As children buying snacks was rare about 40 years back. Our favourite snack was freshly fried peanuts and pieces of jaggery (made from sugarcane juice). Whenever it rained, the above recipe was a must. I would go to the Marwadi shop ten streets away to buy groundnuts and jaggery.

Buying chewing gum was a luxury, so my mother taught us to make our own chewing gum. We chewed the wheat grains without swallowing it, after some time it turned into gum. We had a Guava plant at home. Sometimes ate the leaves with a piece of tamarind calling it Pan (betel leaf) that adults cherish.

Upma (cooked with coarse wheat flour) was the traditional tiffin. Rice was the principal food, eaten along with a vegetable curry, Rasam, Pachhi-pulusu (raw tamarind juice with onion, green chilly pieces, and a pinch of salt), Pappu Charu (Yellow dal plus tamarind juice) and Sambar (like Pappu Charu with types of vegetable pieces), additionally had pickle and curd. Sambar or Pappu Charu was very common at home.

My mother preferred to make sorghum and wheat flour rotis on the biomass stove. The stove was rudimentary which was usually made out of clay or three bricks and released lots of smoke while cooking. Especially in the winters, we always preferred to sit near the biomass stove and is used to watch the flame, while my mother prepared rotis, cooked rice and vegetables on these stoves. My experience with the biomass stoves started as a child, probably these observations later in life motivated me to design and facilitate efficient cookstoves.

Sometimes by adding sugar to the wheat dough, the rotis prepared were delicious and crispy. Avisha podi (Flax seeds powder) with sugar was also good to eat with hot rotis. The taste of the food cooked on these biomass stoves was delicious, when compared to the food cooked on kerosene or LPG stoves that I ate.

Food didn’t have a great variety, but it was tasty and yet it was never less sumptuous. Maybe it was mother’s cooking that had the magic or the expectations were within the means.