When Pittu Feels Like Home
When Pittu Feels Like Home
Pittu in New York
My partner, who was born and raised in Mumbai, and I can only really see each other on weekends because we work in different parts of New York State. He’s in New York City, and I’m upstate. So Saturday and Sunday morning breakfasts are a special affair for us. I swim laps early in the morning, sweat in the sauna, and come home ravenous. We make a variety of things that reflect the ongoing conversations we have with our diasporic journeys. For me, it’s pullet eggs, fresh from one of the local farms near the university where I work as a professor of postcolonial literature. I open one of the jars of chunky tomato-thyme-jalapeño sauce that I made when the late summer tomato glut rendered them cheap at local farm stands, create small oval spaces in the sauce, crack the little eggs into each hollow, and poach them. We eat the eggs with my partner’s no-knead bread; he mixes up the ingredients on Friday evenings when he arrives home and allows the dough to leaven overnight. When I come home from my swim on Saturday morning, the house is infused with the smell of baking bread and slightly burnt raisins and walnuts.
Poached eggs are a favorite for me because the taste reminds me of being on my first airplane journey, which took us from Colombo, Sri Lanka to Paris, France. We were on our way to Zambia, which was to become my childhood home. In Paris, I learned to eat my first poached eggs with a knife and fork. Now, to my poaching liquids, I add the remembrances of the island my parents left behind: green chillies, a tiny bit of cumin, and thyme—a hint of the occident—which makes the poached eggs redolent of the things I love about each of my life experiences. In Zambia, my father began his job as an engineer in the copper mines. My mother adapted less easily to what was available to her in a rural, semi-dry high-plateau, where no coconuts grew. She faltered when she attempted to make kiri hodi (a delicate sauce that is made with the richest milk that comes out of the first squeeze of grated coconut and is an ideal dipping for steamed rice noodles in the morning) with cow’s milk as a substitute; of course, her sauce broke when she added the requisite squeeze of lime at the end. I learnt how to cajole her tastes with new recipes from the farm wives around us, showing her how kiri hodi could be made without the milk separating into curds and whey. And of course, I also wanted to try new things—tastes that those around me in Zambia favored, rather than the tastes towards which my mother wanted me to gravitate.
When I first met my partner, I was attracted by the fact that unlike me, he was so located—so solidly “homed”—as a city boy from Mumbai. He was now equally situated as a city boy working in an office on the nineteenth floor in one of Times Square’s high-rise buildings. He came to see me in upstate New York two weeks after we first met each other in the city. He marveled at the saffron yolks of the local eggs from Xanadu farms (where the chickens really run about freely with ducks, a few turkeys, and two Great Pyrenees-mix dogs who are there to keep the coyotes away), and made the correct noises of approval when he tasted the jam I made from wild berries, collected from mosquito-infested thickets by Lake Ontario. He laughed at what he called my “western” tendencies, such as my propensity for poaching eggs, making stollen with homemade marzipan for the Christmas breakfast table, and adhering to boarding school table manners. I laughed back, and asked him how come he was the benchmark for all mannerisms deemed “eastern”.
About two months into our courtship (I hadn’t quite decided whether this man would do), he showed up with a pittu maker—a modern take on the bamboo cylinders that were used in Sri Lanka to steam rice flour and grated coconut dumplings. His family, though Mumbai people, originated in Kerala, the coastal state in the south of India. I came to realize, later, that Keralites share many foods and customs with Sri Lanka. Pittu, which I was sure was specific to the island—beloved by paddy farmers and island wealthy alike—is something that is also popular among Keralites. I had to get over any of my food-centered chauvinism.
One eats the pittu dumpling with the right hand (my cousins inform me that ladies must only permit the food to touch the first division line marking each finger), dipping them into a chili-onion chutney and jaggery (palm sugar). Pittu takes forever to steam, so they were considered a treat. But my new boyfriend had a metal contraption that cut cooking time to minutes—it attaches on to the vent of a pressure cooker (no South Asian—diasporic or Subcontinental—worth their breakfast lives without one), and pops out columns of pittu in no time. Because I’d been away from Sri Lanka since I was seven years old, I had no idea that such innovations had been made to breakfast technology.
When I read the instructions on the millet (ragi) flour package he bought from a Jersey City Indian shop, it instructed the cook to “wet the puttu podi with suitable quantity of water and salt” and to “transfer the mix into puttu candle with coconut gratings as per the photograph in the front of the pack”. I had no idea what they were talking about. I knew that puttu was the Malayali (the Keralite language) version of the Sri Lanka word pittu. But what in the world was a “puttu candle”? We laughed about how instructions on Indian food packages were never intended for a novice. Basically, these instructions were meant for someone who grew up next to a grandmother’s daily cooking, for whom they would be unnecessary. He showed me how to mix the millet with rice flour, add the correct amount of water, load the dough into the steel column (the “candle”), alternating the dough with grated coconut, and steam it on the pressure cooker vent.
I brought out palm sugar jaggery, and a pounded mix of red onion, red chili, and lime juice (luunu miris)—sweet and spicy things with which pittu are supposed to be eaten, as the recesses of my memory told me. I made a pot of South African rooibos tea—from a farm near the Cederberg Mountains—flavored with a pod of cardamom from my grandmother’s garden. He made a chickpea dish that is a typical accompaniment to puttu in Kerala kitchens—the soaked chickpeas are cooked in a sauce of sweet spices—cinnamon, cloves, a little fresh ginger root, aniseed, fenugreek, as well as chili, black pepper, and turmeric.
My Mumbai Man sealed the deal with the pittu he made for breakfast that Saturday morning.