In a traditional Indian home, the wife and mother does not go out to work. She stays at home and spends her days making sure that there is wholesome and tasty food ready for her family to eat whenever they may want it. If there are other older women in the household such as aunts or a grandmother, they will help too.
An Indian girl will start learning to cook at a very early age and will be expected to help her mother with the household catering and cleaning too. At her mother’s side a daughter will learn how to grind spices, how to mix them to make various masalas and exactly when and how to add them to individual dishes. She will learn how to make various types of bread – chapattis, rotis, parathas and more. She will learn to make several dishes at the same time, no Indian meal consisting of only one dish, and she will learn the art of producing the crispest deep-fried onion bhajis and pakora. The girl’s skill in the kitchen can make the difference between her finding a husband or not.
There’s no getting away from it, delightful though Indian cuisine is, producing a meal is a complex and time-consuming business, even for the most...