Editing The Chef In The Food Part 1 (section)

==== The Dharma of Food ====
The goal of a cook in a traditional culture, where cooking has not been commercialized and optimized to the restaurant experience yet, is to approximate to the norm. Such a cook wants to cook the dish as close to the traditional way as possible. This cook is not necessarily a professional cook. Though there are obviously professional cooks available, most of the eating and cooking are done at home and thus half of the population will have done regular cooking at some period of time in their lives. Whether the fancy French word ‘chef’ applies to them is a different question altogether.

At home, it was mostly women who cooked. Though a lot of men knew how to cook, it was the women who cooked on a regular basis at home. My grandmother cooked a wide variety of dishes, but neither did she claim to ‘invent’ any new dish, nor did she gloat in how her food was ‘different’. Instead, she always held her own grandmother to be the norm. All her life, she tried cooking food as her ‘grandmother’ would, as it would be cooked in a traditional Kayastha family.

The goal, to reiterate once again, was to approximate to the norm, and not deviate from it. The best cooking was that in which the cook almost disappeared from the dish, and the dish became exactly as everyone expected it to be.

And this norm to which everyone aspired to, was neither completely artificial like it is in modern times, where ‘chefs’ invent entire cuisines and dishes, nor completely spontaneous. For Ayurvedic instructions guided the local cuisines all over India. People cooked with whatever was available locally, including spices and other ingredients, but the general ‘dos’ and ‘donts’ of Ayurveda always applied.

This meant that people were free to choose ingredients and the processes to cook them but they did it according to some universal rules which were dictated by the Ayurveda. The ingredients were of course dictated by whatever was available locally and seasonally. The exotic rarely entered the cuisine except in some fruits and some rare items like asafetida.

This was a mirroring of how Dharma also governed in India. Local deities, local practices were encouraged rather than suppressed. But they were infused with an underlying meaning of the high civilization of the Vedas, keeping them tied in an invisible but ever-present thread of Sanatana culture and civilization. The food was the same. Ayurveda was the Dharma of Food.