Ancient Grains for Modern Meals - Maria Speck [52]
Considering that I married into a large Indian family, it is no surprise that this practical tool entered my kitchen as well. I received my first masala dabba as a gift from my mother-in-law. We bought it in one of Toronto’s Indian neighborhood stores, where they are sold next to shiny stainless steel containers for flour, sugar, and rice, another must in an Indian home. Of course, I own a set of those as well.
I bought my second masala dabba years later while working with my husband in India. I had seen, and envied, this type at the home of Indian friends. My new spice box is state-of-the-art. It is the Mercedes of masala dabbas. Unlike my old solid box, this one has the same basic design, but with a glass lid! This clever invention makes finding your spices a snap. No more stressful fumbling, trying to pry open the metal lid while your mustard seeds are popping away on the stove and onto the kitchen floor. No more hunting for the dash of turmeric that colors so many Indian dishes (and stains your tablecloths forever). To this day, I use both of my spice boxes, the modern transparent one and the old-fashioned “mysterious” one. My reasoning goes like this: since I can see the spices in one box, I can make a fairly good guess about what’s in the other one (forgetting how many spices I own and how often I change the contents).
My craze for Indian spices goes way back. And, my friends are surprised to learn, this passion is not connected to my husband’s Indian roots. Nor is it really part of my own heritage. In German cooking, spices don’t take center stage the way they do in many other parts of the world. And my Greek mom, with her purist taste, relies solely on creative combinations of fresh herbs for her dazzling Mediterranean cuisine. I was first intoxicated by spicy food as a young adult, when I visited Sri Lanka on my very first solo trip abroad.
Food on the island has many similarities to the cuisine of southern India. Soon I found myself abandoning the Western dishes local restaurants cooked up for tourists, from pancakes to omelets to pizza. Why eat what I can get at home? During the heat of the day, I indulged on the first fresh tropical fruit of my life, ripe and juicy mangoes, the soft flesh of papayas, and tiny local bananas with their heady aroma. At night, I wandered around sampling spicy local curries in small beach restaurants. But there was more to come.
Joining a group of hungry fellow travelers, I soon found myself at the jungle hut of a local family who cooked dinner for foreigners for a small fee. Tropical nights are dark, so right after sunset we would traipse with a flashlight through a forest of tall palm trees to a tiny straw-covered home. We sat on the ground and waited, and waited, as the cooking began only once we arrived. There was no electricity, just the light of a lantern next to which a woman briskly chopped and worked away over an open fire, together with her daughters.
We could barely see anything as dish after spicy dish was carried to us in the warm night. Using our fingers, we scooped up countless tongue-tingling curries with rice, often made with unknown ingredients and spices. There were aromatic fish and meat dishes we could not identify, vegetables we had never tasted. But dining in the darkness only enhanced our senses and