Homesickness: My kitchen secret

The kitchen of our apartment in Tramin. Pic/Rosalyn D’Mello

Every now and then my partner puts in a dinner request. The latest was the most unusual. He wanted a curry with which we could eat the fugias he got us back from Mumbai. We had unpacked them as if they were gold biscuits, carefully placing them into Tupperware so they could sit in the fridge until I had time to cater to them. My parents had ordered a kilo from Cecilia, who lives in the Kurla village and, by our family's estimation, makes the very best - light and fluffy, not overly sweet, and tastes phenomenal when resurrected after a long flight with a sprinkling of water and a little oven time. My sister had asked me if I had wanted vindaloo. I had refused because of the logistical challenge of transporting something liquid like that through the complex journey involved in reaching our apartment from the airport in Milan. I asked her for masalas instead. She sent me two East Indian bottle masalas, one for fish, the other for mutton. They were among a vast constellation of gifts that composed my partner's luggage. The fish masala was pitch perfect. I had marinated some largish prawns with it the evening before, adding a light dollop of ginger garlic paste, salt, and coating it with corn grit from Tramin before frying it with a bit of oil. We had eaten them with a pumpkin rice pulao I had made, my attempt at repurposing the leftover roasted pumpkin soup from the night before.

My partner made us soup for lunch, a traditional South Tyrolean preparation with select vegetables and a chunk of meat, stewed over at least 1.5 hours, served with a tiny shell-shaped pasta. I'd thought of making something with the cooked meat along the lines of what I generally do, inspired by a bell pepper stir fry my father used to make, using Worcestershire sauce and other secret ingredients. But my partner asked if we could have the fugias instead. It had been more than two years since we had both eaten them alongside a gravy. I would have liked to have made a chicken curry with coriander and coconut, but, to our dismay, we had neither of these ingredients and ordering them would need at least a day. So I decided to attempt an unusual, possibly never before done fusion - an East Indian goulash.

Since I got familiar with goulash, I've found it's the one dish consumed in Northern Europe that comes closest in flavour to a beef curry. We'd recently begun following a recipe in a book my partner had been gifted decades ago by his aunt. It has the most precise descriptions, and offers intriguing tips and tricks for teasing flavours out of ingredients. I was able to up my bechamel game, for example, with them, as well as my method for bolognese sauce. Instead of using sweet paprika, which any recipe for goulash demands, I used the fiery red masala my sister had sent which was marked ‘M' for meat. I bought cubes of veal, a luxury indeed and, around 5 pm, set it to stew, using the almost half kilo of onions the original recipe demands. Around 7 pm, when the veal and the onions had begun to sing to each other, producing an unbridled moist gravy, I added a bit of creamy coconut milk, to round off the sharp edges and intervene in the intensity of spice. I revived the fugias in the oven, giving them enough time to cool so one could really eat with one's fingers and soak up the gravy. Though we finished the veal, we have just a bit of gravy left which I am sure to repurpose. I'm thinking egg drop curry. I'll use the rest of the coconut milk and poach the free-range farm eggs in it.

This kind of experimentation helps me endure the lengthening absence of my loved ones within my everyday life. Homesickness serves as a muse, remedy and kitchen ingredient. Each dish I concoct fuses the memories that flood my home when the various fragrances melt and sigh and stick to my clothes. I like to narrate their origins to our child who prefers to sit on his high stool when I occupy the kitchen instead of playing on the floor with his things. I am hoping that my mother's Christmas gift to him will be a wooden chakla-belan so he can make chapattis alongside me.

Tomorrow I am meant to be interviewed by Roma Buchhalter for her podcast, Cerdan Stories, in which she speaks to writers who are inhabiting some form of exile. I hadn't imagined this realm would apply to me, and yet this is precisely my state of being. Yesterday I read a copy of last Friday's mid-day that my partner brought back. I cannot even begin to describe the pleasure I derived from flipping through the pages and reading local news, seeing the crossword I used to love doing and glimpsing my own column in print. Until soon, I told myself last evening with each bite of bottle masala goulash and fugia. Until soon…

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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