The Right Sort of Girl

by Anita Rani

  Already, at three, it absolutely terrified me. I was my mum’s protector. I didn’t want to bring her any pain or shame, but then I also quite fancied living my own life when I was older. The actions of all the adults around me were already making ‘running away’ seem like a very good option. My inner turmoil had begun! If I could, I would have put all of my thoughts, when that inner turmoil first started churning, away in a box. I’d have used industrial strength brown tape to make sure it stayed in there. I could already see I wanted to get far enough away to make sure no one could tell me what to do, as well as spend a lifetime trying to make everyone happy. It’s only now, looking back, going through the scenes of my life, that who I am makes so much sense. Why I feel so much inside, but can’t always express what I want. Why I get twisting knots in my stomach, why I’m so afraid of conflict, why I feel so angry. I’m still constantly battling with doing what I want and doing what I’m told. I clearly understood, even as a toddler, that I was balancing a big invisible glass box of shame on my head – one false move and it would smash for everyone to see. I was also carrying my mum’s shame, too. If I messed up, it was my mum who would be exposed in some way. It’s a bloody heavy box. I was made to feel as though everyone was watching and waiting for me to trip up, so they could turn around and shout in Mum’s face: ‘Told you so’, ‘Shame, shame’. And at three, I was terrified. I didn’t want to mess up. The seeds of control were well and truly sown. One . . . false . . . move . . .

  I do also have fond memories of my dysfunctional childhood, even amongst the fighting and arguing. There were moments when we would all shut up and come together. The one thing that was always there to comfort us: food.

  1 Even me – I was one when I first started to walk!

  Food Will Always Be Life

  Thankfully, there is more than one way to show affection. My family were definitely not a ‘touchy feely’ family, thank God, (I’m not sure people generally are up north) so we show our affection through food. This is what my gran did, too. Her kitchen, like the rest of the house, was always tidy, with blue lino, a sofa bed, fold-down wooden dining table, one of those multicoloured strip blinds in front of the door leading out, and a blue wall-hung cabinet with glass doors that housed all Gran’s crockery, including her prized Charles and Diana wedding mugs, and Gandhi, our beautiful Rhodesian Ridgeback, in the corner.

  I can smell it now. Her delicious chicken curry. Her hypnotic halwa made with semolina, sugar and entire blocks of Anchor butter. Fridays were always a treat – homemade fish and chips (although Yorkshire has the best chippies in the world. Why do you leave the skin on the fish down south? It’s just wrong!). Nothing beats homecooked chips, drenched in vinegar and brown sauce and a sprinkling of garam masala. Granny’s sausage butties were always delicious: Wall’s skinless sausages made in the frying pan, sliced in half, then laid between two slices of margarined Sunblest white bread, so the fat soaked straight through the bread, and always with brown sauce. Then there was my granny’s party trick: if you want a dish to demonstrate how we truly had become a working-class British Indian family it’s . . . SPAM CURRY. I’m not messing with you, she didn’t make it often, maybe she only did it once, but my God, it was good! It has now become the stuff of myth and legend.

  I used to love Spam. Spam fritters, mashed potato and peas was one of my favourite school dinners. Greasy, salty, fatty goodness, the spam fritter is iconic. I say used to, because naturally my tastes have developed, now I’m a la-di-da, solid middle-class, east London type, and I’ve not tried Spam for years. I do have a tin of it in my cupboard and a tin of corned beef. Those were the gifts my husband and I gave to each other on our tenth wedding anniversary. Maybe I should use the little metal key and get into that tin? Maybe a spam curry recipe needs to be resurrected? Or maybe I should leave it consigned to my memory banks . . .

  While Granny used to do the Asian shopping, I loved going to Morrisons with my two young aunts to get the basics and essentials: Mellow Bird’s instant coffee, Sunblest bread, Birds Eye fish fingers, marg, bottles of Dandelion and Burdock, Nice biscuits, digestives, Spam. Morrisons was only a short walk away but a bit too far to have to carry all the bags of shopping, so my aunts wouldn’t think twice about using the trolley to wheel the shopping all the way home. We may be the reason the pound slots were added . . . Sorry! The discarded trolley would then get recycled as a go kart for the local kids.

