Twelve years ago, I exchanged my fickle, twenty something life in London for a brief backpacker existence quickly followed by a smooth slide into the Expat world. During my twenties, I was too busy working eighteen hour days and attempting to climb the greasy pole of London’s competitive advertising circuit to worry about putting food on the table. I lived in a shared house, cooked my share of pasta dishes a couple of times a week, and relied heavily on Tesco’s variety of chilled “just like home made” pasta sauces which were brilliantly simplistic in their choice of red or white, spicy or mild, the overpriced versions from the chilled cabinet (for the couple of weeks after the salary arrived in the bank) or the cheaper options in packets, on the shelves (for the rest of the time). When the carbohydrate overload became too much, I simply switched to eating calorie controlled frozen dinners which cooked for sixty seconds in the microwave and which along with a few glasses of wine, just about curbed my hunger. I topped up my limited diet with a healthy expense account – after all this was the nineties and I had to keep my clients happy and well fed, and as expected, I dutifully maxed out my corporate credit card on five star dinners and lunches.
Moving to Asia meant a life of delicious, exotic food on tap. I discovered a world where domestic help came as a pre-requisite, a maid was standard issue for every expat, and they were all extremely capable of rustling up delicious, healthy, home cooked dishes which I’d discover in my fridge when I returned home from a day’s work. Failing that, if the maid was having a day off, for example, I’d stop off at one of the myriad street stalls to order Pad Thai or Chicken Satay, piping hot and laden with eye watering chillies which I theorised would kill off any bacteria. In ten years, I don’t think I managed to use my limited kitchen to cook much more than a slice of toast, and even that was an occasional deviation from the norm, given the poor quality of Asia’s bread (think plastic, sweet and sweaty). The fridge was for chilling beer and wine, the stove top was for the maid to produce her incredible curries and the kettle was for tea or for boiling water for a pot noodle.
When I met and married my husband, we made the most of Mumbai’s renowned service orientation, and I directed my new-found domestic goddess to organise a handy laminated file of takeaway menus. Our biggest decision of an evening was always – pizza, Chinese, Thai, or Indian. Or when we couldn’t be bothered, yesterday’s leftovers. It sounds sloppy, but it simply hadn’t occurred to me to bother cooking, and I used my poorly equipped kitchen, India’s lack of oven culture and its propensity to fry everything as excuses for my culinary lethargy. And then some English friends who were leaving Mumbai gave me their old oven, a tiny thing which could just about hold a (small) roast chicken but which aroused the first deeply buried twinges of domesticity within me.
I suddenly realised that I was sick of eating food whose ingredients had flirted briefly on a stovetop rather than meeting and fusing in a hot oven. This tiny addition to my kitchen ignited some deep part of my Englishness, and I became overwhelmed by the need to cook, and determined to overcome India’s limitations in that area. I discovered a tiny, smelly stall hidden at the back of one of the more popular market areas, and found that I could get surprisingly decent beef (or perhaps buffalo) there, as long as I was prepared to walk past stinking rows of live chickens lined up for the kill, and mangy flea ridden kittens slinking around in the hope of a handout. I found that I could source the cooking basics from the local shops, even occasionally find dusty imported items to top up my limited stores, and if all failed, I would simply carry critical ingredients back from my visits to the UK. I’d always made a trip to Tesco to fill my suitcase before leaving England, and now I simply exchanged boxes of wine and new shiny shoes for Yorkshire pudding mix, Bisto Beef gravy granules, goosefat for crisping roast potatoes, Colmans mustard, bacon and sausages.
I was all set to dive back into the world of cooking, and during that first year with my oven, I ran through the English classical recipe repertoire, producing beef roast dinners with all the trimmings, shepherds pies, toad in the hole,bangers and mash, beef and ale pies and lasagne (not strictly English, but close enough from the heavy carb and fat content perspective). My husband, who grew up in an English boarding school was delighted, reconnecting with his own inner schoolboy, and I called my expat friends home for Sunday dinner, delighting them with meals which were literally impossible to find in Mumbai, and stretching my tiny oven to its limit.
And then came the real double whammy – pregnancy combined with a brand new fitted kitchen, along with a shiny new “proper” fan oven. My inner domestic goddess returned with a vengeance, delighted to be finally liberated from the shackles of the wok and the instant noodle. As the pregnancy hormones kicked in, my repertoire expanded, and I developed a whole new obsession for cooking proper, old fashioned puddings and cakes. Victoria sponges, cupcakes, Lemon meringue pies, cheesecakes, queen of puddings, Banoffee pies, all came tumbling out of my new gleaming oven to the delight of my husband and the office, who became guinea pigs for my culinary experimentation. I realised then that this new found desire to create heavy, starchy delicious dishes was actually a throwback to the pre teenage me, and that the maternal cocktail of hormones swelling inside me had actually revived old memories of a childhood spent poring over floury cookbooks with my Mum who painstakingly taught me how to make pastry and cakes.
Now that I am pregnant for the second time, my baking obsession has intensified, and I find myself scouring the internet for new twists on old favourites. My husband loves the steady flow of delicious dishes which are emerging from that glorious oven, but he and I both know that once the baby is born, the desire to create complex fusions of fat and carbohydrate will be replaced by a fitness kick which will leave my oven cold and bare. I’ve promised him that I will fill the freezer before I deliver the baby, but it won’t quite be the same – those enticing baking aromas will no longer waft around the house and it will be back to Indian recipes and takeaways, at least until the next hormonal rush grabs me.
