In the pre-cellphone, pre-cable TV era we lived in a portion of an old house. We and the landlord were on the first floor and an elderly couple downstairs. The landlord was very clear – no meat in the house, not even as takeaway. So, of course, we professed horror and shock at the idea of meat (abacharam! abacharam!) and merrily went on to cook and devour a bunch of animals (including the Banned One) in the few years we lived there.
Since we rarely ate out or ordered in, my mother would cook meat about once a month. It was always the same dish – a meatloaf with minced beef, egg, bread, nutmeg etc, accompanied with toast. Usually we were joined by a couple of cousins for this feast. So there would be four hungry kids, and one hungry adult (my father could, on a good day, compete with all of us) almost hitting the plate with forks and spoons (à la the maggi ad) and chanting, “meatloaf! meatloaf!”. Only we couldn’t chant meatloaf with the landlord living nextdoor and so we invented a code word – kathirikai (i.e. brinjal or aubergine) for the meatloaf. After much discussion, while waiting for the ‘kathirikai’ to make its appearance, we decided that the toast could not be left behind in the codeword arena as it was rather strange to be eating kathirikai with toast. Therefore the toast was renamed paruppu podi which is a powder of various spices and lentils that is mixed with rice and a spot of gingelly oil. Now we could yell kathirikai and paruppu podi with abandon while my poor harried mother tried to keep the supply of both going. The landlord must have thought us a strange family with such a love for brinjal and paruppu podi!
Sadly these days ‘kathirikai’ does not figure much in our menu. It has been replaced by more exotic things like quiches (that the pater keeps calling pees though he quite likes quiche and keeps suggesting we have it for dinner) and enchiladas.
the chronicles of s 