  During the week, all of six years old, I was at a prep school, wearing a school hat, pinafore and gabardine, having sleepovers in the poshest parts of West Yorkshire, learning to eat roast dinners with homemade Yorkshire puds and make polite conversation sitting at dining tables. At the weekends at Gran’s, I was nicking shopping trolleys. Already effortlessly moving between worlds, you might say.

  Gran was no-nonsense about food. When Mum first arrived from India, she’d make dainty little round chapattis. ‘You’ll be here all day feeding them with those little things,’ she told Mum, talking about her husband and sons. ‘Double up the dough and feed them a big roti so you won’t have to make as many.’ And just like that, Mum’s chapattis doubled in size.

  Even now, two generations later, food remains a constant. I cook and eat cuisine from all over the world, but at least twice a week, I have to eat curry – authentic, rustic, flippin’ fabulous Punjabi food. I’m not just bragging because I’m a proud, biased Punjabi, I know for a fact you agree with me. The food available in most curry houses, even though they are Bangladeshi-run, is a bastardised version of Punjabi food. For years, through the seventies, eighties and nineties, you were not really eating curry that resembled the curries we ate at home. Homecooked curries never glow in the dark, each has a distinct flavour (not generic onion and tomato mush) and they allow you to taste the vegetables – but the main ingredient missing is the love.

  Britain’s palate has now matured and opened up and most people know a damn good curry when it hits their taste buds. Which is a godsend when I’m filming Countryfile up and down the land – if all else fails, head to the local curry house for dinner and everyone leaves smiling, overly stuffed but delighted. There’s always someone on the team who still thinks everyone should order their own individual curry. Let me explain: that’s not the way it works. You order a variety and everyone shares.

  The easiest and most nourishing dish for the body and soul is dhal. A simple, delicious, yellow dhal. (My recipe is at the back, if this chapter is making you hungry.) Dhal has bubbled away in pots for generations on the Indian subcontinent and was brought to these shores by the men who first got here, who needed its nourishment and familiarity so far away from home. You might think it was the East India Company who first brought curry to these shores and, yes, Queen Victoria apparently loved it so much she ate it twice a week. But kedgeree is not kitcheree and sultanas have no place, none whatsoever, ever, in a curry, so I will stick to my statement: that curry, real curry, was brought to these shores by the first wave of South Asians to arrive in the UK.

  While we’re talking food, there’s something else you need to understand. When the old Punjabi boys first arrived on these shores, they would always eat chapatti, never rice. If you think of Indian cuisine, you might automatically think of rice. Not in Punjab, not if you want a proper meal. For Punjabis, no meal is complete without roti. Unleavened wholemeal bread, dripping in butter. Landlocked Punjab is the bread basket of India and nearly 40 per cent of India’s wheat is grown there. It’s incredibly fertile land and agriculture is big business. If you went to work in the fields, as a lot of Punjabis did and still do, then you needed a diet that was going to sustain you. The Punjabi diet is not shy when it comes to carbs – there’s nothing we like more than carb on carb with a bit of carb on the side, and an extra dollop of carb just in case. Roti sustains Punjabis.

  Chicken . . . Oh, how we love to devour a chicken! I’ve seen people at weddings leap at a plate of tandoori chicken like a pack of wild dogs, demolishing it in seconds, slathering at the jowls. Na
turally, my gran made the best chicken curry. The old-fashioned way, before supermarkets started packing chicken into polystyrene. Vegetarians look away now! I heard stories of Dad having to get the bus out to a local farm and bring a still lively and breathing chicken, loving life, back home in a sack to be put in a pot. Consequently, my dad doesn’t eat chicken curry. He’s a Punjabi anomaly. He doesn’t do chicken, tea, garlic or ketchup – all fundamental pillars of Punjabi cuisine.

  As Asians arrived and settled, Asian grocery shops and butchers, usually two in one, began to spring up on street corners in Asian areas. These shops were and still are an essential part of life in any Asian household. We always did our English shop at the supermarket and the Indian shop at the local Asian shop, the mini supermarket. They all have a distinct smell of spices and incense and sell all the stuff that you could never get in a Morrisons or Asda that is essential for an Asian kitchen. Everything from Asian veg: bindi, karela, mooli, tinda, big bunches of coriander, sacks of onions and potatoes, ginger, chillies, garlic, corn on the cob still in its husk (not individually packed, but open boxes so you can buy as much as you need). And all the best fruit: mangoes, lychees, pomegranate and guavas also bought by the box load.

