Cuisine Minceur
Sitting around the living room of Mike Frame’s four-room house in Janakpur, we all agreed when Shostak observed, "Thanksgiving’s coming. We ought to do something." Off and on, he had been reading aloud from The American Woman’s Cookbook, among the works of fancy in the paperback book-locker we each had been given.
Thoughts of food had been growing steadily more absorbing. Since soft rice made up the greatest part of what any of us had to eat and even goat, the usual meat, would be chopped into bite-sized pieces, then cooked to rags, the teeth were reduced to mostly ornamental status.
"I’d give anything for a hoagie on a tough Italian roll," I said, "something I could really bite into. My teeth are actually loose from lack of exercise."
"Yeah, I’ve got this cast iron meat grinder back at my place, which somebody back in training told me to buy and I never found anything to grind with it," Finucane said. We all had meat grinders. He lived on bananas and milk, which little boys had learned to approach him with as he walked the streets of his village, a known buyer in a cash-short economy.
Cooking, for most of us, had been reduced to an Einsteinian thought experiment by reason of our primitive skill set. Mostly unable to warm an opened tin before we left our homes, we had been forced by circumstance to learn to prepare dhal bhat–the sub-continental boiled dinner of rice and lentils. Beyond that, we depended on the rare packages from home, filled with familiar ingredients, canned or dried. We might be lucky enough to eat out, when a restaurant or fresh fruit swam into our ken. But for the most part, in those first six or eight months, whatever the land offered beyond lentils and rice remained wrapped in clouds of mystery (how did one open a coconut, anyway?), inhibition (eggs were well known aphrodisiacs), prohibition (pork and chicken were unclean, by reason of habitual coprophagy) or involved preparation techniques unknown to any of us. Instruction in cooking, as provided in our training program, had consisted on a single class, during the course of which Ben Weaver held his left hand aloft, saying, "This is a potato," and then drew a hunting knife with his right hand, saying, "This is a knife." Ben was an engineer. He peeled the one with the other in half-inch slabs which would not have left anything of the largest potato in Nepal. But that was of little consequence, at least among the flooded rice fields, where I lived, as potatoes were available only at certain parts of the year and they never did provide us with hunting knives.
There in the U.S.A.I.D. agent’s living room, we enthusiastically drew up plans for the ideal Thanksgiving dinner, circumstances allowing. "A big roast turkey with stuffing and all the trimmings," we chorused. Well, the nearest turkey was...possibly in Turkey. Substitute a peacock. That got a chuckle all around. "I saw one of them, once," Heinze volunteered. "It was in Kathmandu, on top of the wall around one of those big old Rana palaces. Only three things stood in our way–a distance of several hundred miles, the householders and their servants who cared for the beasts and our tendency to come over faint at the thought of wringing such a beautiful, blue neck. "So, substitute a chicken," said Shostack, son of a cook. Possible, but no local chicken would be caught dead in the refrigerated section of a market. "Anyone know where to get a chicken?" he asked. Rather you had to know someone who had a few chickens and who might be willing to part with one for pecuniary consideration, which turned out was not the present case. We all shook our heads. This was a land where, far from slaughtering the goose that laid the golden eggs, people were reluctant to kill the hen that turned out even the occasional speckled item. Well, substitute extra stuffing for the chicken.
Leafing through cookbooks and memories lead to a yearning recollection. "White bread filling," said Finucane. "Corn-bread stuffing," Shostack gloated. "My mother does this oyster stuffing," I added. "Chestnuts, roast chestnuts," Heinze put in. "Wild rice, that makes great stuffing," Det cried. That was it! Substitute wild rice for the stuffing ingredients which were not available. Since the wild sort was also unavailable, substitute white rice, we agreed with enthusiasm. "Lord knows, we’ve got white rice to stuff mattresses with," said Heinze. Celery, parsley, sage, marjoram and so forth, used to season the stuffing were also conspicuous by their absence, so substitute, um, let’s see, dhal. Yeah, sure, the local lentil sauce went very well with rice, moistening the dry grains and adding flavor.
So there we had it, the best possible Thanksgiving dinner–rice and dhal. Why hadn’t we thought of that straight off?
