Behind Recipes Of Convenience Is A Story Of Sacrifice
By Sharmila Vaidyanathan
The summa kuzhambu was created by women as a quick fix solution to feed themselves. Photo by Sharmila Vaidyanathan
In Tamil, the word ‘summa’ means just like that, for no reason. Summa (or chumma as it is also pronounced colloquially) has been my go-to response for questions that never really had defined answers. I may even have slipped the word into my English conversations, for lack of a better expression to convey the absence of ambition or intent. Summa really packs a punch when you want to emphasise that there is nothing more to it. I have met many a summas in everyday life, but I never imagined that I would encounter one in the nomenclature of a recipe.
While meandering through the YouTube food world, I came across a video by the south Indian cookbook author and television personality, Revathy Shanmugam. Seated in her garden, Shanmugam is seen cooking using earthenware pots on an open fire. She introduces her audience to two recipes: gramathu kootu — a rustic, village-style lentil and vegetable stew, and a summa kuzhambu — a watery yet punchy gravy made with onions and tomatoes.
Why would a dish exist for no reason, I found myself wondering. Luckily, Shanmugam delves into the origins of this kuzhambu a few minutes into her video. “This is a popular dish from the Chettinad region,” she explains in Tamil. Known for its robust culinary heritage and the spacious mansions that dot its landscape, Chettinad is located in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
Shanmugam takes her viewers into the kitchens of Chettinad and shares that the summa kuzhambu was a quick-fix side dish that women made for themselves. A secret indulgence, you would think. Not really. When the main accompaniment for a breakfast of idlis was polished off by the menfolk in the family, the women quickly sauteed onions and tomatoes, and added tamarind water, spices and garlic (you must have garlic to make this kuzhambu, insists Shanmugam) to make a flavour-packed dish that they could generously dip their idlis into. A recipe without vegetables, using what is always available — just like that!
A quick Google search reveals that the summa kuzhambu has now joined the annals of foods that are made when time is of the essence. Several written accounts also mention that the kuzhambu is given to women after childbirth. One blogger writes about how this recipe, seemingly churned out of thin air, speaks to the culinary prowess of the women from the Chettinad region.
Even though the summa kuzhambu has cemented its place in Chettinad cuisine, I find myself thinking about its origins. Although it is widely lauded for its ingenuity, it is impossible to miss the fact that it was created as a result of sacrifices women made on the table.
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Summa kuzhambu belongs to a larger genre of recipes that are born out of sacrifice — usually made by women to feed their families. “This is a leitmotif across cultures and across the world. Wherever patriarchy has a stronghold, we get to witness this,” said cookbook author and culinary consultant Saee Koranne-Khandekar. “In many traditional families, all the members don’t sit and eat together. Women try to make sure that there is plenty of food for everybody, while also trying to ensure that there are no leftovers.” Sadly, women also find themselves having to make adjustments when this delicate balance is upset.
That women across the world compromise on their own food so that the rest of the family has access to it was not news to me. What was surprising, though, was that this has inadvertently led to the creation of several recipes, some as distinct as the summa kuzhambu and others as simple as rotis or bread smeared with jam. Dr Punita Chowbey, Research Fellow at the Sheffield Hallam University, reminds me that the latter also falls into the same category.
Dr Chowbey’s research focuses on the impact of household economies on food choices and consumption. For her research, she interviewed 91 women of Indian and Pakistani backgrounds who lived in the UK, India, and Pakistan. Their responses gave her insights into how food plays a crucial role in negotiating power, and in determining the dynamics between family members.
“Although you don’t see the same pattern across households, certain aspects are similar,” said Dr Chowbey over a Zoom call. “A majority of the women I spoke to prioritised feeding their husbands and their family members before sitting down to eat.” She also found that menu planning often favoured family members, which meant that women rarely got to make the food of their choice.
According to Dr Chowbey, the underlying question that drives these choices is — whose food is more important? Food priority or hierarchy is reflected in various ways, she explained. Everyday choices such as shopping for food, the method of cooking (the amount of spices and oil used) and the way meals are served — serving order and portion sizes — often reflect the preferences and needs of family members over those of the women who typically undertake these activities. Forgoing meat or bits of paneer in the gravy, and eating smaller portions or leftovers are also ways in which women ensure that there is enough to feed the family, before turning their attention to their own plates.
While economic factors contribute to these practices, it is important to understand that even when access to food is not a concern, women sacrifice food for various reasons. In many households, the onus of food preparation falls on the women, and a refrigerator full of ingredients can be daunting after a long day of chores at home or outside. “Several employed women said that when they came back home from work, often too tired to cook, they would quickly whip up something for the family, while they helped themselves to a bowl of cereal or a piece of toast,” said Dr Chowbey. “That bowl of cereal is also a symbol of whose food needs are flexible and women’s place in the food priority hierarchy within the household.”
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Feeding the family often goes beyond the physical act of providing sustenance and nutrition. Meals must aim to strike a balance between nutritional requirements and gustatory satisfaction using what is available — a juggernaut of a task that several women undertake multiple times a day. “The acts of feeding and caring, as connected to each other as earth to water, maintain and sustain the family,” writes feminist scholar Catharine R. Stimpson in her foreword for Marjorie L. DeVault’s seminal book Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. As women continue to place others’ needs above their own, the slow impact on their health is often forgotten.
