There is no reference in the history books published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) that any of the past wars or battles fought within or outside the country caused a crisis of cooking fuel in the Indian kitchens. The latest one in the Middle East has turned history on its head!
Despite the country being deep into the
atmanirbharta mode, the fear lurks that the next dose of coffee may come a little cold and one may need to await an eternity to taste another crisp vada!
The memes and the jokes going around on the cooking gas shortage capture little of the evolution of cooking in the country as those creating these can identify only the microwave ovens, hot plates and air fryers.
It is the lot who are in their late sixties and beyond who can well relate to how cooking was organised in a typical middle or upper middle-class south Indian kitchen in the period before the 1970s.
Irrespective of the economic strata of the users, firewood was the common source of energy to work the kitchen—except that the nature of the wood differed.
Even the poorest who had a roof to call their own cooked, using wood. But these would be the pieces picked up from the streets or in the houses where the person worked, supplemented with rags and dry leaves. Energy, though smoky, came free!
The other households bought the firewood from the yards that stored and sold them, present in many parts of a city like, Madras. The wood was sourced from the outskirts where it grew in abundance and reached the city by water transport or lorries.
In independent houses, the kitchen was very spacious. Most kitchens could have served to play pickleball. The stove(s) to cook using firewood (fireplace) were three or even four, spaced on a platform, of a length that would have measured only slightly less than the boundary in IPL matches!
These were kept shining and smooth by applying a paste of cow dung before the kitchen shut down late at night. Each was of a different size to accommodate vessels from the huge brass ones that could be upwards of 16 inches at the bottom, to much smaller ones.
The design helped multiple cooks circulate within the space without any physical contact. If the correct balance between the external help and the domestic womenfolk got upset, then the West Asia crisis is but a tempest in a teapot compared to the extra heat generated in their midst!
The place for cooking rice was distinct and any question about why it could not be used in an emergency to cook any other item was dismissed like a challenge to the basic structure of the constitution!
The ones who managed the kitchen understood physics better than those who taught it in the universities. The flame was controlled more finely than with the modern cooktops, by changing the quantity of the wood used, its thickness, etc, the nuances will miss a casual observer.
The process of getting the firewood was a separate specialisation which task was assigned to the smartest one, adept in cycling and managing delicate negotiations with the shopkeeper, someone no less volatile in temperament than some presidents.
The first task would be to inform the owner that he was being accosted by none other than so-and-so’s grandson for buying the wood and reminding him of the conditions in the standing purchase order existing for over three generations between the two contracting parties.
The store was an open yard with a variety of wood stocked in piles like a mound. Getting a helper to climb the right one and bring down the exact type that will pass the QC test meant using many enticements, including the promise of a full ‘10 paise’ coin changing ownership!
Weighing the wood with anything other than the 20 kilo weighing stone significantly increased the error percentage.
The cargo would be loaded onto a handcart. Avoiding the last-mile glitches, which derail many a grand corporate plan, is where the key performance evaluation by the rest of the household stood.
If anyone thought that the stacks of wood unloaded in the compound would directly move to its storage area clearly lacked the knowledge of how an efficient stores department worked.
The gardener would bring bucket-loads of water from the well and make sure the stack of wood was drenched without leaving any gaps for the women folk to spot a dry area! Can there be anything more counter intuitive than drenching the firewood?
Once successfully bathed, the wood would be spread to dry in the Madras sun for the next few days, encroaching on the stadium space where the major test matches were played.
Cooking this way was a matter of fulfillment for the women who overlooked the red eyes and constant cough; they felt closer to their forebears who cooked the same way many millennia ago!
This system survived beyond the early 1960s in many families. The next generation that moved out for employment, to places like Bombay, needed to adjust to smaller kitchens or just to an omnibus single room. Pressure stoves were the only option in those settings.
These used paraffin or lighter fuels; in India, kerosene was more common. The air pressure generated by pumping sent the fuel as a thin jet through a nozzle to the burner to produce the flame. It posed some challenges to operate, including the risk of the stove bursting.
Simultaneously, the government’s R&D (research & development) helped develop a viable and safer alternative called Janata Stove which used cloth wicks and burnt without smoke with no risk of bursting. This was decades before the much-publicised Ujwala scheme.
When LPG entered the scene in the mid- to late-1960s in the city, Esso and Caltex were completely unwelcome in the traditional households. The expostulations by the menfolk, of using a smarter and healthier mode of cooking, saw a restricted entry through the back door.
Except for extraneous and ancillary uses, the old firewood, burnt bright for some more years to meet the essential cooking, especially for ritual occasions.
The strong conviction that kept the firewood going was that the food prepared tasted more authentic, as the burnt wood smell blended with the spices in sambar. A belief, no international peace negotiator could have talked them out of!
(Ranganathan V is a CA and CS. He has over 45 years of experience in the corporate sector and in consultancy. For 17 years, he worked as Director and Partner in Ernst & Young LLP and three years as a senior advisor post-retirement, handling the task of building the Chennai and Hyderabad practice of E&Y in tax and regulatory space. Currently, he serves as an independent director on the board of four companies.)