Before they jeeped us off to our assignments, the half-dozen volunteers who were to inhabit the countryside around the town of Janakpur, the Peace Corps supervisor had caused us all to buy cooking gear–a kerosene wick-stove, two pots and a plate, a large spoon, all aluminum, along with some rice, dhal, salt and spices. Twenty miles north of town there turned out to be a large dormitory which had been constructed for pilgrims to a local shrine. After I was deposited there, I was faced with the task of cooking my own evening meal. I knew rice got boiled in water, but where water was to be found..., it served as a good introduction to the men who had gathered to see what a foreigner looked like. I was the new owner of a bucket–a veritable tub of steel, but no rope to lower it into the well. However, someone hauled water up in his bucket and splashed it into mine, barely reaching the half-way mark.
My single-burner wick-stove was slow to bring a pot to the boil, and wasn’t I there to modernize and improve the efficiency of the local culture? Sure, I was. I could sit around for an hour or two while rice cooked itself in my big pot and then another hour, maybe more, while dhal changed from hard pellets to formless soup in my little pot...or I could put them in together and be done in half the time. The advisory board, which had been formed to supervise my activities, voted against. But I was not easily to be swayed by agents of benighted tradition (these were actually traditions and it was night). And one of them had let slip that there was such a dish; it was called kitcheree. Pressing ahead, I had my elbow tugged by a man who wished to remind me to put in some salt–not that much salt. No, no, I liked salt, I assured him. And I really ought to add haldi, said someone. I peered down at my kit of mystery spices, noticing a woody, little pellet which could have been a possum dropping, for all I knew. What did it do, I asked, irritated by the unnecessary-seeming distraction. Haldi, they told me would make everything yellow. This was important, I asked? And it would improve the flavor, they added. One fellow also informed me that up in the hills, where he came from, it was called baeshart or poison-killer because if my food were poisoned (and who could say?), the haldi would turn black in warning. Only later did I learn that turmeric was what cooks called it at home, if anyone where I was born ever called it anything. Okay, I was nothing if not willing to avoid poisoning, so I snatched it up and dropped into the soup. You would have thought it was somehow self-evident that it ought to be ground to a powder first by the way they reacted–over-reacted, really. It would be fine, I assured them, when it had been established that I did not have a grind-stone. I figured that any process which could make soup of hard lentils would do the same for anything else. Before they could rest, they had to make one final suggestion. No one could ever eat anything unless it had some mirchai, chilli pepper in it. I was game–one? At least two, I was told.
I have to hand it to the group, they quite loyally sat about on the floor and on my bed, watching the progress of my first cooking experience, chatting, inquiring as to my plans, purposes and marriage prospects, for the hours it took the sooty little kerosene flame to turn the mixture to a stiff paste, which I gouged out of the pot, hard, black bead of haldi included, and sampled to the diplomatic interest of all. It was well I liked my salt; I would not be needing any for several days. And then the peppers kicked in. That night, as I dumped most of what I had cooked, I met the white pi-dog which would be my dinner companion for as long as I lived in the dharmsalla.
A proper meal in Govindapur, as in most of the sub-continent, consisted of a large platter of rice, topped with dhal, a sauce made of lentils and spices, with servings on the side of at least one sabji, usually vegetable, but sometimes meat. The local dialect of English often substituted for the verb to eat the phrase to take rice. Rice was food: food meant rice; to eat was to eat rice. In Heart of Midlothian, Sir Walter Scott has one character ask another if he will take kale, meaning the evening meal by the same logic applied to nineteenth century Edinburgh. When I could not get it any more, I missed it, but for the first six months of my residence, appreciation lagged behind opportunity. Beverage was not served with a meal. Water would be available after. One ate with the fingers, washing before and after, and custom was to rinse the mouth afterwards, sometimes spectacularly.
Cooking a meal usually would take two hours, housewives taking off from the fields in advance of their men-folk for this purpose. Ready-to-cook was a concept which applied to one’s wife, perhaps, but had no meaning in reference to food-stuff. Vegetables had to be picked, in fact, they generally had to be grown first from seed. Meat involved slaughtering an animal, usually–raising one, sometimes. If one wanted spices, they had to be ground with a few drops of water on a twelve-pound, stone lori-pati, a flat mortar with cylindrical pestle. The wrist motion which resulted in a smooth paste was tricky and I never did learn it, nor did I ever own a set. These grindstones were only available at certain annual festivals, when troops of little donkeys would bear them down from the hills, where there was a decent supply of stone. I was not free to play with equipment in anyone’s kitchen, as my status within the caste system was never more than questionable and I might cause pollution. But such an intimate object would not have been available in any case to anyone outside the immediate members of a family.
