Small Wonders – Session 8
Food is rarely just food. It carries the smell of a house, the rhythm of a kitchen, the hands that prepared it and the people who once sat around it. Sometimes, a taste can bring back an entire season of life.
In Session 8 of Small Wonders, KG Manoj and Anuradha Nayar immerse themselves in the flavours of Kerala cuisine, travelling through food into a landscape of nostalgia and memory. The conversation brings back Anuradha’s culinary memories of Puthenpurakkal and Ooleth – homes where cooking was closely woven into everyday life.
There is a particular wonder in remembering how seemingly ordinary things around a house could find their way into the kitchen and become delicious dishes. The small plants, greens and other humble ingredients growing around the home were not simply part of the landscape. They were part of the pantry too. What grew nearby could become something to be cooked, shared and enjoyed.
But the memory of food extends beyond its ingredients. How food was prepared, how it was served and, perhaps most importantly, how it was fed to someone are all part of its emotional language. A meal could carry affection in the manner in which it was placed before someone, offered to a child or shared among family members. The taste remains, but so does the feeling attached to it.
The conversation then moves outside the kitchen, towards the small canal in front of the Puthenpura house. What might appear to be an insignificant waterway today once formed an intimate part of everyday family life. Bathing, fishing, washing vessels and even buying provisions were connected to it. The banks of the canal also became places for meeting people, exchanging news and maintaining the everyday social connections of the neighbourhood.
In that sense, the canal was more than water flowing past a house. It was part of the family’s daily geography- a space where domestic life, food, work and social life quietly met. Just as the plants around the house found their way into the kitchen, the canal found its way into the memories of the people who lived beside it.
Perhaps this is what makes nostalgia so powerful. It does not always return through grand occasions. It comes through a particular taste, a plant growing near the house, the way a meal was served, or the memory of someone standing beside a canal. Small details gather over time and become the texture of a life.
A small conversation about Kerala cuisine, forgotten flavours, Puthenpura and Ooleth, a little canal and the memories that continue to live through food, places and family.
Small Wonders – Wake up with Small Talks.
A programme from AWAD by The Language Mill.
