En memoria de "The Dubba"

Tiffin lunch dubba, a memory that brings back comfort. Like a salient companion, it’s the best refuge you can return to when taking a break in the middle of a long day. For home cooked food is never about the taste, its about the comfort, the flavour of home.

This is no sad recollection people, I'm a day scholar blissfully aloof of the (sometimes stomach, mostly mood) upsetting food of the college mess.

It takes me back to my childhood, where one of my earliest memories are of my mum creatively coming up with new healthy sweet dishes to go along with my food. For I was a fussy eater albeit with a sweet tooth (or sweet teeth, as my mum prefers for, I'm a huge lover of anything sweet). In her trials to at least make me eat something, yet keeping it artificial sugar free, she whipped up apple jams, banana- mango rolls and jaggery sweetened milkshakes, which were all but happily devoured by me. So, yes, homemade food is all about the love, the care, the tiny tweaks made to ensure that it's just perfect for the loved one you're preparing it for.

When someone cooks, their entire personality somehow gets infused into what they make. The same dish, prepared with the same recipe, yet has a different flavour when made by different people. It’s their own tiny touch, maybe an extra tadka, or a squeeze of lemon, that truly makes the dish theirs. And it is that little pinch that we remember years after, as their own little signature.

I feel the most beautiful love language is cooking for someone. The way you cook for someone shows how much you care for them, how much you are aware of their little picky tastes, how much extra effort you're willing to put in just to ensure they love it. The way someone remembers how you like your coffee with half a spoon sugar and not even a grain more, how you'll always pick a cookie over a muffin, how you'll always get super hangry when you are tired and a chocolate will be more than welcome, is the most, most beautiful way of showing they truly care.

And so, I hope, dear reader, the next time you open a pickle jar made by your mum, you acknowledge not just the flavour kick it brings to your food, but also the secluded comfort it gives, the feeling of being closer home.