In the absence of refrigeration, ingredients could be nothing but fresh and the constant practice in scratch cookery kept every housewife’s culinary skills honed sharp. I eventually came to have excellent meals on a daily basis by paying one or another of my neighbors to provide them–for practically nothing. It was my introduction to gourmandism.
Left to our own inclinations, any of us would have eaten quite a lot more meat, a regular supply of sweets and plenty of dairy products. One thing the entire nation was united upon was that none of us were to be left to our own inclinations. Visiting Gary Shostak in his village, just south of Janakpur, I had been in the country long enough to be embarrassed when he purchased two eggs to ornament our evening meal. I felt they should have been bought down an alley and concealed in plain brown wrappers. We were bachelors; what could we want with eggs–known aphrodisiacs? In truth, the low-protein diet of the average person, such as myself, yielded an exquisite sensitivity to the sudden intake of the quickly digested bolus of protein in an egg. I could feel stirring in the primary processes within minutes. In Gary’s case, there was no question and the village locked its women-folk securely away that night..., every night, really.
A row of PC volunteers sitting in the winter sun, looked like old duffers in front of a Florida nursing home. From behind, their ribs could be counted right through their shirts. Dysentery was the main affliction, and I toyed off and on with the notion of returning home to found a weight-loss program which would sell bottles of drinking water from my village. The regime would consist of one glass of the water daily and you could eat all you wanted of ice cream, whipped cream, cakes, pies..., whatever you could keep down. On average, each of us lost thirty pounds in the first three months after arriving in Nepal. With this slimming came a ravenous hunger. Mills Boone volunteered that he thought from a quarter to a third of his body weight was parasites, anyway. Meat became the ideal for all food, so to say that a certain mushroom or radish dish tasted like meat was the ultimate compliment. Gorman illustrated our condition when he told of being invited to a wedding feast, as a sort of guest-of-honor cum novelty. He was served an enormous platter of rice with a variety of sabjis, a lake of dhal and, to literally top it all off, a large slab of fried fat was popped onto his plate. His glasses fogged up from the rising steam, obscuring the wedding party and his voice broke with gratitude as he repeated, "Goat fat, oh, goat fat!"
When a villager would feel ill, the first question to arise in his mind was what he should eat? Probably more attention was paid to diet in the Indian sub-continent than in the rest of the world put together. Moslems, of course, may not eat pork and it is the Hindu position that anything Moslems can not do, Hindus can not do better. Cows, obviously, are sacrosanct. Animals which consumed unclean things, such a dogs and pigs, were considered unclean. And after witnessing these creatures at their lunch, I was willing to go along with that assessment. But there is always someone willing to take a principle to its next level of application and there were those who, citing religion, would not eat anything growing underground, such as onions or potatoes, dirt being what it is.
Foods were arranged across a spectrum from garam to thandi– warming to cooling. Rice, for example, was cooling compared to wheat; it did generate less heat when eaten, and thus whole-wheat chhapatis were more in demand in the winter months, while rice was eaten in hot weather. Water was the most cooling food, while spices were considered the most warming, followed by meat. Each ill to which the human body is heir required the patient’s diet to shift to the proper point along the warming-cooling scale, since illness could be the result of or aggravated by eating too much to one extreme or the other.
In general, spices were considered warming, though distinctions were made. Chilli was self-evidently most garam, leading to heavy breathing and perspiration. Curry powder, a fixed proportion of certain spices was absolutely never used. Each housewife would mix and grind what she felt was suitable for each dish. In fact, the word curry was unheard. Perhaps is it a British concept, lumping all south-Asian food under a single heading. One valid generalization about spices was that they were used in plenty, the fistful being a standard measure. A collection of spices suited to meat was called garam masala, warming spices–generally cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, chilli, cardamon, cumin, and others in varying combinations. Even non-vegetarians considered the frequent eating of meat to be unhealthful because of its extremely warming properties. Foreigner that I was, I took every opportunity to have meat, going way out of my path to obtain it at distant markets. Though once I went three months without, I generally managed to get one sort of meat or another every few weeks. And my reputation preceded me.
