My Cooking Story!
23 Dec 2022 Munshiganj, BangladeshCooking is fairly simple these days. The willingness to cook regularly is what we struggle with. And no one’s cooking journey is interesting enough to read – you decide to learn it, you put effort and watch some videos, you experiment and fail, and after a few days, voila, you can cook. My cooking story is the same too except maybe how I view cooking and the influences I have had along the way are worth writing about.
I never liked cooking much. It wasn’t intellectually challenging and there was no novelty, same process on repeat, every goddamn day. But, Kamrul Islam, a friend, a football and uni-mate from Sylhet, changed my perspective on cooking forever!
Kamrul helped me when I started to conserve more in my sophomore days. My family was struggling to provide me with 4k bdt per month, as always, so I started to cut expenses. In that process, he started to share his dorm room and bed with me, which he got six months earlier than us through his premium network. He loved the kitchen our dormitory offered!
He’d often cook, but it was his process that made me realize he wasn’t just some ordinary guy cooking as a random activity of the day. He knew how many tablespoons of ghee and garlic mix were required for a beef recipe for 10 people, and which ingredients to experiment with. He would chop his veggies slowly. He’d stir his makings with utmost care. He’d taste the salt of his recipe like a lovely grandmother. He’d serve us as if we were in a five-star restaurant. He’d enjoy every little compliment of his work like someone who just cooked for the first time for their family!
Living with him, gradually, I started cooking too. A big Sylheti influence in my cooking first up. We were together for six months until I had my own dorm access. We’d become roommates again in the final year, along with another cook, Khandokar Sabbir, a sportsman from Kushtia, a guy who’d cook with the lowest of resources, with an opposite cooking style of Kamrul. Kamrul, me and Sabbir would announce our dorm room as a restaurant to our neighbours where every day would feel like a new festival with new recipes, pithas and whatnot. People would come and sponsor and we’d just cook, we’d become freelance cooks at some point. I soon would live the best six months of my life, food-wise.
Life got eventful when I left Kamrul’s dorm space. I got my dorm room and soon covid started to spread everywhere and the lockdown started. I lived the first half of the lockdown in my village, playing football with kids, enjoying homemade food, bonding with the people, and sharing Facebook stories of the simplest of things life offered. And I lived the second half of the lockdown in Bhawal National Park, in Creative Conservation Alliance’s turtle conservation facility where I volunteered. I lived there for almost all of 2021 with Fahim bhai and Komol da. The facility was ten minute’s walk away from the highway and we all enjoyed our solitude, away from the hustle-bustle of the city.
Fahim bhai was the facility manager. He was a did it all-seen it all kinda person and the ex-president of the BracU photography club back in the day. He had every possible life experience, and finally settled in the jungle, doing his bit to ‘heal the world’. He had the poster of “Into the Wild (2007)” as his Facebook cover and it showed his views a little. Having all kinds of experiences, he did cook, for sure! He cooked his best recipe for the guests into the facility. He slowly danced if he was in the mood while cooking, from Chaiyaa Chaiyaa to Uptown funk, and the recipes always came out very very hot and spicy! His makings featured various spices, edible fragrances, some of which I didn’t know. Guests always asked “who cooked?”, praised, and rightly so! He intentionally took a little while to cook and it always paid off. I remember I collected fallen mangoes after the storm once and he made pickles, as nice as any other grandma would make.
Komol da, on the other hand, was a very quick cook, a generalist from Moulovibajar, Sylhet, a successor of Fahim bhai, who worked as an animal keeper at CCA. A peaceful person, always busy, keeping the facility together with his hard work, work ranging from cooking, building, repairing, electrical engineering and whatnot, a real-life Ruplal, the skills necessary to survive in the jungle, he had it all. He could finish twenty other chores while cooking breakfast!
I must mention one other person from the Bhawal days, Dulal vai, a day labour from Sylhet who came to the facility to work on a project for a few weeks. He proclaimed that he had cooked for 200 people in a public event and I believed this based on the mere taste of a chicken curry he used to make. Despite him teaching me his recipe and me being with him while cooking for weeks, I still can’t recreate that curry! He had his ways.
And then there was me. I was there like a ghost, an invisible entity amongst them, not proactive at all. I climbed trees, wandered into the jungle on a motorbike, got lost in my world, and sometimes, I cooked. I cooked just for the sake of eating something, the whole process clicked a lot later. Fahim bhai showed me the correct way to chop veggies. I remember once I made bottle gourd (লাউ) curry without actually peeling it and everyone felt like not eating that day! There are many more stories like this of course, but we were in a jungle for god’s sake, and nobody complained! It was a long trial and error period for me and I explored a lot of varied outcomes by varying these physical variables (heat, water, time, cookware thickness etc) and ingredients we need in cooking. It is fascinating that people master this art as these variables can end up in infinite numbers of permutations!!
Lockdown ended and I had to come back to my dorm for the final semester afterwards. As I mentioned earlier, I lived with Kamrul and Sabbir in a room of four-bed there. Sabbir came from a farming household like me and he was the easiest to connect with, all you needed is a little honesty and humbleness. Growing up with very very low resources, he was conservative by nature. He did whatever he did with the lowest of resources, not just for his habit, but also because it was his way of showing gratitude towards the world. He solved all of his daily problems out of thin air, without a single neuron spent stressing. I remember one day, we had nothing to cook, so he went out, looked for leaf vegetables (শাক), collected them from somewhere around the dorm, and cooked one of his best servings!
I am very glad that I got to know these people and inherit some of their attributes. That’s how I started cooking! If you’ve read this far, thanks, this is where my cooking story ends. Some rant/observations coming up!
My home was close enough to the university to visit during a break of one or two days. And I often went. I always saw the women in our village doing their bit for their families. But only after I started cooking with ready-made spices and gas, I realized what these women were doing! When I was little, my mother took me to collect wood/bamboo spares and anything that could be ignited to cook and I climbed trees for fun and collected dead branches but it was no fun for my mother. Women did every layer of work, from collecting the woods, to collecting শাক from near green spaces to feed their families. They have been doing these in this region for centuries, without any acknowledgement. And above all that, cooking wasn’t the only thing on their daily chores list. Women!
Women these days can spend a little free time and I am glad as a feminist that I can die seeing this barest of progress. Ending this quoting Marwa Kazi Muhammed:
Our mothers, sisters, and wives have been making bhortas, panta, maach er jhol and khichuri for as long as any of us can remember. And they have made it because they were expected to, because they were supposed to. Their cooking, their meals have been taken for granted. The slightest lack of salt or spice in any of them, even for one day, brings them an earful. The love, effort and intricacies of the dishes they make have been overlooked for centuries, because this is basic cooking, right? They are just supposed to be able to cook this, right?
Yesterday I was watching a video on Kishwar’s journey and on her first day in the kitchen, the judges were so impressed by her that they asked her, “Where have you been all this while?” to which she tearfully replied, “Oh, you know, just at home.”
They are all just at home, all our masterchefs. All this while they have just been at home, and now we know. And maybe, just maybe, we will appreciate what they cook a little more.
Thank you.