Book Excerpt: A Victorian Meat Grinder in an Indian Vegetarian Kitchen

Rukmini Srinivas’s Tiffin is much more than a cookbook. Beautifully designed and charmingly written, Tiffin is filled with stories and recipes that piece together a sepia-tinted book of memories. Srinivas time travels into the past and brings people and recipes back to life with her descriptions – her father who (unusually for a man of his generation) loved cooking; the “mobile canteen” that sustained Srinivas during her student years in Madras; recipes Srinivas picked up while travelling abroad, snacks that have been prepared the same way for generations; people she remembers because of the food they brought into her life.

Good cookbooks tend to be a feast for the eyes, but Tiffin stands out because it is part cookbook (with tempting photographs of food), part graphic novel (thanks to Mohit Suneja’s illustrations) and altogether delightful. Srinivas, with her gentle storytelling and eagerness to share recipes, is like the grandmother whose lap you’d burrow into when the world got too tiresome. This is a book you’ll keep for the recipes, but one that you’ll remember and return to for the stories that Srinivas shares. Here’s an excerpt about Srinivas’s father and his Victorian meat grinder. Did we mention theirs is a vegetarian family?

In 1937, when we lived in the city of Poona, my father worked in the Southern Command office of the Military Accounts Department on Susie Sorabji Road, just a 10-minute walk from our school, St. Helena’s. The canteen in the Southern Command office was a large dining room with a well-organized kitchen, where delicious soups were made, and occasionally my sisters Kamala, Sarasa and I would join Appa for lunch. The menu boasted of a large spread, but my favourites were the hot soup of the day, which was either tomato or fresh corn soup and Welsh Rabbit (Welsh Rarebit) or a vegetable au gratin. Even today, I can recollect the taste and smell of real butter, Polson’s butter, and the melted, sharp English Cheddar cheese oozing from the sides of warm toasted bread slices. Welsh Rarebit remains one of my favourite snacks but I now spike it with green chillies. Sarasa almost always ordered potato croquettes with soup, and Kamala preferred a light lunch of soup and green salad. She envied us our big lunch but added, she did not dare fall asleep in the first period after lunch, which for her was arithmetic. The pastries and plum cakes in Appa’s office canteen were also fabulous, and Appa always sent a mint-chocolate pastry, Leelu’s favourite, packed for her – as a kindergarten student was not permitted to leave school during lunch hours.

St. Helena’s School has a very special place in my life because of the dedicated and caring teachers I was fortunate to learn from. I did not realize it at the time. I was not a diligent student like my younger sister Sarasa, who was two years my junior. I spent time studying only the subjects I liked, like nature study, English and French, and while I submitted the homework for these on time, a subject like arithmetic would give me a headache and invariably, I would end up with an ‘incomplete’ remark from the teacher, three or four times a week. To add to may distaste of the subject, we had two periods of arithmetic on the same day, twice a week! When I was a student in the fourth standard, I was bogged down by ‘bill sums’, where we students were introduced to the concept of fractions. My father tried to make the concept more realistic for me by introducing shopping lists and bills for groceries for the family as an example: it did not help much. This distaste for arithmetic continued throughout my school days. I was only too happy to move into liberal arts and humanities when I joined Queen Mary’s College in Madras.

As I said earlier, my father’s interest in cooking was in trying out new recipes we were not familiar with in our home; once in a while, he would treat us to a fresh salad of lettuce with segnets of oranges and walnuts in a vinaigrette dressing. Vinegar was alien to south Indian cooking and my mother did not like the sour fermented smell and taste of vinegar, so he frequently substituted it with lemon juice.

And so it was that Appa, on one of his visits to his other younger brother in Bombay (now Mumbai), returned home bearing a heavy, silver-coated metal Victorian meat grinder. It had a big flywheel on one side, with a wooden handle capped with burgundy-coloured leather embossed with the name of the manufacturing company in the Midlands in the UK. Amma was mystified with his purchase and asked him, ‘What are we going to do with this?’ Appa soon unveiled his plan.

One Sunday a month, after our family lunch, my father would host a bridge party for four of his friends. Amma would invariably make snacks for the group – a light tiffin. But on one such Sunday, Appa got busy. My sister Sarasa, around eight years of age at the time, and I, two years older than her, watched as he shifted a square, heavy, teakwood side table from the living room to the kitchen. With knit brows and pursed lips, he set about unpacking the meat grinder, washing the parts and drying them with the tea-towel that was slung over his shoulder. He assembled the grinder and fixed it to the table. Inspired by some Victorian recipes for meat cutlets he had been reading, he had decided to make vegetarian versions for the bridge players. He looked very professional in his white apron!

He took a couple of carrots and potatoes, a handful of french beans, some cabbage leaves, a few green chillies, an onion, a couple of garlic cloves and mint leaves from the wicker baskets, washed all the vegetables carefully, quartered the potatoes, cut the carrots into 2-inch lengths, and stacked all of them neatly on a wooden tray. He then started feeding one piece at a time into the meat grinder while one of us turned the flywheel. He patted the vegetable mix into thick juicy discs which he shallow-fried brown and crunch on the outside and soft and mushy within.

My sister and I excitedly took over feeding the vegetables and turning the flywheel. If any vegetable got stuck, Appa would halt the process while he undid the central screw, cleaned out the barrel, and put it back together. The timing was perfect, and as the last batch of cutlets was being fried, the bridge players walked in. The cutlets were accompanied by a tart, orange and green chilli relish, that Amma made, followed by piping hot south Indian filter coffee. I think Appa’s friends stayed longer than usual that Sunday.

From Tiffin - Memories and Recipes of Indian Vegetarian Food, by Rukmini Srinivas, Rupa Publications, Rs 395