Sakhawa Bajaar, where Heinze lived, held its large market every week, and one, sometimes as many as two goats would be slaughtered there by one of the Mussulman who seemed to have a corner on the goat-butcher’s trade. Still-quivering portions were sold to a jostling crowd ready-chopped into bite-sized pieces with a heavy knife. Bone in a goat was regarded much like the bones of a salmon–a slight inconvenience to the over-delicate. Splintered ends in goat meat or anything else with bones large enough to stab the eater in the gums taught everyone caution. In an effort at even-handedness or a desire to simplify pricing, the butcher would try to give each customer the same mix of liver and lights, pluck, bone, fat and meat. It took real arguing to have him leave out the lung and intestine and less easily named viscera.
I only lucked in on Heinze’s market day once in a while, given his distance from my own village. But I chanced by one day when a group of untouchables decided to slaughter one of the pigs they herded through the area in lieu of public refuse collection and sewers. They planned to take advantage of hill-tribe people assembled for the market, who did not pretend to social niceness. Sungur, the local pig was a small, black, pot-bellied creature, unappetising in habits and appearance. The herd was milling about one the edge of the market, making runs into the crowd in search of anything edible. Sows with litters of piglets seemed to keep in touch by means of constant squealing, sonar like bats used, but highly audible. Bombay taxi drivers use the same technique, nowadays.
One of the swineherds walked casually through the herd and made a dive onto the selected victim...onto the place where the suspicious animal had been. For a stout animal with short and skinny legs, a pig is capable of surprising acceleration and maneuvering. The whole herd began to screech, scattering through the shopping crowd, which protested in turn. Shouting instructions to each other, the swineherds gave hot pursuit of the selected animal. Finally, a flying tackle snagged the pig by one hind leg and the men jumped on it. They flipped the screaming pig on its back and brought the killing tools. A pig’s throat does not lend itself to being cut, so another method had been chosen to kill the animal. Two iron pokers about a yard long were pounded into its chest, puncturing each lung and who could tell what else. The pig screamed. It was over in a moment, well, a couple of moments, or perhaps a few minutes or so. They piled straw against the carcase and set it alight to burn off the coarse black hair which covered the animal. Rolling it over, they did the same to the other side.
The reason Mussulmani butchers dominate the field may be that they follow their religious precepts and bleed an animal before cutting it up. Blood is sold separately, an additional profit center. Then they skin the animal, as there is a market for goat-skin. Football not having been introduced, there was no market for pig-skin, so the swine-herds simply took their knives and reduced the swine carcase to bits, skin still covered in charred bristles, bones and all.
Only low-castes would eat sungur. Baby of a sungur was a good thing to call someone with whom you were annoyed, I found. On the other hand, bahral, the wild boar, is an admirable, large, brown animal, given to healthful rooting in pristine jungles, although sometimes in a farmer’s potato fields. Anybody would eat bahral, well, not Muslims, not Brahmans, not lace-curtain Hindus, but anybody else. I knew I would. Gentleman Jim Corbett rated the wild boar the most dangerous animal in the jungle, because of its pugnacious personality, rapier-like tusks, wolf-like teeth and nearly invulnerable body, which is shielded by a layer of fat under tough hide. Tigers and leopards may be more powerful, but they attack less frequently. With its short legs, the bahral finds it more effective to charge than to flee. An interesting fact is that, while the live bahral is seldom seen, people several villages over sell its meat quite frequently.
The conservative view holds that filth contaminates and many removes are needed to make the impure acceptable. At its most extreme point, the view is that the world is irredeemably corrupted, to be cleaned by no washing, and should be ascetically scorned. I elbowed my way to the front of the pork-market crowd and came away with my portion of meat, cheap at any price. One of the amazing aspects of life, for those who care to take the liberal point of view, is that perfect filth can be turned into pristine sustenance by passing it through the body of an animal. Soap was also considered to work wonders in my family, turning my dirty uncles into men in suits for weddings, funerals, national and religious holidays.
Walking the two hours back to my village gave me time to build up quite a head of anticipation for a plate of curried pork and rice–a big plate. My neighbors had migrated up from India a generation before and were trying to forget their low-caste ancestry through strict out-abstaining of the few Brahmins in the area. Luckily, I did my own cooking by that point, but I felt it would only be diplomatic not to trouble anyone’s conscience with my dinner plans.
As the main road entered my village, a nine-year old boy stood up and shouted, "Sah’b bought pig meat in Sakhawa Bajaar." The grin on his face would have split a pumpkin. Although I may have been viewed as the local Toad of Toad Hall, by those who lived around me, I never tried to practice any more advanced depravities because nothing I did was ever secret. Nothing.
