. A paper buyer would come round the neighbourhood every Sunday, calling out "khata, boi, kago--z" and buy all the paper you had saved at home by weight. This paper was used to make wrapping in which people would sell you peanuts or other snacks (in rapidly folded cones) or your grocery items in more permanently crafted bags. Every year, during exams, there would be horror stories about how ungraded class X or XII board exam answer sheets had been accidently sold to the kagojwala and had turned up as bags in a snack seller's cart. (In those days, board exams would be graded by external examiners who would take bundles of answer sheets home to mark. These were the examiners for whom we all had to have neat, perfect handwriting with wide margins and good spacing because - in the imagination of teachers and parents - when the examiner took out your paper to grade, they would be having a bad day with a stomach upset or a sick kid or both and would be reading by candlelight due to a power cut and the moment they set their eyes on your illegible scrawl, their day would get significantly worse and they would absolutely hate you and refuse to read a thing you wrote and put down a 3 out of 10 or something bad like that.)
Food was not the only thing packed in these natural or recycled wrappers. Flowers for the temple or to wear in your hair could come carefully nestled between large leaves, loosely tied with a string. The last time someone brought me one of those was in 1994. I was visiting India after completing grad school and stopped in Bombay, on my way to Kolkata, to meet some relatives. I was given many beautiful gifts but my kakima (the one I talked about at the end of the Santiniketan story; the one that could break into song, no matter the state of her voice, at the slightest encouragement; the one who lost jewellery on the train because she was carrying it carelessly on the top of her bag while her favourite brand of tea was stowed carefully at the bottom) brought the gift that I still remember, mostly because of the way she presented it to me. "Look what I brought for you!" she said, producing a leaf packet from her purse with a flourish, "I had to carry it really carefully, the train was so crowded." Then she handed me the packet and looked at me with shining eyes, waiting to share my excitement when I opened her gift. To this day, the memory of my kakima, who is long gone, is perfumed by the fragrance of those exquisite strands of perfect, white, scented jasmine buds that she brought for me to wear in my hair.
Comments
Post a Comment