I was probably five years old the first time I cooked independently. It was not part of our daily script. I’ve written before about growing up in a household with two much older siblings, two working parents and a younger sister. Our caretaker, Mangala, made many things possible. My mother told me many times the story of how she was looking for help when I was perhaps four and my sister three. Mangala interviewed for the position. ‘You’re an educated woman, go work; I’ll take care of your kids’. Or at least this is how I remember the anecdote. One morning she was late. My sister and I were hungry. We were home alone, sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her to show up. I still have this memory of putting the frying pan on the stove, lighting it, taking an egg out from the fridge and frying it. I didn’t feel any trepidation doing these actions. I had seen them being done and had clearly learned. I don’t know if there were eggshells in the pan or if I had broken the egg fluently. I don’t even remember eating the egg. I only remember what happened next. Mangala showed up and was livid. We had no business touching the stove. Why hadn’t we just waited? She took us down to our neighbour Michelle’s house to complain about our misbehaviour. When she later met our mother on a rare day when our mother was home, I think she complained to her—I heard her—but we faced no recrimination for this particular misdeed. 

In my adult life, I began to wear it as a badge of honour, the fact that I was somehow able to provide for our hunger at an early age. That I ‘took’ to the flame as if it was something my body simply understood. My memories of early evenings from the time between the ages of 7 until I finished school involved cooking with our father. I saw him make everything from a recheado  masala to a béchamel sauce to mayonnaise. I learned to make a cross on a tomato before scalding it briefly in boiling water to peel the skin off so we could make a great sauce to go with fish. For a very long time, my sister and I were only tasked with stirring things, but we inadvertently learned that the basics of a good dish lay in how well the onions were cooked. We also learned how to incorporate flavour. My father showed us his way of ladling a small portion of whatever he was cooking onto his bare hand, then licking it with his tongue. This was the taste test. We saw him incorporate a range of ingredients to ‘fix’ flavours, to add elements of crispness or sweetness to balance things off.