Now that the ethnically defined New Year celebrations have come and gone, a slight annoyance lingers like a fallen yellow Ehela petal in the evening rain.
No, no, wrong image. More like the fragrance of a post-kevili fart.
The kevili is the question.
This year, I decided to buy them all, in mass-produced polythene packs of 15, from the cardboard boxes of a lower-middle-class eatery.
Are the kevuns fresh? Are they made with good kitul treacle? Are they made with ANY kitul treacle? Are the kokis crunchy? Did they come in propah kevili vatti? The voices of the purists tried to cry in my head.
I didn’t really care, and warned guests at the avurudu table that they were not made with the best of gamay products. They didn’t seem to care either.
This aspiration for the best ingredients for the best culinary offering according to the perfect standards of some great-grandmother’s recipe is beginning to sound like society folks and their designer handbags. Ouh, I only like kevun made with the best kitul peni from my village” (tapped by the poorest illiterate in the village, no doubt, but that’s not a festive thing to say, no?) and The best kokis in the world were at my grandmother’s place when it was made with the flour of freshly harvested rice from her own paddy fields (now sold to some dodgy real estate fellow to be sliced up and resold).
And we know it’s not only kevili. Mention the word lamprais in genteel company and you will see several elegant noses immediately going up in the air. Ouh, what is available these days is such a jouke! They put chicken and egg in it and call it lamprais! The ounly propah way to make lamprais is to have three types of meat and ….. blah-di-blah-di-blah.
Who gives a frikkadel, men? Like we really know how anything was cooked in 1701.
You know that even the blogosphere is full of dull unimaginative fellows by the number of paeans to ‘original’ lamprais. No one really wonders how alukehel and pol kiri became ‘authentic dutch’.
If my kade mudalali wants to call his dish lamprais or buriyani or fried rice on alternative days of the week, or makes kokis with his left-over godamba dough, he should be given an award for culinary creativity, not crucified by the purists. Particularly if my mudalali knows how to fill the average rice belly better than those puny ‘dutch’ offerings that cost three times more.
And perhaps a more original person will now start carrying on about coconuts. What about… they are best plucked by a man who’s too poor to send his children to school? Or … they are only scraped propahly by my cook who slaves 18 hours a day?
Why not, no?
Vicious Verandah 