I looked at the boy in surprise. "Nai, not pig meat, wild boar."
Thoughts of food had been growing steadily more absorbing. Since soft rice made up the greatest part of what any of us had to eat and even goat, the usual meat, would be chopped into bite-sized pieces, then cooked to rags, the teeth were reduced to mostly ornamental status.
"I’d give anything for a hoagie on a tough Italian roll," I said, "something I could really bite into. My teeth are actually loose from lack of exercise."
"Yeah, I’ve got this cast iron meat grinder back at my place, which somebody back in training told me to buy and I never found anything to grind with it," Finucane said. We all had meat grinders. He lived on bananas and milk, which little boys had learned to approach him with as he walked the streets of his village, a known buyer in a cash-short economy.
Cooking, for most of us, had been reduced to an Einsteinian thought experiment by reason of our primitive skill set. Mostly unable to warm an opened tin before we left our homes, we had been forced by circumstance to learn to prepare dhal bhat–the sub-continental boiled dinner of rice and lentils. Beyond that, we depended on the rare packages from home, filled with familiar ingredients, canned or dried. We might be lucky enough to eat out, when a restaurant or fresh fruit swam into our ken. But for the most part, in those first six or eight months, whatever the land offered beyond lentils and rice remained wrapped in clouds of mystery (how did one open a coconut, anyway?), inhibition (eggs were well known aphrodisiacs), prohibition (pork and chicken were unclean, by reason of habitual coprophagy) or involved preparation techniques unknown to any of us. Instruction in cooking, as provided in our training program, had consisted on a single class, during the course of which Ben Weaver held his left hand aloft, saying, "This is a potato," and then drew a hunting knife with his right hand, saying, "This is a knife." Ben was an engineer. He peeled the one with the other in half-inch slabs which would not have left anything of the largest potato in Nepal. But that was of little consequence, at least among the flooded rice fields, where I lived, as potatoes were available only at certain parts of the year and they never did provide us with hunting knives.
There in the U.S.A.I.D. agent’s living room, we enthusiastically drew up plans for the ideal Thanksgiving dinner, circumstances allowing. "A big roast turkey with stuffing and all the trimmings," we chorused. Well, the nearest turkey was...possibly in Turkey. Substitute a peacock. That got a chuckle all around. "I saw one of them, once," Heinze volunteered. "It was in Kathmandu, on top of the wall around one of those big old Rana palaces. Only three things stood in our way–a distance of several hundred miles, the householders and their servants who cared for the beasts and our tendency to come over faint at the thought of wringing such a beautiful, blue neck. "So, substitute a chicken," said Shostack, son of a cook. Possible, but no local chicken would be caught dead in the refrigerated section of a market. "Anyone know where to get a chicken?" he asked. Rather you had to know someone who had a few chickens and who might be willing to part with one for pecuniary consideration, which turned out was not the present case. We all shook our heads. This was a land where, far from slaughtering the goose that laid the golden eggs, people were reluctant to kill the hen that turned out even the occasional speckled item. Well, substitute extra stuffing for the chicken.
Leafing through cookbooks and memories lead to a yearning recollection. "White bread filling," said Finucane. "Corn-bread stuffing," Shostack gloated. "My mother does this oyster stuffing," I added. "Chestnuts, roast chestnuts," Heinze put in. "Wild rice, that makes great stuffing," Det cried. That was it! Substitute wild rice for the stuffing ingredients which were not available. Since the wild sort was also unavailable, substitute white rice, we agreed with enthusiasm. "Lord knows, we’ve got white rice to stuff mattresses with," said Heinze. Celery, parsley, sage, marjoram and so forth, used to season the stuffing were also conspicuous by their absence, so substitute, um, let’s see, dhal. Yeah, sure, the local lentil sauce went very well with rice, moistening the dry grains and adding flavor.
So there we had it, the best possible Thanksgiving dinner–rice and dhal. Why hadn’t we thought of that straight off?
