Archana Pidathala's Vankaya bajji or bashed aubergine chutney
Archana Pidathala's Vankaya bajji or bashed aubergine chutney
An introductory essay, and a recipe for Venkaya Bajji. Text and photographs by Archana Pidathala.
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Welcome to Vittles Recipes! In this new weekly slot, our roster of six rotating columnists will share their recipes and wisdom with you. This week’s columnist is Archana Pidathala. You can read our archive of cookery writing here.
“I cook to hold my memories in my body”
An introductory essay and a recipe for Vankaya Bajji or bashed aubergine chutney. Text and photographs by Archana Pidathala.
It is spring when we arrive in Barcelona, the air laden with the heady scent of jasmine and orange blossoms. We moved here from Bangalore, for my husband’s work and our son’s love of football, our lives packed into twelve boxes. ‘Why did I uproot my life?’ I ask myself repeatedly in the aftermath of moving five thousand miles from home.
In our first few weeks, I have transplant shock. My hair starts to fall out and turns silver faster than it should. I lose my desire to eat. I feel loneliness crash inside me like gigantic waves. Nothing – not the deep blue sea, pink skies, or historical markets I witness – could have prepared me for this.
On a very muggy day in July, after putting it off for months, I finally begin to unpack. Halfway through, I spot my grandmother’s cookbook wedged between the pressure cooker and cast-iron pan. I abandon everything and stay up reading late into the night, as if the book were a guide to settling into a new city, a new continent. In the book, I see the lanes of my childhood: here is my grandmother dictating recipe after recipe after recipe to me on a summer afternoon; here we are, the five grandchildren, sitting cross-legged on the floor, knees bumping, eagerly waiting for ammama to feed us. I slowly begin to cope the only way I know: by taking myself to the kitchen. Like always, I cook because I want to eat my memories – to hold them in my body a little longer in this place far from home.
The kitchen I inherit in our rented apartment is newly refurbished, with a flameless stovetop, a touch-sensor kitchen tap, and a seventy-page instruction manual. I feel unreasonably frustrated, nostalgic for my tiny, old-school Bangalore kitchen, in which I cooked nearly every day for fourteen years. I also feel like a fraud, having confessed, in my recent book, my desire to live off the grid – without refrigeration, electricity, or running water. All I want is to live simply and sustainably, somewhere familiar, without worrying about all the mechanics of the kitchen that now runs my life.
To reconcile my fantasy with the reality of my life, I fill my mornings with the smell of south Indian filter coffee and cook my grandmother’s three dozen aubergine recipes on repeat. Slowly, I taste my way out of feeling unsettled, scenting the backdrop of every meal with rice and ghee.
On the day I cook this vankaya bajji, I wake up craving something earthy. When I go looking for aubergines, I realise that the word ‘aubergine’ comes via the Catalan word ‘albergínia’. I find kinship in a place that loves aubergines as much as I do. I make vankaya bajji from memory: cooking chunks of aubergine in olive oil with onions, tomatoes, tamarind, curry leaves, and lots of chillies, bashing everything up and pouring over a tadka of garlic and onion, with their raw, pungent edge still intact.
The rest of my boxes still remain unpacked, and my new kitchen and its ways still distant, but I realise that I can cook this bajji and come home to myself.
Venkaya Bajji or bashed aubergine chutney
Note: In South-Asia, a ‘chutney’ has many forms, and does not imply a sweet condiment or side. The Vankaya bajji is a comforting, zesty chutney to eat with rotis, or any other flatbread, crisps and rice.