  Of course, they would have all the spices. As much spice as you need. Haldi, jeera, elachi, ajwain, saunf, turmeric, cumin, cardamom, caraway, fennel, black cardamom, cinnamon, garam masala. This aisle always had the headiest aroma. They were also the place to get giant sacks of rice and chapatti flour, to be dispensed at home into the chapatti flour bin, an actual bin. They also stocked jars of pickle, poppadoms, incense, kids’ toys, sweets, crisps, tins of everything that you could buy in bulk (tomato tins are never bought in small quantities), giant packets of lentils and pulses, yellow dhal, green dhal, black dhal, orange dhal, pots and pans and disposable plates. Asians always need disposable plates. You could get all of this plus a cuddly toy at the Asian shop. This was before the Asian Cash n Carry opened up. Now South Asians just do a trip to Costco to buy in bulk!

  As a kid, it was such a chore going to these shops with Mum. She’d spend what seemed like an eternity in them, inspecting aubergines and ladies fingers, before she decided which to buy, getting into lengthy conversations with the shopkeeper. A packet of Space Invader crisps for 10p would usually shut my moaning mouth up for five minutes. Now, I can spend days in the aisles of these shops. I love visiting Ilford High Street or Tooting Broadway to stock up on everything I need – authentic Asian produce, with less packaging and always cheaper than at a large supermarket. I can get lost in the spice aisle (even when I really don’t need any more cumin because my mum bought me a kilo of the stuff last time she was there) and you can never have enough pickles.

  Some of these shops would also have butcher’s in the back. This is where Asian women would always buy their meat. I’m not sure what the health and safety standards were back then, I’m not really sure I want to know. We all survived, anyway. Now, the only way to cook a proper traditional chicken curry is to curry the entire chicken. You’d ask the butcher to chop up the whole bird and once it was cooked, fight to get the bits you wanted the most. The neck. Always the weird little neck – give it a go. Gran would start with an entire block of Anchor butter in her big metal pan, in her pathila. To this she would add her spices and onions, ginger and chilli, then the tomatoes, chicken, then water and simmer. I can taste it. I wish I could taste it now, I really do. Maybe some of you haven’t got past the ‘entire block of Anchor butter’. Butter is a staple. Not only butter, but all dairy products. It is a fundamental necessity in a Punjabi diet. I’m lucky enough to have experienced fresh buffalo milk being delivered in a churn to the doorstep of my family home in a village in Punjab. The fatty, creamy goodness would then be turned into a variety of dietary essentials, churned into white butter/makhan, boiled and turned into yoghurt, then boiled and turned into cheese/paneer. Yoghurt and cheese were always made at home, even in my lifetime in the UK.

  It’s the blocks of butter melting in a pan that I remember best. Maybe it’s due to my huge weakness for butter, or maybe it’s what caused my huge weakness for it? I love it dripping through toasted bread and the only reason I can’t resist biscuits (shortbread, digestive, jammie dodger) is because of the butter. My ingrained love of all things dairy keeps me away from becoming a vegan. I could easily give up meat and I did, for a very long time, but give up dairy? My hefty Punjabi bones would take you down for that last spoonful of yoghurt.

  We’ve not even got to the small matter of sugar. Naturally, Punjabis, like the rest of India, have a massive sweet tooth. And Indian sweets are probably some of the sweetest in the world. Barfi, jalebi, gulab jamun and, my favourite, rasmalai. Even the plain sugar I ate in India as a kid on holiday was a treat in itself. Either chini, granulated sugar made from sugar cane that gives it a delicious flavour, or jaggery, unrefined sugar cane, that has a fudgy taste and texture. Which I now use all the time at home. I’ve even reinterpreted my banana bread recipe to use jaggery instead of caster sugar and my jaggery mojitos are THE ONE!

  The Punjabi diet maketh the Punjabi.

