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. 

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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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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.