Before they jeeped us off to our assignments, the half-dozen volunteers who were to inhabit the countryside around the town of Janakpur, the Peace Corps supervisor had caused us all to buy cooking gear–a kerosene wick-stove, two pots and a plate, a large spoon, all aluminum, along with some rice, dhal, salt and spices. Twenty miles north of town there turned out to be a large dormitory which had been constructed for pilgrims to a local shrine. After I was deposited there, I was faced with the task of cooking my own evening meal. I knew rice got boiled in water, but where water was to be found..., it served as a good introduction to the men who had gathered to see what a foreigner looked like. I was the new owner of a bucket–a veritable tub of steel, but no rope to lower it into the well. However, someone hauled water up in his bucket and splashed it into mine, barely reaching the half-way mark.
My single-burner wick-stove was slow to bring a pot to the boil, and wasn’t I there to modernize and improve the efficiency of the local culture? Sure, I was. I could sit around for an hour or two while rice cooked itself in my big pot and then another hour, maybe more, while dhal changed from hard pellets to formless soup in my little pot...or I could put them in together and be done in half the time. The advisory board, which had been formed to supervise my activities, voted against. But I was not easily to be swayed by agents of benighted tradition (these were actually traditions and it was night). And one of them had let slip that there was such a dish; it was called kitcheree. Pressing ahead, I had my elbow tugged by a man who wished to remind me to put in some salt–not that much salt. No, no, I liked salt, I assured him. And I really ought to add haldi, said someone. I peered down at my kit of mystery spices, noticing a woody, little pellet which could have been a possum dropping, for all I knew. What did it do, I asked, irritated by the unnecessary-seeming distraction. Haldi, they told me would make everything yellow. This was important, I asked? And it would improve the flavor, they added. One fellow also informed me that up in the hills, where he came from, it was called baeshart or poison-killer because if my food were poisoned (and who could say?), the haldi would turn black in warning. Only later did I learn that turmeric was what cooks called it at home, if anyone where I was born ever called it anything. Okay, I was nothing if not willing to avoid poisoning, so I snatched it up and dropped into the soup. You would have thought it was somehow self-evident that it ought to be ground to a powder first by the way they reacted–over-reacted, really. It would be fine, I assured them, when it had been established that I did not have a grind-stone. I figured that any process which could make soup of hard lentils would do the same for anything else. Before they could rest, they had to make one final suggestion. No one could ever eat anything unless it had some mirchai, chilli pepper in it. I was game–one? At least two, I was told.
I have to hand it to the group, they quite loyally sat about on the floor and on my bed, watching the progress of my first cooking experience, chatting, inquiring as to my plans, purposes and marriage prospects, for the hours it took the sooty little kerosene flame to turn the mixture to a stiff paste, which I gouged out of the pot, hard, black bead of haldi included, and sampled to the diplomatic interest of all. It was well I liked my salt; I would not be needing any for several days. And then the peppers kicked in. That night, as I dumped most of what I had cooked, I met the white pi-dog which would be my dinner companion for as long as I lived in the dharmsalla.
A proper meal in Govindapur, as in most of the sub-continent, consisted of a large platter of rice, topped with dhal, a sauce made of lentils and spices, with servings on the side of at least one sabji, usually vegetable, but sometimes meat. The local dialect of English often substituted for the verb to eat the phrase to take rice. Rice was food: food meant rice; to eat was to eat rice. In Heart of Midlothian, Sir Walter Scott has one character ask another if he will take kale, meaning the evening meal by the same logic applied to nineteenth century Edinburgh. When I could not get it any more, I missed it, but for the first six months of my residence, appreciation lagged behind opportunity. Beverage was not served with a meal. Water would be available after. One ate with the fingers, washing before and after, and custom was to rinse the mouth afterwards, sometimes spectacularly.
Cooking a meal usually would take two hours, housewives taking off from the fields in advance of their men-folk for this purpose. Ready-to-cook was a concept which applied to one’s wife, perhaps, but had no meaning in reference to food-stuff. Vegetables had to be picked, in fact, they generally had to be grown first from seed. Meat involved slaughtering an animal, usually–raising one, sometimes. If one wanted spices, they had to be ground with a few drops of water on a twelve-pound, stone lori-pati, a flat mortar with cylindrical pestle. The wrist motion which resulted in a smooth paste was tricky and I never did learn it, nor did I ever own a set. These grindstones were only available at certain annual festivals, when troops of little donkeys would bear them down from the hills, where there was a decent supply of stone. I was not free to play with equipment in anyone’s kitchen, as my status within the caste system was never more than questionable and I might cause pollution. But such an intimate object would not have been available in any case to anyone outside the immediate members of a family.