  * * *

  I need you to know that, after finishing writing this, I was overcome by the urge to cook a chicken curry, just the way Granny did. I’ve currently got two large onions and a load of whole spices sautéing away in half a block of Anchor butter (only half). In a big metal pathila. I’m cocooned by a comforting smell and a warmth in my heart and I’m opening my kitchen door to share the love with anyone walking past my house. Do I have a recipe? No. Did I bring out the pot and just cook with my instinct, a little bit of this, a sprinkling of that and a bit more of the other? Yes, and it worked. The lessons in cookery, passed down from grandmothers to mothers to daughters, have worked. Now, we should start to include the sons.

  I’m not sure how many generations this recipe has been passed down, how many centuries old it is, what my ancestors may have been thinking when they were making it, but I am almost certain of the comfort and feeling of home the smell and taste would have made them feel. The same as I’m feeling now. Maybe they too were thinking about their granny while cooking it.

  Food really will sustain you. Food is a hugely important tradition that has been passed down to me. My food heritage is my family’s love story. It’s what binds us. It’s still the most important daily ritual for me. I live for food, not just to sustain me but for pure pleasure and pure greed. And when we are together for family events, a wonderfully communal affair, that’s when I get to learn the secrets and observe the magic up close. Traditions and recipes are passed down from one generation to the next. We always reminisce about Grandma and Naniji when eating their recipes; happy memories are triggered and I’m back watching the butter melt, swiftly followed by the dull heartache of missing them. All we have left of them are the memories and the food. Cooking is a life skill but, in my kitchen, it’s so much more. Cooking is conjuring up the past. It’s a nod to my loved ones. Food is love, food really is life, and it’s a part of my family legacy I’m keeping with me, always.

  Mum and Dad Aren’t Perfect, But They Are Superhuman

  ‘Are you well-orf?’

  Who the hell asks a question like that? Apart from nosey Indian aunties? Nine-year-old Kate at her roller disco birthday party in 1986, that’s who.

  ‘What? Erm, I don’t know. Yes?’

  We hardly knew each other, to be fair. She was obviously doing her research. I’d just joined Lady Royd, part of Bradford Girls’ Grammar School, after acing the 9+. I had left my first ever school, which was a beautiful little private school in a very posh residential area of Bradford, where I was taught French, that ‘ginormous’ isn’t a word, and also how to maypole dance. It’s where I discovered that some girls wore knickers over their tights to keep them up. Its main job, however, was to prepare me for the ideal mapped-out school route: take the 9+ to get into Lady Royd, which would prepare me to become a proper little lady (didn’t work) and then for the 11+ exam for
the senior part of Bradford Girls’ Grammar School, where I’d stay on for the sixth form and then head to uni. There was never a question about it. This was the plan.

  My school buildings were breathtaking old Victorian mansions. I was learning in luxury, old-fashioned luxury. And I loved being in those magnificent grand buildings, feeling inspired simply by the architecture. It was easy for me to imagine the beautiful grand homes in the Victorian children’s novels I was reading because I was sitting in one every day. Lady Royd had a grand entrance hall with a spectacular ceiling, painted midnight blue with little gold stars all over. I wore a school hat, carried a hockey stick and even had a school regulation basket. No wonder the kids from the comp down the road would spit on us from the bus. What did we look like?! This was the best education money could buy in West Yorkshire, which meant a lot of girls I went to school with, the vast majority, were loaded, and the vast majority were white.

  I loved school, I loved learning, I loved answering questions, but this one had me flummoxed. I’d never encountered a question like it. She wanted to know if my parents were rich, and for some reason this was important to nine-year-old Kate.

  I remember this birthday party really well for two reasons. First, for the strange question she’d asked and second, because back at school after the party, Kate announced in front of a group of girls that ‘My mummy thinks you’re a loon and you can’t come to my house again.’ Which I suppose I shrugged off . . . I was a confident kid and loved a party, I may have been excited. I still love a party and my friends will confirm, I get very excited and may even act like a ‘loon’, if your definition of loon is keeping the drinks flowing, making sure everyone is having a right good time, letting people stay however long they want (someone stayed for two weeks once) and regularly end up dancing on my kitchen worktop.