the English for "hing" is "asafoetida"

I have been meaning to write this up for a while and failing to do so but this is my last chance for a month, so here it is. I’ve been thinking a lot about food recently. I spent September and October mentally checked out and right in the middle of that came Diwali. I didn't want to hold a party, because I didn't want to do anything, and held one anyway because it felt bad not to; it ended up being an even bigger party than usual for which I cooked 16 people's worth of matar paneer, chicken, Bengali tomato chutney and aloo Shimla mirch. It took two days and I got very invested in it. Kind of comedically, but kind of for serious: it turned out it really mattered to me that everyone be fed and enjoy their food. I felt like I would have in some way failed if they hadn't. There's something there of course about the need for diaspora people to perform their origin culture very emphaticallly, both for white people (who can't otherwise conceive of cultural non-whiteness) and for the non-diaspora (because colonialism). That's actually not the collective anxiety I came here to write about! Spoilers, the party went well and the food all got eaten down to the tiniest scrap.

The thing is, I grew up eating these sorts of foods and I have never really tried to cook them at home day-to-day, mostly because they are high-effort, "party" type foods and I don't think of them as "normal" food. But at some point last year I filled my kitchen up with "real" spices - haldi, garam masala, mirch, jeera - and it turns out cooking Indian food is easy as pie when you have them. Nearly everything I grew up eating starts with jeera popped in oil and the other spices thrown in to fry, with salt, fresh garlic and ginger. You can follow a recipe, but I have done just fine on my mother's notes and waiting for things to look and smell right. For Diwali I ignored various things the recipes said, I soaked the paneer but didn't fry it, used chopped tomatoes rather than fresh and half the onions because I ran out, and it all came out good.

(This is why, incidentally, I can't bake. I make jokes about how my immigrant ass can't be trusted to follow a recipe, but baking is an oddly ubiquitous form of white British cultural hegemony, like Christmas and toilet paper. Nadiya Hussain won the Great British Bake-Off in 2015 by baking a British "wedding cake" because she never got to have one at her (Muslim) wedding and the media ran actual thinkpieces on how it represented a Triumph of Multiculturalism. They loved her! She had worked so hard to overcome the disability of being raised in a completely different culinary tradition! It was so inspiring. The Union Jack bunting was just a coincidence.)

Anyway, it turns out I can cook food I was raised with, and now I have feelings about my authenticity and history and my relationship with my mother! How unprecedented in Western diaspora discourse. Authenticity, in particular, is not a neutral word and I feel like it gets thrown around too much in respect of food. On the one hand, it’s just the classic reason to be irritated: it’s the same white people who back in the nineties,told me that my food smelled like shit now go nuts for “authentic” Indian dining experiences and turmeric lattes at Starbucks. (And can’t pronounce “lassi”, “gulab jamun”, “halwa” or “dosa” though they do believe so hard that they can. I also feel this sense of deep unending rage when white British people tell me, kindly, that I shouldn’t make fun of traditional white British foods. Your empire ran with the blood of people of colour and your food still sucked, jfc.)

And, on the other hand, authenticity is a way for white people to explain that people of colour need help making their own food; or that because they use microwaves and ready-made spice blends just like white people do, their food can’t be authentic to who and what and where they are. (The Guardian really does stray into this quite a lot. This Felicity Cloake recipe is about cooking sweet and sour pork. Every Chinese cook she talks to says she should use tomato ketchup in the recipe; it's what people do at home and ketchup has been available in China since the 1900s (not that that should make a difference!). Cloake dutifully writes that down, and still recommends the "authentic" (and difficult to make) orange and cranberry puree (!) alternative. It feels like a white-people reflex, and it feels strongly related to how women’s domestic labour is uncompensated. Do it the difficult, time-consuming way, it’ll be more “authentic” and thus automatically better. The very existence of that column bothers me, actually. On the one hand, I love that it has recipes from a huge spread of world cuisines and I learn a lot from it. On the other hand: white woman; immigrant and POC food; “perfect”.)

Which brings us naturally to my relationship with my mother, welcome to the immigrant cliché hour. She and I have been getting along slightly better in the last couple of years because of, of all things, WhatsApp and how it lets you type in Hindi. She writes to me in Hindi or Hinglish, either in script or romanised depending on her mood, and it has slowed down and sweetened all our interactions. I read it already predisposed to affection, I give her the benefit of the doubt; in the same way I think she listens more to what I'm saying, without the language getting in the way.

And food, of course, is the crux. I learned to cook from watching her - she's an absolutely first-rate cook; I'm ok in comparison, but what I do have from her is whether something (as above) looks and tastes right. I don't do anything that requires technique or complexity, but I can spice something right. And she is delighted that I'm cooking more of our food at home. She sent me a whole bunch of tips for my Diwali food (including a text which was such the immigrant experience I put it on my Instagram) and - amazingly - a food processor in the post! An actual food processor, in the post! It is a very good mini food processor and I have used it for all sorts of things but it came out of the box with a white blade and now the blade is yellow. Like everything in my mother's kitchen, it has been dyed yellow from haldi, turmeric.

Anyway. tl; dr I have more time to cook now and it makes me feel slightly better about myself. I made jeera cookies (they don't count as baking, you don't need to worry about the ingredients). I keep talking about "my" kitchen, rather than "the" kitchen. It's yellow and it smells very strongly of spices and incense, like an Indian kitchen should, like the one in the house I grew up in. I feel good about it.