I was hungry last night. I made myself a toast butter and cheese sandwich with coarsely ground black pepper inside.
I toasted the bread in the oven. We’ve bought a new @philipsindia toaster but the bread just doesn’t pop up.
‘We didn’t have a toaster at home when I was growing up,’ I told K.
‘Oh, you guys must have used the jaliwala (with a grill) hand held toaster,’ replied K.
‘No, we used the tava.’
‘Tava? How would you toast bread in that?’ She sounded incredulous.
‘We’d add oil before putting the bread on it. It was a sort of fried bread.’
‘I can’t imagine your mother using oil,’ she replied, raising her eyes incredulously.
The pepper has a story too. We buy pepper powder or whole pepper which we finely grind it in the mixer.
Then I thought of buying whole pepper and coarsely grinding it at whom. That adds bite to a dish and a bolder flavour. Mom used to hand pound pepper corns and it would coarsely ground. Not finely powdered as it would be in a mixer.
The peppercorn that we bought from the supermarket the other day came in a little plastic bag with the brand name written on it.
The whole pepper that we used to buy in Kolkata in the ‘80s and ‘90s was from the neighbour mudir dokan/ kirana shop. They would pack the pepper in a sheet torn from a newspaper and give it.
Most loose food items, which was almost all food items, were sold in packets made out of newspapers, ‘thongas’ as we called them.
In Kolkata we would buy egg rolls, chop cutlet, patties packed in thongas. In Mumbai, vada pav, bhajiya pav, dabeli, bhel and sev puri.
Newsprint is considered toxic today. Food should not be served in newspapers, say experts.
I am sure they are right, but we didn’t turn out too bad did we?
[food nostalgia, pepper, street food, recyclable, Indian food]
