Aviyal, in accordance with the Bhima myth, is made with whatever vegetables you have on hand. In Sidu’s case, there was drumstick, a large, mottled yellow-green cucumber-like vegetable that’s woody on the outside and tastes like zucchini. We halved it, scooped out the centers, and cut them into a baton. Then we repeated the process with a small eggplant, a yam, green bananas, long beans, and snake gourds. The tamarind paste was mixed with water, and we let the vegetables simmer in it, in the wok, then scattered grated coconut and curry leaves over the top.
As we cooked together, day after day, and ate together night after night, I slowly began to separate salty from bitter from sour. And I began to distinguish the aromas of coriander, mustard, ginger, garlic, onions, fenugreek, and tamarind. The layers started to peel away.
I experienced this same feeling when I went to a performance of the centuries-old Keralan dance drama, Kathakali, with drums and gongs and singers accompanying actors in elaborate crowns, big striped skirts, and colorful face paint. Everything seemed too exaggerated—the gestures, the makeup, the stories of heroes and gods. But then I listened carefully to the interchange of the small cymbals (the ilattalam) and the gong, and I realized that each drum in the ensemble was associated with a different type of character, and that the singers were bending notes in a way I’d never heard before, the dancing actors speaking through the stomp of a foot, the flick of a wrist. Exaggerated textures became a seamless whole.
Back in the kitchen I learned about varying texture at every meal, about creating a balance by serving both wet and dry foods. A wet curry, such as aviyal, would be served with a dry curry, such as thoren (which means “dried out”). Sidu’s thoren incorporated seasonal cheera, a red chardlike plant with basil-shaped leaves and foot-long stems. We stir-fried grated coconut with the masala, red chiles, black mustard seeds, and cheera in a wok. Sidu taught me how to make it come out dry, barely beginning to caramelize, her signature stroke.
And behind each dish, I began to see, was an operating principle. We were not trying to coax the essence from a vegetable, to raise and cook something in such a way that it would taste as much like its idealized form as possible, as we do in the U.S. The idea in Indian life, whether it’s playing the most intricate raga or cooking the most aromatic curry, is to build and build, to dignify the ingredients with the complexity that spices and technique can provide. It’s not a matter of disguise, but more of creating a stratification of flavors that reflects the hierarchy of the cosmos. It’s about spiritual mimicry.
So just as I began to figure it out, to dissect each dish and memorize each scent, to do the thing that all chefs do, I realized that figuring it out was the least of it. That cooking like an Indian means cooking as you live, working out a balance, filling it with spice, and always looking at what your hands -produce as something beyond the individual ingredients, as a story and a gift, and as something that perhaps should always remain a bit of a mystery.
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