The Rajasthan Nutrition Project is a stellar example of how the simple act of eating with the family can improve food security for women. Executed by the NGO, Grameen Foundation, and a non-profit organisation called the Freedom from Hunger India Trust, the project worked with residents in the tribal areas of Banswara and Sirohi districts of Rajasthan, in north western India. The initiative encouraged dialogues between genders, and created community nutrition advocates to help improve the health status of the women and children in the region. The project revealed that within the same family, there were members who were food secure and others who were food insecure; no prizes for guessing how the division worked.
As a part of this project, women were encouraged to eat meals along with their families. For most women, it was the first time. After two years, it was reported that the practice had more than doubled food security among women and improved nutrition status among the children as well. The project also used dialogue-based health education to encourage family members to share meals and divide the chores at home.
As encouraging as these results are, they need to be placed within the larger context of gender-based hunger. Year after year, the Global Hunger Index reveals that women suffer from poor nutritional status, and that discriminatory eating practices play a significant role in exacerbating this trend. Earlier reports found that women and girls make up a whopping 60% of the world’s hungry population. The report released last year noted: “Widespread and ongoing iron deficiency in women of reproductive age, as well as a higher global malnutrition rate compared with men, reflects systemic discrimination, including within health and nutrition services.”
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Most experts would agree that gender disparity in food goes beyond the kitchen. As activist Vandana Shiva once wrote: “From seed to table, the food chain is gendered.” Women play a key role not just in food preparation but also in agriculture as seed savers, keepers of traditional knowledge, and in food processing and provision. Despite their significant roles, policies and other initiatives often overlook their contributions.
Although several researchers have pointed out these discrepancies, there is one important aspect that is missing from most narratives: the mental labour involved in food. “Nearly all women spend a significant portion of their day occupied and preoccupied with food,” write Patricia Allen and Carolyn Sachs in their paper Women and food chains: The Gendered Politics of Food. The writers call this the ‘food-provision puzzle’ (after DeVault described the process as similar to solving a puzzle) and explain that while paying attention to nutrition and taste, women also worry about the consequences of food not being well-prepared. “Thus, although women choose the food from supermarket shelves, their decisions often reflect the preferences of others. And, if they make the "wrong" decision, tension, arguments, or violence may ensue,” write Allen and Sachs.
Dr Chowbey shares that the opposite can also be true. Many of her interviewees shared instances where they used food to express anger or discontent by purposely cooking a dish that was disliked by their families. The bottom line is that healthy food on the plate does not necessarily symbolise a healthy — or equal — relationship in the household.
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Once made by women in Maharashtra to use up leftover modak dough, nivagrya has now been co-opted into mainstream festive traditions. Photo by Saee Koranne-Khandekar
Recipes of sacrifice are hard to pinpoint. They have the uncanny ability to exist in plain sight, and are rarely the same between two kitchens. But they do deliver the hat-trick of being resourceful, delicious and time-saving. When I started looking around, I found a treasure trove of recipes from across the country that tick these boxes.
Shanmugam shared the recipe for milagai thuvayal, a spicy chutney made with dried red chillies, shallots, a hint of tamarind and curry leaves. Also from the Chettinad region, this chutney is tempered with mustard seeds if time permits. My aunt shared a similar South Indian recipe for a paruppu thuvayal or lentil chutney, where moong dal (or yellow split gram) is roasted, soaked and ground with fresh coconut and green chillies to be eaten with rice. The water used for soaking the lentils is also utilised to make leftover rasam last longer, she added. In the modern day, these quick and easy chutneys are a stand-in for more labour-intensive sambars and rasams.
Sandeepa Mukherjee Datta, author of popular blog (and the cookbook by the same name), Bong Mom’s Cookbook, said that ilish maacher matha'r tauk, a sweet and sour Bengali dish made with the head of the hilsa fish, was one of the recipes that was mainly eaten by the women in her grandmother’s home. While the rest of the family enjoyed the meaty parts of the fish, the head and tail were used in this dish. "Women often used leftover ingredients, but they had the tastiest bits for themselves. They cooked using prawn heads and chicken liver, frying them to make delicious meals," shared Kathija Hashim, a recipe developer and culinary consultant from Kerala who runs a blog called The Malabar Tea Room along with her daughter, Aysha Tanya.
In Maharashtra in western India, a dish fashioned out of leftovers has been adopted into mainstream festive traditions. “There is this recipe called nivagrya, which is made using the rice flour dough that is left behind after making modaks [sweet, steamed rice flour dumplings with a coconut and jaggery filling],” Koranne-Khandekar said. This leftover dough is spiced, flattened into small circles, and steamed. The women typically ate this while the rest of the family got its fill of the modaks. Even though it may have been created as a quick fix, nivagrya has now moved up the hierarchy of delicacies. “I make extra dough on purpose so I can make nivagrya,” Koranne-Khandekar said. “Many households do that.”
Although recipes born of sacrifice may add an interesting element to cuisines, Dr Chowbey believes that there is room for a lot more improvement when it comes to the circumstances that led to their creation. “Although small steps like knowing how much food is there and sharing it, as well [sharing in] meal preparation is a step in the right direction, we still need to address some deep-seated gender norms that are internalised by women themselves, their families and society at large. Women’s nutrition is important, and families need to understand this,” said Dr Chowbey.
On the other hand, Koranne-Khandekar believes that women must hold on to some of these recipes for reasons that have nothing to do with altruism. “Women tend to get sucked into the regimental nature of things. Their day and their routine revolves around planning meals for the family. I think they should be making something for themselves — on purpose — more often. They deserve that.”
An indulgence and not a sacrifice — now I could raise a glass of the summa kuzhambu to that!
