She never used cups. A pinch was a brother's wedding. A handful was the year the river dried.
My grandmother kept her recipes in places no recipe should go: under the lid of the rice tin, between the pages of a tax receipt from 1973, behind the kumkumam box where no one would think to look. None of them were written down. All of them were measured in the calendar of her own life.
A pinch was a brother's wedding. A handful was the year the river dried.
When I tried to learn the *vatha kuzhambu* from her, the year before she died, she did not give me numbers. She gave me stories. The tamarind had to be the size of the dosa that her sister-in-law made on the third day of the harvest. The salt had to be what my uncle would call "enough, but not yet."