In the absence of refrigeration, ingredients could be nothing but fresh and the constant practice in scratch cookery kept every housewife’s culinary skills honed sharp. I eventually came to have excellent meals on a daily basis by paying one or another of my neighbors to provide them–for practically nothing. It was my introduction to gourmandism.
Left to our own inclinations, any of us would have eaten quite a lot more meat, a regular supply of sweets and plenty of dairy products. One thing the entire nation was united upon was that none of us were to be left to our own inclinations. Visiting Gary Shostak in his village, just south of Janakpur, I had been in the country long enough to be embarrassed when he purchased two eggs to ornament our evening meal. I felt they should have been bought down an alley and concealed in plain brown wrappers. We were bachelors; what could we want with eggs–known aphrodisiacs? In truth, the low-protein diet of the average person, such as myself, yielded an exquisite sensitivity to the sudden intake of the quickly digested bolus of protein in an egg. I could feel stirring in the primary processes within minutes. In Gary’s case, there was no question and the village locked its women-folk securely away that night..., every night, really.
A row of PC volunteers sitting in the winter sun, looked like old duffers in front of a Florida nursing home. From behind, their ribs could be counted right through their shirts. Dysentery was the main affliction, and I toyed off and on with the notion of returning home to found a weight-loss program which would sell bottles of drinking water from my village. The regime would consist of one glass of the water daily and you could eat all you wanted of ice cream, whipped cream, cakes, pies..., whatever you could keep down. On average, each of us lost thirty pounds in the first three months after arriving in Nepal. With this slimming came a ravenous hunger. Mills Boone volunteered that he thought from a quarter to a third of his body weight was parasites, anyway. Meat became the ideal for all food, so to say that a certain mushroom or radish dish tasted like meat was the ultimate compliment. Gorman illustrated our condition when he told of being invited to a wedding feast, as a sort of guest-of-honor cum novelty. He was served an enormous platter of rice with a variety of sabjis, a lake of dhal and, to literally top it all off, a large slab of fried fat was popped onto his plate. His glasses fogged up from the rising steam, obscuring the wedding party and his voice broke with gratitude as he repeated, "Goat fat, oh, goat fat!"
When a villager would feel ill, the first question to arise in his mind was what he should eat? Probably more attention was paid to diet in the Indian sub-continent than in the rest of the world put together. Moslems, of course, may not eat pork and it is the Hindu position that anything Moslems can not do, Hindus can not do better. Cows, obviously, are sacrosanct. Animals which consumed unclean things, such a dogs and pigs, were considered unclean. And after witnessing these creatures at their lunch, I was willing to go along with that assessment. But there is always someone willing to take a principle to its next level of application and there were those who, citing religion, would not eat anything growing underground, such as onions or potatoes, dirt being what it is.
Foods were arranged across a spectrum from garam to thandi– warming to cooling. Rice, for example, was cooling compared to wheat; it did generate less heat when eaten, and thus whole-wheat chhapatis were more in demand in the winter months, while rice was eaten in hot weather. Water was the most cooling food, while spices were considered the most warming, followed by meat. Each ill to which the human body is heir required the patient’s diet to shift to the proper point along the warming-cooling scale, since illness could be the result of or aggravated by eating too much to one extreme or the other.
In general, spices were considered warming, though distinctions were made. Chilli was self-evidently most garam, leading to heavy breathing and perspiration. Curry powder, a fixed proportion of certain spices was absolutely never used. Each housewife would mix and grind what she felt was suitable for each dish. In fact, the word curry was unheard. Perhaps is it a British concept, lumping all south-Asian food under a single heading. One valid generalization about spices was that they were used in plenty, the fistful being a standard measure. A collection of spices suited to meat was called garam masala, warming spices–generally cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, chilli, cardamon, cumin, and others in varying combinations. Even non-vegetarians considered the frequent eating of meat to be unhealthful because of its extremely warming properties. Foreigner that I was, I took every opportunity to have meat, going way out of my path to obtain it at distant markets. Though once I went three months without, I generally managed to get one sort of meat or another every few weeks. And my reputation preceded me.
Sakhawa Bajaar, where Heinze lived, held its large market every week, and one, sometimes as many as two goats would be slaughtered there by one of the Mussulman who seemed to have a corner on the goat-butcher’s trade. Still-quivering portions were sold to a jostling crowd ready-chopped into bite-sized pieces with a heavy knife. Bone in a goat was regarded much like the bones of a salmon–a slight inconvenience to the over-delicate. Splintered ends in goat meat or anything else with bones large enough to stab the eater in the gums taught everyone caution. In an effort at even-handedness or a desire to simplify pricing, the butcher would try to give each customer the same mix of liver and lights, pluck, bone, fat and meat. It took real arguing to have him leave out the lung and intestine and less easily named viscera.
