Shortly after he agreed to support his son’s marriage to a Westerner, my future South Indian father-in-law (appa) gave me this piece of advice: “When cooking, put turmeric in every dish.”
I looked at him incredulously and nodded affirmatively, but I was thinking to myself, “Are you really serious?”
Cooking with turmeric? I could not understand why he would say such a thing. First of all, I had only met him six days before. The point seemed random, even irrelevant. We went back home to New York that evening.
What did I even know about cooking with turmeric? I was vaguely aware that it was the yellow part of “curry powder.”…