I’ll be the first to admit that chana masala, like good or even decent pound cake, is best made from scratch but there’s a time and place for that, and a time and place for simply throwing everything into a pot and crossing your fingers that you end up with something edible.
Like nearly everyone else in Chicago, I’ve been sick with whatever monster virus is floating around the city. My last trip on the el sounded like a syncopated chorus of The Concerto of Death, as all of the passengers hacked, sputtered, and coughed along, a weary, bug-ridden carriage of sickness and misery dragged along in loud, screeching trains that always sound like they could do with a break too. It doesn’t help that our weather here has been changing swiftly and constantly, alternating between the deep, bitter freeze of winter and the mild promise of Spring, often on the same day.
The illness has meant a (hopefully temporary) sharp loss of smell and taste. The cat’s litter box is suspiciously unsmelly, despite clear evidence that it could do with a cleaning; this might explain why he has taken to nearly flying out of the box and into the living room as soon as he’s done. But the hardest part is not being able to taste anything other than the top or base notes of everything. Or worse.
I made lamb one night, craving its silky fattiness, because I would at least feel a texture, and hopefully some of its rich taste. I threw all the ingredients into my beloved slow cooker, but despite everything I packed into it, a myriad flavourings and spices in a desperate effort to taste and smell something, anything, the apartment only reeked of something that stirred a memory in me, a memory that brought with it a sense of dread. I was astonished that I could smell nothing else but this, a ferrous-laced scent of something…I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then it hit me.
Blood. My place smelt like a slaughterhouse.
Of course, I ate all of it.
Last evening, I had a different craving, for chana masala. I’m easily tired and didn’t want to have to spend too much with the usual chopping and sauteing, and I’ve figured out that the slow cooker does a decent job if I just throw things into it, even without the usual prep work. I wanted a quick recipe, something with canned chickpeas, and I needed to know whether to set the cooker on high or low so that it would be done in a couple of hours.
So, of course, I went about looking online looking for “Chana masala slow cooker.” I find that the web responds especially well to ungrammatical queries; too many details and you get results nothing like what you expect.
I scrolled through a few and, as expected, there are hundreds of recipes online and, as expected, most of them are on mainstream cooking sites targeted to the average (presumed white) American. This never surprises me: amongst my American-born friends, whether desi or not, chana masala and dahl rank among the favourites and, truthfully, they make both dishes better than I do. With the latter, I tend to be a lazy cook, throwing red lentils into a pressure cooker till they cry for mercy and then petulantly refuse to adopt the desired texture, leaving me with a soupy mess. Chana masala isn’t necessarily hard, but it requires a degree of patience.
Which I did not have in abundance, as I wrestled with my craving and checked out the first many recipes.
All of these were to my raging-with-craving mind, inordinately complex, with sometimes a dozen ingredients and a process that required too much work.
It’s for a slow cooker, people, I muttered, so I really need this to be a quick one.
I realised the recipes were not for people like me who knew what the stuff was supposed to taste like but, really, basically, would probably have been happy with a boil-in-the-bag version to satisfy her craving (the bodega was out of those, alas). Instead, these were designed for People Who Loved Mother Earth, beginning with admonitions to learn about the Sacred Chickpea and its Magic Nutritional Powers. Chickpeas were loaded with all kinds of long-named vitamins and minerals, they cooed, which horses and the poor in India have known for centuries, actually, consuming them in abundance as a source of cheap nutrition.
These elaborate recipes were designed for people who made friends with their local chickpea farmers, long before the budding season began (or whatever it is that chickpeas do), and who would only use beans they had to soak for twelve hours. If they did take the quicker route, they would pay six bucks for a sixteen-ounce can of organic, unsalted chickpeas, and they probably wouldn’t be looking for a slow cooker recipe online but consulting their Very Authentic Indian Cookbook for something that took an hour just to assemble.
But I, I was ready, damn it, with my $1.29 can of chickpeas (a brand with an Arabic name, twenty cents cheaper than the Latino brand; let us not ponder the various meanings of that), and my big splurge was, okay, fine, the fire-roasted tomatoes for about two bucks. And I had a lovely, plump, large jalapeno (also not authentic) to throw into the mix because spicy heat is really the only flavour I can taste, if it’s a flavour at all. I had even bought, in a fit of mad optimism, a bunch of fresh cilantro, hoping my dead nostrils might catch at least some of their scent in their process.
Finally, at last, I found what I needed. It was on a site clearly targeted at harried desi housewives and others like me, and the recipe couldn’t have been easier: Get the ingredients into the pot, mix in a pre-made spice paste (which the site obligingly advertised), cook on high for 2 hours. That last bit of information was really all I needed, and soon I had chopped some onions and garlic, thrown in the chickpeas and tomatoes, cranked the cooker to its high setting, and then liberally sprinkled entire tablespoons of a ready-made chana masala spice mixture onto the whole thing.
As I waited for my inauthentic but crave-satisfying dish to be done, I mused about what it meant that a chana masala recipe meant for people who might actually know everything about what the dish should taste like also recognised that they were the least likely to have the time or the inclination to make it from scratch every time. I grew up in India, but haven’t been back since 1994, and the waves of neoliberalism crashed onto its shores in full force soon after that.
There have always been forms of fast food in India, street food you can pick up for very little, but domestic cooking, the sort that involves complex dishes that take time and care, has always been the pride of the home cook. And while desis like to wax eloquently about the “home cooking” of mothers and aunts, the truth is that all that of usually happens, at least in households middle class and above, with at least one invisible servant alongside who might even be the actual cook, whose signature dishes earn high praise from everyone who gathers around for feasts at parties and get-togethers, and whose talents are sometimes rated so high that people frequently try to snatch them away from their friends’ kitchens.
My chana masala would have been spat out in nauseated bewilderment at such gatherings, its gritty and incomplete register of top, middle, and high notes less the fault of my ruined sense of smell and more due to the fact that it came out of a tiny cardboard box. I’ll be the first to admit that chana masala, like good or even decent pound cake, is best made from scratch but there’s a time and place for that, and a time and place for simply throwing everything into a pot and crossing your fingers that you end up with something edible. At some point, someone will have to write a complex cultural history of the transformation of the Indian home cook and its relationship to inventions like the pressure cooker and ready-made spice mixtures. Until then, I’ll keep consulting the web, my collection of cookbooks, and blogs like those of Aruna D’Souza to find ways to cheat.
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