A Meal to Remember
This past weekend, the Sethi family descended upon New York City, ready to try as many places to eat as humanly possible in the 3 days we had together. In celebration of my parents’ 28th wedding anniversary (a weird number, but one of my mom’s favorites), my brother and I bought them plane tickets and a reservation for four at a restaurant called Indian Accent, which had a tasting menu. If you aren’t familiar with that, a tasting menu offers a special type of dining experience where the overall meal is composed of a series of small dishes meant to showcase the skill of the chef. We ended up eating three courses, picking different forms of the foods that we had all been raised on. Each dish was magnificent, but the dessert stood out in a class of it’s own.
The dessert was a play on a standard Indian sweet called makhan malai, which is a combination of milk, cream and sugar. The chef had reimagined the dish to be a gorgeous, light mousse, which had a variety of flavors and spices inside, including rose, cardamom, saffron and more. As I took my first bite, I was completely overwhelmed with emotion, and for the first time in my life, I started to tear up from just the flavor. The mousse captured the taste of every Indian dessert I had ever had and with them, the immense memories and nostalgia that accompanied them.
With the first bite, I was a kid again, taking $2 that my mom had given to me to buy a malai kulfi (Indian ice cream) at Gokul, the sweet shop that we would always visit after our adventures throughout the Indian shopping center. With the second bite, I was shoving ladoos in my mouth whole on Diwali, channeling my inner-Ganesh in between setting firecrackers off and setting pinecones on fire. I was sitting at my grandparents’ house drinking tea and having some kaju katli from some puja or another. At once, I relived all of the moments that made me feel so close to my family and our culture. Every single day, I struggle with how I’m not Indian enough or don’t speak Hindi well enough or I don’t fit in with other Indians or Indian Americans enough. At that moment, I felt completely content with my diasporic experience.
And although that dessert managed to capture so many feelings and memories into a single dish, I can still find contentment within my culture in less high brow food. I love to get doodh pati at the Punjabi Deli near my place, surrounded by taxi drivers speaking solely in Punjabi. Although I only know a few words of the language, there’s comfort in the familiar unfamiliarity of it. The meaning of the words is lost on me, but we all connect through our desire to get some nice cha.
Drops of the Week
where I *drop* recommendations of cool things this week
Article
"Too Many Men” by Simon Denyer and Annie Gowen - an eye-opening account of the extremely strange ratio of men to women in some of the most populated countries in the world.
Book
Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg - I finished my second read of this book. I think the first time I learned a lot. This time I really just noticed how blasé being terrible to other people has become when it comes to dating. Apparently, the key to modern romance is just being a real human being for once.
Playlist
june 18 - another month, another playlist! This is a pretty eclectic mix, even by my standards, but I was a huge fan of the music I discovered this month. A lot of these songs are in my regular rotation now.
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:~)
Love,
Nikhil