I was never a food snob. I just love good food.
My earliest food memories are from other people’s kitchens. First mutton, at a family friend’s house party. First small fish, at a neighbour’s. That second one came with a side of jaundice, and for the next thirteen years non-vegetarian food largely disappeared from my life. Just the occasional egg.
During those years, my comfort food was sambar rice. Specifically, my grandmother’s sambar rice.
Every summer, my mother and grandmother would set aside their differences and spend a few days grinding spices together. They’d shape the mixture into dense round balls and lay them out in the backyard to dry. My grandmother called them laddus. My job was to guard them — keep the monkeys away, rush them inside if it looked like rain. I took the responsibility seriously without understanding it at all. Why go through all this when you could just buy powder from the store?
I only figured it out after my grandmother passed away and my mother stopped making them.
Those laddus were the sambar. They gave it a smell and a depth that I’ve never found anywhere else. Without them it was still technically sambar, but it wasn’t hers.
As I got older and started eating out, I realised sambar is everywhere in India. Every restaurant, every corner, north and south. I tasted most of it and hated it. I’d sit with friends happily dipping their idlis into bowls of the stuff while I quietly wondered how they could enjoy it. Flat, thin, forgettable.
They were probably right. The sambar was fine.
The problem was that I’d been eating the gold standard since childhood without knowing it. Every bowl that followed was going to lose that comparison.
Some food can’t be judged on its own terms. It carries too much else with it.
