The Hands That Fed Us

A meditation on memory, legacy, and the slowness we once knew

Before Cooking Had a Name

There was a time when cooking wasn’t a profession, nor a curated ritual shared through stylised reels, nor a menu signed with names. It was simply life. In the older days of Indian villages, food was not just sustenance—it was a system, an inheritance passed not through ink but through the smoke of kitchens and the rhythms of memory. Before words came, before measurements mattered, before books began to bind instructions—there were hands. Hands that stirred, shaped, and smoked meals into existence without ever needing to speak of them.

The Kitchen Without Walls

The idea of a kitchen was not confined to four walls and a chimney. It was a courtyard under a mango tree, or a thatched roof open to the light, or the shared earthen floor of the sanjha chulha—the communal hearth. Here, women gathered not just to cook, but to become. The sound of rolling pins on wooden planks, the song of oil crackling in iron pans, the rustle of sarees as they crouched by the fire—these were the music of life. Chapatis puffed and browned with the press of a palm. No one needed timers. Dough rose with intuition, spices bloomed from instinct.

Food as Osmosis

Food knowledge wasn’t passed down—it seeped in. A girl would watch her mother’s fingers dip into turmeric and learn the geometry of seasoning without ever being told. A boy would sit beside his grandmother and memorize the way she tossed mustard seeds until they danced. No recipe was written, yet everything was known. The unlettered knew more than chefs with stars and degrees. Their currency was lived time.

Collective Breath

This was a world where one did not cook alone. You cooked with voices around you, laughter over lentils, songs humming beside smoked fish. Every household had its rhythms, yet all rhythms found a place in the collective breath of the community. The kitchens were not silent; they were libraries with no books. You remembered by doing. And forgetting was rare, for forgetting meant letting go of a piece of yourself.

Unacknowledged Artists

The story of our cuisine was not written by historians. It was shaped by women who stirred with one hand and fed children with the other, who saved the last morsel for the guest at the door, who never saw what they did as art—and yet, it was.

The Cycle of Fish and Fog

I remember the fish being caught at dawn. No iceboxes, no cold storage—just hands and water. Nets cast by instinct, the shimmer of silver under sky. The catch would be laid out on wet jute sacks, cleaned with a handful of ash, and cooked before the sun rose too high. It wasn’t a dish; it was a cycle. No menu could ever name that taste, because its flavour lay in the morning fog, the call of the birds, the salt on one’s arm.

Rice and Reverence

Rice, too, was a ritual. It was sun-dried on rooftops, turned with care so no grain cracked. It was pounded by wooden pestles that echoed through courtyards. It was washed, thrice, with the kind of tenderness one reserves for a child. I remember them. Slender men, sun-worn, who climbed trees like spirits and whispered to bees. If they saw a hive, they’d cut it just so—never enough to anger, never more than needed. Honey would drip, golden and wild, into unvarnished tins. It was sold as it was—no labels, no grades, no promises. And yet, we knew it was honest.

Devotion, Measured in Ghee

Ghee was once a practice of patience. You began with milk, drawn at dawn, still warm from the cow’s breath. It was boiled and cooled, turned into curd overnight. The curd was churned into butter, the butter simmered until it sang—and only then was ghee born, fragrant and golden. Now we buy it sealed and shelved. We forget that its making was once an act of devotion. And what remained after—the dark, caramelised residue at the bottom of the pot—was not waste, but treasure. We mixed it with puffed rice or ladled it onto warm rice with salt. That taste, rich and earthy, is lost in today’s clarity.

Flowers That Spoke

Even flowers had their own sacred rhythm. Today we order marigold garlands online, their symmetry too perfect to feel alive. But once, they were strung by hand, petal by petal, by women sitting cross-legged on verandahs, humming as they worked. Flowers were not decorations—they were declarations of joy, grief, welcome. At weddings, you’d see not just garlands, but memory. At funerals, not just wreaths, but silence. A woman in my neighbourhood still does this—quietly, every day. I see her fingers fly through the thread, but no one asks where she learned it, or why she continues. We buy, but we do not behold.

Pickles, Pithes, and Patents

And what of pickles? Once buried in sunlight and sealed in clay, now rushed into jars with vinegar and shelf dates. Of millets once called food for the poor, now reborn as gourmet grain. Of sabzi seeds passed between neighbours wrapped in old newspaper, now patented and sold. Of sweet pithes made only during winter, by hands rubbed raw from grating coconut. Who makes them now? Who waits all year just to fold rice flour into warm syrup and share it before the day ends?

The Lost Art of Waiting

We have forgotten the slowness that once defined us. The waiting. The gathering. The effort behind every grain and garland. Today, food is curated, branded, marketed. But it wasn’t always so. It was once the fragrance of mustard oil in an iron pan, the crackle of cumin, the murmur of family gathered to eat before the light disappeared.

What Remains

And yet, not all is lost.

Some still return to the elders, asking for a forgotten proportion.
Some still kneel by old chulhas, lighting fire the way their mothers once did.
Some still sit with old women who speak more through spices than sentences.

These moments may be small, but they are enough. Because culture is not saved by museums. It is saved by memory. It is not archived—it is enacted.

Smoke and Legacy

We will not find ourselves in five-star kitchens.
We will find ourselves where the fire burns low, where the roti is shaped imperfectly, where someone remembers how to make ghee not from butter, but from devotion.

Where the smoke that rises isn’t just from firewood—it’s from legacy.

It is the smoke that fed us.
Let us remember the names that were never written, the songs that were never sung aloud.

For in those unnamed moments lies the truth of who we were—
and the whisper of who we might still be.