A story I tell our cats at bedtime.
I was a really fussy eater as a kid in Calcutta in the early 80s. We had just moved into India and I wouldn’t eat the Bengali food cooked at home. My mother, your thammi, would make me fish and chips instead, chicken and chips too, Spanish omelette with mince meat, Iranian polo with tahdigh, chilli chicken, fried rice and noodles.
Then dad passed on and things changed, but mum would still make me fried rice, chilli chicken and noodles as the occasional treat.
I would subconsciously observe my mother in the kitchen when she made the noodles. The way she would boil cubed onions along with noodles and then strain it all in a plastic strainer. The way she would boil chicken to add in the noodles and use the stock to make a soup. How she would add soy sauce while tossing the noodles for flavour. Make an omelette earlier and shred and add it at the end. Drizzling in some vinegar and ajino moto too. Making sure that the vegetables added were not overcooked.
The corner roll shop guys started making ‘chow’ in the late 80s and I would observe them as they threw boiled noodles on a flat wok doused with dalda, add in chopped carrots, cucumber, onions, capsicum, chillies, red and yellow sauce, soya sauce, lots of ajino moto, vinegar, salt, and stir it all with skewers used normally to spin the parathas of the rolls… and then give you veg chow on a stainless steel plate on which a piece of newspaper was first placed.
If your ordered chicken Hakka, they’d add the kosha chicken kept for chicken rolls!
I moved to Mumbai. met your mum. We got married. I tried to make noodles one day. I nailed the flavours. The noodles were as soggy as the Khar subway after the first rains though. Mummy was upset and stormed off and I had to go to JATC, where she was waiting, and give her a cold chocolate milk shake to calm down.
Next morning I was about to enter the Nariman Point office building where I first mummy, when I saw two Chinese thelawala (cart) boys from UP drain baskets full of noodles for the day.
They taught me how to make noodles that would stay separate from one another with all the grace of the Queen’s Necklace. Boil till the noodles begin to bend, turn off the flame, drain out the water and rinse the noodles under cold water from a tap.
Later, on the first of my many trips to Singapore, I ordered a seafood hokkien mee at the the Newton Hawker Market and watched in a trance as the surly Chinese granny at the stall mixed prawns, squids and mussels, chilli paste, noodles and soy sauce, added chives, lime and shallots at the end, to come up with a (‘one person’) plate which made me fall in love with the island
And that Baby Loaf and little Nimki, is how I learnt to make the Hakka noodles that Mummy Loaf loves. As does Gia Loaf.
And, as does my mother’s grown up, but still fussy about food, first born son.
Er, that’s me. Daddy Loaf!
How to make Kolkata Hakka noodles.