I only lucked in on Heinze’s market day once in a while, given his distance from my own village. But I chanced by one day when a group of untouchables decided to slaughter one of the pigs they herded through the area in lieu of public refuse collection and sewers. They planned to take advantage of hill-tribe people assembled for the market, who did not pretend to social niceness. Sungur, the local pig was a small, black, pot-bellied creature, unappetising in habits and appearance. The herd was milling about one the edge of the market, making runs into the crowd in search of anything edible. Sows with litters of piglets seemed to keep in touch by means of constant squealing, sonar like bats used, but highly audible. Bombay taxi drivers use the same technique, nowadays.
One of the swineherds walked casually through the herd and made a dive onto the selected victim...onto the place where the suspicious animal had been. For a stout animal with short and skinny legs, a pig is capable of surprising acceleration and maneuvering. The whole herd began to screech, scattering through the shopping crowd, which protested in turn. Shouting instructions to each other, the swineherds gave hot pursuit of the selected animal. Finally, a flying tackle snagged the pig by one hind leg and the men jumped on it. They flipped the screaming pig on its back and brought the killing tools. A pig’s throat does not lend itself to being cut, so another method had been chosen to kill the animal. Two iron pokers about a yard long were pounded into its chest, puncturing each lung and who could tell what else. The pig screamed. It was over in a moment, well, a couple of moments, or perhaps a few minutes or so. They piled straw against the carcase and set it alight to burn off the coarse black hair which covered the animal. Rolling it over, they did the same to the other side.
The reason Mussulmani butchers dominate the field may be that they follow their religious precepts and bleed an animal before cutting it up. Blood is sold separately, an additional profit center. Then they skin the animal, as there is a market for goat-skin. Football not having been introduced, there was no market for pig-skin, so the swine-herds simply took their knives and reduced the swine carcase to bits, skin still covered in charred bristles, bones and all.
Only low-castes would eat sungur. Baby of a sungur was a good thing to call someone with whom you were annoyed, I found. On the other hand, bahral, the wild boar, is an admirable, large, brown animal, given to healthful rooting in pristine jungles, although sometimes in a farmer’s potato fields. Anybody would eat bahral, well, not Muslims, not Brahmans, not lace-curtain Hindus, but anybody else. I knew I would. Gentleman Jim Corbett rated the wild boar the most dangerous animal in the jungle, because of its pugnacious personality, rapier-like tusks, wolf-like teeth and nearly invulnerable body, which is shielded by a layer of fat under tough hide. Tigers and leopards may be more powerful, but they attack less frequently. With its short legs, the bahral finds it more effective to charge than to flee. An interesting fact is that, while the live bahral is seldom seen, people several villages over sell its meat quite frequently.
The conservative view holds that filth contaminates and many removes are needed to make the impure acceptable. At its most extreme point, the view is that the world is irredeemably corrupted, to be cleaned by no washing, and should be ascetically scorned. I elbowed my way to the front of the pork-market crowd and came away with my portion of meat, cheap at any price. One of the amazing aspects of life, for those who care to take the liberal point of view, is that perfect filth can be turned into pristine sustenance by passing it through the body of an animal. Soap was also considered to work wonders in my family, turning my dirty uncles into men in suits for weddings, funerals, national and religious holidays.
Walking the two hours back to my village gave me time to build up quite a head of anticipation for a plate of curried pork and rice–a big plate. My neighbors had migrated up from India a generation before and were trying to forget their low-caste ancestry through strict out-abstaining of the few Brahmins in the area. Luckily, I did my own cooking by that point, but I felt it would only be diplomatic not to trouble anyone’s conscience with my dinner plans.
As the main road entered my village, a nine-year old boy stood up and shouted, "Sah’b bought pig meat in Sakhawa Bajaar." The grin on his face would have split a pumpkin. Although I may have been viewed as the local Toad of Toad Hall, by those who lived around me, I never tried to practice any more advanced depravities because nothing I did was ever secret. Nothing.
I looked at the boy in surprise. "Nai, not pig meat, wild boar."