Subha's Rice Pan - Bee Wilson 🌞

‘Possessions are a convenient means of storing … memories and feelings.’
Russell Belk, 1988


My friend Subha Mukherji has a pan for cooking rice unlike any I’ve ever
seen. It is made of flimsy-looking aluminium with a little wooden handle
and looks no bigger than a doll’s pan. But thanks to a small vent hole in the
lid, this pan can cook a generous quantity – two to three hearty portions – of
the most perfect fluffy white rice. This pan has been in Subha’s life for
nearly four decades, a daily reminder of Kolkata, where she grew up. A
household companion, it has created the rice for dozens and dozens of
meals and, through all the joys and disappointments of the years, it has
never let her down.

I only got to know Subha recently, though we have both lived in the same
town for years. Life sometimes has a strange way of allowing you to
encounter exactly the person you need at that precise moment. Subha is a
university teacher and researcher, a distinguished expert on tragicomedy
and Shakespeare among many other subjects. The first time I went to dinner
at Subha’s house my mother had just died and I was feeling so flat I wasn’t
sure if I would make it through the meal, yet I came away energised. I
realised later that Subha’s kindness and knowledgeable passion for
literature reminded me of my mother, even though she was decades younger
and very different in personality.

We met at a party for a mutual friend to which Subha had brought one of
the most delicious cauliflower dishes I have ever eaten. The cauliflower
tasted so savoury and deep, it was as if it had been smothered in slow
cooked onions; but Subha assured me that it contained no onion at all, only
asafoetida (or ‘hing’), a remarkable and strong-smelling seasoning which
can mimic the taste of onion. She had also seasoned the cauliflower with
oil, a few tomatoes and a little turmeric, salt and sugar, plus curry leaves. It
was a Bengali dish from her childhood. Usually, she explained, she would
have prepared it on the stovetop but she was exhausted at the moment and
she had made it in the oven instead, which felt like a compromise to her (to
me it tasted nothing like a compromise).

After I had known Subha for a few months, I saw that her pointing out
the imagined flaws in her superb cauliflower dish was very characteristic.
Every time she cooks for me she produces exquisite dishes and then
outlines ways in which they might have been better with different
ingredients or more time. This isn’t false modesty; it’s a sign of how acutely
sensitive she is to the taste and texture of food.

Subha invited me over to show me her rice pan in action. Into this tiny
vessel she measured out a cup of white Basmati rice and two cups of water.
She rinsed the rice, but only a little. The rice she buys in Britain ‘doesn’t
really need washing’, she said. It looked like way too much rice for the pan
but Subha seemed relaxed. I asked her how long it would take to cook, but
she said, ‘I can tell from the look, actually, not so much the time.’ Sure
enough, while we were chatting and drinking Riesling, she seemed to have
a sixth sense for how the rice was doing on the stove and at one point
elegantly glided across the room to rescue it seconds before it was going to
boil over. She skimmed off the scum with a wooden spoon, clamping on the
lid and turning the heat down. Very, very quietly, she whispered, ‘It will be
fine,’ like an incantation. I felt at that moment that she was speaking not to
me but to the pot.

The pan came from a little market in Kolkata; Subha can’t recall exactly
where. What she can remember is that it was one of the crucial vessels with
which she first taught herself to cook in her twenties. A few years ago,
Subha’s ex-husband, who was also from India, was visiting her in England.
They had remained close friends long after the divorce. When he saw the
little rice pan, he exclaimed with disbelief. ‘He said, “It’s that one?” and I
said, “Yeah.” I said, “It survived our marriage and ten thousand [house]
moves,” and he said, “Oh my God, I will drink to that.”’ He died not long
afterwards, a death which hit her hard. But the pan lives on.

