Cooking up trouble
By Amrita Dhingra

IT has been a long cherished, albeit secret ambition of mine, to master that marvellous and mysterious art — cooking. With our cook who has been in the family for ages and ages (God knows how many ages), one feels a little reticent in voicing this desire. "Now missy," she’ll say wagging a long stirring spoon under my nose, "you don’t worry about all of such things. It’s my job and I’ll do it!" Emotions run high, to say the least.

Suppressed desires, they say, are bad for one’s health. What’s more, suppressed desires fuelled by a ‘healthy series of Food and Wine and Sunshine Cuisine on Star T.V. are worse. So you can see I’m in pretty bad shape.

Well, every chef, er, amateur chef has her day and it’s mine today. Cook’s out, father and mother are going for a nice long round of golf, the maid I’ve given half the day off. Great! It’s all done and I’m mistress of all I survey. I drag out a rather deliciously illustrated volume of "Crookery" Oops! Cookery in Colour, (must be all this talk of tricking people and entering kitchens on the sly that’s getting to me). Cooking is just logic plain and simple — a little of this, a pinch of that, stir it, mix it up, pop it in the oven and out it comes. Ah! page 396: Raspberry Meringue Pie.

The recipe informed me I’d need a whole host of ingredients, from short pastry to pureed raspberries, from cornflour to castor sugar. Delightful! Baking powder, sugar, and a suspicious looking tin complete with cook’s illegible scrawl, it did look as if it said, Castor sugar. I took a chance. Voila! We had the ingredients! I donned a chef’s hat and apron and glanced in the mirror — I looked very chef-ish. The recipe didn’t specify any bowls, spoons, etc so I got ample quantities of all such items and piled them on the work surface.

Alas! the 5 ounce short crust (recipe no. 566) had to be made first. Well never mind. I was getting pretty good at hunting ingredients and I believe I even managed to take a few seconds off my earlier record. In any event, I measured out ounce fat with some difficulty. Personally, I’m all for gm and kg but then I had my dictionary and calculator to help. I sieved the flour and salt and a lot of it settled on the worksurface. I ignored it. It was a mere trifle. "Rub the fat in till the mixture looks like find bread-crumbs." Now how am I supposed to know what find bread-crumbs look like. "Using first a knife and then the fingertips to fell the pastry gradually add enough cold water to make the dough into rolling consistency". I added enough cold water to make it into something which perhaps with the tiniest bit of exaggeration may pass for rolling consistency.

"Lightly flour the rolling pin and pastry board". I did. ‘‘If a great deal of flour is necessary to roll out the pastry then you’ve undoubtedly made it too wet." Made it too wet! Gooey! What a drip of a pastry! There it was clinging to the pastry board as if its very life depended on it. I endeavoured to "roll the pastry to the required thickness and shape, lifting and turning to keep it light". The pastry had other ideas, suddenly it’d become bosom pals with not only the rolling pin but also my hands, apron and the worksurface. "Light" said the recipe. This pastry was so light it was showing remarkable tendencies towards levitation. I washed my hands off the whole matter. It could wait.

I got hold of the raspberries. They looked docile, deceptively so. Raspberries who don’t really relish being squashed have demented notions that they’re meant to be missiles. First the pastry, now the raspberries. Enough to make any general order a retreat. But no, the Amis of this world are made of sterner stuff. I straightened my spine and ordered a strategic retreat.

Don’t be so crestfallen, I had to marshall my troops. Among them I found that unmatched sentinel — the food processor. At making raspberry puree in no time at all, the food processor is proficient. The puree you have to collect yourself, preferably in a dish and not on the floor.

Gosh! If Cook could see her kingdom now. A shudder passed through me. You can always clean up, I assured myself and pushed the ugly spectacle out of my mind. Temperamental, she may be but surely I’d manage, somehow. The meringue, I’m told, is a delight to make, that is, if you have a well-behaved set of eggs. The telephone call from Jane, demanding if I was going to keep that appointment at the cafe didn’t help.

Eggbeaters left lying around in bowls with eggs, whirring at speed 5 are dangerous things. Egg-egg everywhere and none to make meringue with. I’ll see, I told Jane, and slammed the phone down. Too late, it already had something sticky on it. Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! What am I going to do? I glanced in the mirror and rubbed a hand-towel viciously at my nose. Egg and pastry on my nose make me feel very vicious indeed. This was a nightmare; it was going to end very soon. All I needed was a noise, a shake....

My prayers were answered. The ample pile of dishes slid to the floor with a resounding crash, causing me to jump out of my skin. I barely made it back in time. It also made me lose my temper. A chef must do what a chef must do. I picked up all that I could (the pastry refused to part ways with its various allies, the raspberries had fallen in love with the marble on the floor) and dumped them in the trash can.

Cook would be hopping mad. Mother’d be furious. But then may be if Cook didn’t hand in her notice I would be able to rise from my lowly position of household hijacker. Meanwhile Jane and the gang were waiting at the cafe. Besides, things needed to cool down at home. Time, the great healer and all that. I left a note.

Dear Mum,

Gone to the cafe with the gang for a raspberry meringue pie.

Love Ami.

PS: Had slight trouble in the kitchen.

PPS: Can I sleep over at Jane’s tonight?