Yesterday, while on my daily self-hating spiral into the world of listicles, I found – 10 things that will be delivered to your doorstep before Father’s Day, 8 D-I-Y gifts to make for dad, 5 activities to bond with your father this Sunday. I wish I had also found something along the lines of 10 ways to spend the day with your father (after having spent the last 90 days in quarantine with him) without wanting to pull your hair apart. But, well, social media disappoints.
Most of these gift recommendations were either kitchen gadgets, BBQ party ideas, or cocktail making kits. Truth be told, I was fascinated but fairly confused too, because fatherhood in India is not conceptualized in the kitchen. Our chest-thumping males are proud of their machismo. Amongst other things, it has led them to spend a disastrously small amount of time doing unpaid housework. 52 minutes for them versus 5.51 hours for women according to this (5 year old) study.
PFB some evidence I found in a daily newspaper.
“I have started doing my own dishes, only mine. It is a start for me. I water the plants every day, make the bed. I made coffee, too; it was bad to taste. I have to get the groceries. But more than anything else, I have had to motivate my wife.” – Vishal Pandey
“I would rather be in bed, watching movies and playing games. I also tell my wife to relax more and not worry much about chores and be unnecessarily burdened. On my part, I am trying to assist by watering the plants, drawing the curtains, making the bed, doing some heavy lifting, and cooking light snacks. Mostly, I am trying not to create any additional mess,” – Raman Shridhar
After spending some time congratulating these young budding gardeners, I stumbled upon Joshua David Stein’s piece on Fatherhood and Food on Grubstreet.
“A father is he who puts food on his family’s table. This is what it means to be a dad, and thus, fatherhood and food are forever entwined. But what of a dad who cannot cook?”
What of a dad who cannot cook? I thought about this sentence hard and strong. Really, what of a dad who cannot cook?
In another one of those moments where I managed to break through the bubble of my sheltered life and realise that my experience has been vastly different from most others, it struck me that I didn’t know the answer to that question. My dad always knew how to cook.
My father’s love for cooking and respect for good food has singlehandedly had the biggest impact on my relationship with eating. Thinking, reading and writing about food has kept me afloat, more than ever in the past few months, and it all started when my father would return from his bi-monthly business trips with food that my sister and I would stay up waiting for. Fancy sour candy that we would take to school the next day to share with friends, a variety of mini Kitkat flavours, box after box of Nerds, lollipops that were bigger than my face (keep in mind, this is the early 2000s, these weren’t a thing in the third world yet).
We were told stories about what he ate in-between meetings and conferences – Neapolitan pizzas and Gelatos in Italy, Hot Pots in China, Street Food in Bangkok, Schnitzels in Germany – the things dreams are made of. I was 12 when he made me have my first ever buttery medium-rare steak, and life has never been the same.
I only realised how strongly his love for traveling and discovering places and people through food had impacted me when I returned from my vacation to Tokyo not with a bag full of clothes, but food, from Miso Soup packets to Wasabi, and of course, Kitkat.
Every weekend he would try to recreate recipes he had eaten somewhere abroad and my fascination as a kid slowly gave way to the same enthusiasm about unleashing my creativity on a plate. Cue – my recent attempt at recreating the chocolate souffle from Le Soufflé in Paris.
I was never handed down an heirloom recipe book to help me document my culinary heritage, neither was I given a secret family spice blend recipe, what I was given instead is a bottomless love for cuisine, for nourishing myself and people I love. A need to cook to care, with ingenuity and authenticity.
So, this Father’s Day, quit the “maa ke haath ka khana” trope, and ask your father if he wants to cook a meal for you. It doesn’t have to be a made-from-scratch pizza or build-it-yourself tacos, although it wouldn’t hurt to go all out with juicy carnitas and bloody marys (Dad, are you reading?). It just has to aim to please. That’s what it is right? Dad Food?
okay chalo 