Growing up in an educated family in Kolkata, Subha was never expected
to cook. She wasn’t even allowed in the kitchen to boil an egg because her
grandfather was convinced that ‘I would burn to death’. Both her parents
were academics and she was encouraged to study rather than do household
tasks. As she stirs cubes of turmeric-marinated aubergine in hot mustard oil
with red chillis and a whole-spice mix called panch phoran, Subha remarks
that ‘There is no gainsaying the fact that it’s a cuisine destined for a society
that was patriarchal and feudal.’ Her family, like the other families they
knew, had cooks who produced most of what they ate. Her mother was an
excellent cook when she wanted to, but as a working woman she spent very
little day-to-day time in the kitchen, saving herself for some ‘fancy stirring’
now and again.

When she left India for graduate studies in Oxford, Subha had no idea
how to cook and the overdone English food on offer in college repulsed her.
For the whole of that year, almost every day, she went to a nearby takeaway
shop and bought herself a chicken and mushroom pie, a can of Coke and a
packet of crisps. That was often all she ate in the course of the day. After a
few months of this she was suffering from acute stomach pain and nausea,
but when she went to the GP they told her that she must be homesick and
put her on antidepressants, which made her stomach complaints even
worse. It was only after one of her tutors gently suggested that she might
have gastric ulcers that she got the medication she needed, which made her
feel better in a month. This made Subha realise that for the sake of her
stomach she must learn how to cook.

There’s a deep-rooted idea that the most meaningful cooking is done by
those who learned it at their mother’s side, as a child. But cooking can be
even more significant for those who learn it later in life. Without any prior
cooking knowledge to fall back on, Subha set out to reverse-engineer the
food of her childhood from memory. She cooked moong dal and delectable
chickpea and potato salads seasoned with sharp tamarind chutney and
cumin with crunchy chaat on top. One of her best-loved dishes in those
days was a potato dish which was christened ‘Aloo Lulu’ by her exhusband.
(‘Aloo means potato, and he would always triplicate the last
syllable of anything he liked.’) ‘I literally worked my way back to
remembered tastes and smells and recreated them.’ She is proud to say that
her very first published writing was a handful of recipes for her college
community cookbook.

The consumer scientist Russell Belk has written that the value of
personal mementos (family snapshots, say) is that they make our past a
treasure that can be ‘savoured, handled … and kept safe from loss’. Belk
adds that ‘without these objects our memories may be as ephemeral as
flowers’. A rice pot is a different and less purely nostalgic kind of memento
than a photo album. When Subha picks up the pot, it is still the same utensil
chosen by her younger self who didn’t know the first thing about cooking.
But, unlike an old photo, it has also developed with time, becoming a
weightier and more significant object with each batch of perfect rice that it
cooks.

This little pot has travelled with Subha from India to England to Italy and
back to England. It has been a perpetual link with home, a source of
certainty in a country that will never completely supplant the Kolkata of her
childhood. Her latest academic project is about migrants and the knowledge
they carry with them across oceans and continents. She quotes the
philosopher Simone Weil, who once said that ‘We must take the feeling of
being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place.’ One
of the most effective ways to root yourself is through objects which can act
as comforting remnants and props of the place that was left behind.

While we were talking, the rice finished cooking. At exactly the right
moment, without any timer to remind her, Subha lifted the lid and noticed
that it was fluffy and had risen almost all the way to the top. She switched
the heat off to let it steam and rest a bit more in the pot. ‘A little less rice
would be good but this is just about OK.’ She quickly finished preparing the
other dishes, which included a sumptuous dal and her famous cauliflower
dish as well as the cubes of fried aubergine. She told me she was thinking of
writing a cookbook about Bengali food – ‘it’s such a flavour-based cuisine’.
Subha was not sure, however, how well the nuances of her food would
translate onto the page (apart from the fact that at the time she was
exhausted, busy with teaching and various research projects – and also
acutely worried about her ageing father back in Kolkata, who was very
unwell; he died a few months later). Cooking, for her, was so rooted in the
senses that it could hardly be written down. ‘It’s not a knowledge that can
be carried in coffee spoons,’ she said. ‘You carry it with you'.

From "The Heart-Shaped Tin" by Bee Wilson
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223736285-the-heart-shaped-tin


Thanks Bee!