Something my Grandmother taught me

The main building with first floor dining room

My maternal grandmother was a dead ringer for fairy-tale witch. She lived in a little terraced cottage with a coal fire in the kitchen. The fire was in a grate that incorporated an oven built to the side for baking and had an arm that swung round to carry a big, old-fashioned kettle. Behind the kitchen was the scullery with a wash-tub, and a frightening mangle that had huge wooden rollers to squeeze the water out of the hand-washed laundry. Her white hair was wound into a bun on the back of her head and she always – it seemed – wore long, black, shapeless shifts. Her eyes constantly twinkled, deep-set in a face that was as weathered and wrinkled as a new-season’s walnut.

My parents used to send me to stay with her sometimes in the school holidays. It was long before I was a teenager but my father, with his forceful expectations of me, picked me up at the end of term and put me on the Yorkshire Pullman on platform 8 at King’s Cross with a note of the number of the bus I had to catch from Hull Paragon Station, and the name of the stop from which I could walk to Granny’s house.

Those holidays in Granny’s house were my first exposure to seeds in cookery, because Granny King’s neighbour used to bake the most delicious Seed Cake, for which I must find – or reinvent – the recipe. Nowadays we take for granted the use of seeds and spices in cooking, but in those post-war years of the mid-fifties, spices were a mystery and appeared only in small cellophane packets to be added to the vinegar for pickling onions or making green tomato chutney. Here in Kerala pepper grows in vines along the roadside and a wide variety of different seeds and spices are used in the kitchen every day. And it’s not just in food, of course, because all the medicines here are made from herbs and spices, and many are produced right here on site.

In western medicine we have come to expect our potions to be bland and tasteless, but that’s a recent innovation since synthetic flavours have become available and affordable. The first medicine I remember as a child – probably for a cough or cold – had the strong and bitter flavour of liquorice, and since sweet-rationing was still in force, the flavour was unfamiliar. This medicine was a mysterious dark colour and I decided it tasted horrid. My mother encouraged me with the phrase that Granny King had always recited to her: “If it doesn’t taste bad it’s not going to do you any good!” And that is how it was for many years: medicines tasted truly disgusting until those dark-brown liquorice-flavoured liquids were replaced with bright pink medicines flavoured with a synthetic strawberry taste and then, in time, most bottles were replaced with pills and tablets.

In Ayurvedic medicine, medicines are still the real thing: disgusting colours, gritty, grainy textures, and flavours that surprise, shock and repel the senses. The doctors hand out little poly-bags filled with fine powders in varying shades of brown. Some are to be mixed into a paste with honey, some are to be taken in warm water and others in buttermilk. But these are not soluble powders. When I collect my early morning mug of buttermilk from the kitchen, I spoon in my brown powder and it floats on top. I stir, I whisk and beat until gradually little clumps of paste form and then they in turn can be broken down, so that the mixture achieves a slightly lumpy consistency rather like wallpaper-paste. It is so thick that I don’t know whether I drink it or eat it, but fortunately this early morning medicine is not totally repugnant. You just need to like the flavour of sugar, salt, chilli, pepper, garlic and something vaguely chocolatey.

I have 6 medicines to take. One of my little tablets has to be washed down with an infusion made of roasted cumin seeds and hot water. Such infusions are commonplace, and almost every guest here can be seen walking around with a thermos of herbal tea. No “tea” of course: just hot water that is tainted faintly green by the soggy, slimy leaves that are floating in it.

But Granny knew best, because these strange potions are having a remarkable restorative and curative effect on my whole system despite the range of unfamiliar flavours and unappealing tastes. And then there was a welcome surprise when my most recent medicine  was prescribed. Not a liquid, not a powder, but a shiny blister-pack of tiny pills, one to be taken daily, at bedtime. Just when I thought the assault on my taste-buds was over, I read the small print: “Not to be swallowed.” So the treatment was clear, just let the pill dissolve in the mouth and fall asleep with the flavour on the tongue, thinking of Granny King’s wise words: “If it doesn’t taste bad it’s not going to do you any good!”