Making a mountain out of a molehill

 

Making a mountain out of a molehillMost of my week was taken up by rai (brown mustard) and anything that takes up so much energy and ruins (or even boosts) my peace of mind, to me, is worth sharing. Who knows how many of us are in the same boat!

It all began with someone dear and close asking for Punjabi style gobhi ka achar (cauliflower pickle). I enjoy making it, so naturally it became my immediate mission. The easy way for me is to procure dry spices first and then get fresh vegetables which are perishable. And those of you who are keen on natural preservation or are as finicky about spices as I am, would support me when I say the spices have to be clean and fragrant.  

I had everything at home for the recipe-mustard oil, turmeric, Kashmiri mirch (Chilly), garam masala, rai, vinegar, and of course, salt. I collected them to check their condition and aroma. In the process, I opened the rai packet and spread the contents on a plate, taking it out in the sunlight to be sure of its purity.

I noticed tiny black particles mixed with the seeds. A few can always be found in a packet, and they are easy to pick out. But this one had too many. To check whether they were dust or charcoal, I even put a couple under my teeth, but the crunch unsettled me.

I took out the whole 100 gm on a plate to clean it. Separating the black particles out was a slow process. After about a spoonful was done, my fingers and wrists were tired and I had to abandon that exercise. I tried one more time after a few hours.

The mass below is those black particles.

I used a sieve but the particles, nearly the same size as the seeds, stayed on the net and the smaller mustard seeds went into the dust bin. I tried to wash them, thinking maybe the black particles would either dissolve or sink. The seeds turned betrayers. They decided to support their fellow packet-dwellers and sank at the bottom with them.

I had to give up on that packet. It was bought a couple of months ago and there was no way to complain to the shopkeeper.

I got a fresh packet of rai from another provision store. I opened the packet the next day, spread some out on a plate and started to check. There was no need to look further, it also had those same black foreign particles and an almost equal amount. This time I complained to the shopkeeper. His reply was that the contents were in a packet which the company supplied, so he could not have done anything about it. Moreover, now that I had opened it, he would not even replace it. Anyway there was no question of getting a replacement because he had similar packets in his shop.

The next day I bought another packet from a different shop, opened it, peered at it, ran my fingers in the small brown spread and disgusted with the ever present particles, put it aside. I did not want to ruin my eyesight cleaning them. I am not putting a price to the discomfort, but the small bottle of eye drops to soothe my windows to the world, costs four times the price of 100 gm of rai.

So now I had three opened packets of rai and three spoonfuls of cleaned seeds. I tried to check with a couple of women. As is usual, I got four different answers.

“Who makes achar these days? I get it from the market.”

“My parents in law are no more, the children are all outside, it is just the two of us and we don’t eat it much.”

“My sister in law/mother/neighbour makes it for me.”

It got me thinking- has the ritual of making pickle/kanji (vegetables fermented in sour, spiced water) of seasonal vegetables become old-fashioned? Is it a dying skill?

Then there was another reply- “Clean rai? Are you crazy? Who looks at it? I just use it as it is.”

“What happens to those black things,” I asked.

“They must be settling down with the juices at the bottom of the jar,” she shrugged after pondering for a few seconds.

“Has nobody ever complained?”

Her ‘no’ was so emphatic that it set me thinking. I visualized the people who had eaten the pickle from the bottom of the jar going in for an x-ray/ultrasound some time in their lives and the doctors wondering what those opaque black piles in their digestive tract were. Do the particles work better than natural fibre and keep their digestive system working well? Or are their digestive interiors artistically carved and sculpted because of these particles running through them?

I know you would say how do I know the ingredients/working surfaces/cooking and serving utensils are actually clean when I eat out, but how can one eat something horrible or unhygienic after seeing it?

I rang up Anuradha in Hyderabad to check if this could be arranged from there since we would be meeting soon. (All south Indian cuisines use as much rai as the north Indians use cumin, is my guess.) But she said she had never even seen rai. She mentioned using black mustard seeds finer than the sarson ka saag (mustard greens) seeds. The new-found knowledge was not of much help, though.

Left: Rai                         Right: Sarson ka saag seeds

But her suggestion was- why don’t you buy it from Big Basket/Reliance/Spencer/More or any other big store? They have cleaner stuff.

Now I did not want to tell her that highly intoxicated by the slogan of 'promote small business', I had shifted to buying solely from old-style provision stores.

No, I am not against big stores, chains or multinationals. The staff are   dressed rather smartly in uniform, and are experts in ‘Ma’am/sir’, ‘thank you’ and ‘excuse me’. They try to be courteous, following you around, periodically pointing at things, suggesting options and generally trying to tempt you beyond the margins of the list you are carrying, till you get irritated and say- “Thank you, I’ll call you when I need your help.”

Have you also noticed that these salespersons are treated with more respect and dignity than the Chhotu, samaan sahib ki gadi mein rakh do (Young boy, keep sahib’s purchases in his car) variety of salesmen? If big stores are earning huge profits, they are also giving jobs to people in construction, maintenance, sales and food counters.

On the contrary, I see just a couple of boys tirelessly running around in the regular kirana (provision) shops, sometimes unmindful of or avoiding, an occasional well-fed rodent scurrying from behind the huge gunny sacks arranged in rows on the floor on one side. The boys go up a ladder to take some small article down from a high shelf, come down to put it on the counter, shift the ladder to another shelf and do the exercise again dozens of times the whole day. The Lalaji/uncle/owner sits at the counter writing a kachcha (unofficial here) receipt (for which he presumably does not pay any tax) and taking the payment. The general observation is that these boys are low-paid and overworked and the owners do not want to spend on extra or ‘unnecessary’ pairs of hands.

I fondly nurture this notion that my tiny contribution would help such businesses. They would grow into cleaner, more organized and better-paying stores.

I am not a political commentator and I always have this pompous feeling that the world is not yet ready for my views on and solutions to economic or political issues, so no more on that topic.

Finally I was forced to change my ‘help small business’ policy. I got a packet from a chain store. It cost me the same, but the contents were clean and I was relieved.

Meanwhile, my pickle-making project has been postponed. I shall make it at their place when I visit them. Even if I have the time and energy to make it now, I dread taking fermenting vegetables tightly packed in a bottle in a suitcase which would be thrown across, tumbled or the contents might freeze at height.

If you think I made rai ka pahad (literally: making a mountain of mustard seeds) or a mountain out of a molehill as is said in English, then think again! I can imagine some men now asking their wives- Listen, where do we buy rai from? Or is rai cleaned before use in our house?  

An aside though -have you actually tried making a heap of mustard seeds? They keep slipping all over, making it very difficult to pile them. So maybe the Hindi meaning should be to do a near- impossible task.

                                                                                                 - Anupama S Mani