Appa and the Sfoglino

There are some memories you don’t know are still inside you until something ordinary pulls them out; a smell, sound, or the taste of something you haven’t had in years. The particular coldness of a drink, or the colour of a syrup. The strange, sudden accuracy with which the past returns and places you somewhere you had not planned to go.

This happened to me recently while I was making a glass of grape soda. I had made a batch of Crowded Kitchen’s homemade grape soda syrup and kept it in Mum’s fridge. It was just syrup. Grapes, sugar, lemon zest, the usual things that turn fruit into something sweet and concentrated. I opened the fridge, pulled the bottle out, and began making myself a glass. But the minute that smell rose up, I was no longer standing in the kitchen. I was back in Jammu, in our sky-blue Fiat Palio, sitting with Appa, both of us eating our favourite Kwality Wall’s grape-apple jelly popsicle.

It was such a specific memory that it almost startled me. Pa and I loved that popsicle. We would sometimes swap it for the strawberry Jiggly Wiggly, but the grape-apple one was ours. It had that artificial grape flavour that had very little to do with actual grapes and everything to do with childhood. Sweet, cold, slightly strange, and utterly satisfying. It was one of those things that made summer feel like summer. Joy is very simple when you are young. You just know what you love. Give us grapes in most forms and I think Pa and I are pretty happy people.

That glass of grape soda opened something. One memory led to another, and suddenly I found myself thinking not just about that popsicle, but about Pa in the kitchen, around food and around tables. Pa around the small systems that make a home feel cared for, even when nobody is naming it that.

I remembered him sitting on one of our now-broken cane moodas in the nip of November, preparing for the Christmas cake. His black cap would be on, worn in that peculiar way of his. He would have his grey sweater and navy blue tracks on. In front of him would be the biggest kadhai we owned, and inside it, whipped butter waiting for the boiling hot caramel.

This Christmas cake is a family tradition. It is definitely not plum cake. It is annual memory and belongs to the colder months, to raisins soaking in Old Monk, the smell of spice and caramel and butter, to the kind of labour that only makes sense when it is done for people you love. Every family has some version of this, I think. A dish or a ritual that becomes larger than itself because it returns every year and gathers everyone into its orbit. One year, while Pa was mixing the hot caramel into the butter, some of it fell on his arm. I remember him flinching. It was hot caramel, so of course he flinched. But then he kept going. He didn’t abandon the mixture. He just absorbed the pain, steadied himself, and continued. That image is still extremely clear to me. A man sitting in a sweater, making Christmas cake, getting burned, and continuing because the cake had to be made. That is very Pa.

To say he is particular and meticulous would be an understatement. His relationship with the kitchen is not Mum’s kind of kitchen intelligence, where things are done by instinct, correction, tasting, adjusting, rescuing. Mum can make things work in real time. She can pivot. She can look at what is available and produce something that tastes like it was always meant to be that way. I think a lot of my cooking comes from watching her do that.

Pa’s approach is very different.Pa is order and planning and precision. Pa is the person who will read the recipe properly, understand the sequence, gather everything in advance, and make sure no step is left to chance. His presence in the kitchen is delightful, but I also think we have kept it to a minimum over the years because his meticulousness is not always easy to work around. It is admirable, yes. It is also intense.

Mum still tells the story of the time she was sick and Pa cooked for us. Before he began chopping the beans and carrots, he lined them up by length properly. Beans on one side, carrots on the other, arranged according to size before their tops and tails were cut off. It is such a funny image because it is so entirely him. Most people would just wash the vegetables and start chopping. Pa had to organise them first. It was not enough that they were vegetables. They had to submit to a system.

We laugh about it even now, but I know with full confidence that if he were asked to cook today, he would do the same thing again. The beans would be lined up. The carrots would be lined up. Only then would the knife come out. And I think that is what I am beginning to understand more clearly now. What we often call excessive is sometimes just the visible part of someone’s internal order. Some people calm themselves by improvising. Others calm themselves by preparing. I believe Pa belongs firmly to the second category.

This becomes even clearer when I think of the Mughlai Biryani.

This Mughlai Biryani is one of our family favourites, and I think it is fair to call it a crowd-pleaser. It comes from Mrs. Balbir Singh’s cookbook, a book that was handed down from Mum’s father. Over time, it became one of those recipes that carried the warmth of love. People remembered it and looked forward to it. It has a reputation.

For one of Mum and Pa’s anniversaries, Pa decided that the menu for a special lunch would be this Mughlai biryani. But, because we’re talking about Pa, he did not decide to make it for a small group of people. He decided to make it for the station. That alone should have told everyone what was coming. I don’t remember every detail of the event, but I remember the preparation. I remember the scale of it. I remember the seriousness with which he approached it. This was not a man casually making a large quantity of biryani. This was a man entering a full operation.

He began with mise en place. I now know that word properly because of kitchens and cooking shows and reading about food. But Pa understood the principle long before I had language for it. Everything in its place. Everything measured. Everything ready before the actual cooking began. And Pa’s mise en place was not a few ingredients arranged in bowls on a countertop. It was a whole system.

The whole spices were counted. The cloves, cardamoms, and everything else were measured according to the recipe and the quantity being cooked. The rice had to be the right kind. The chicken had to be cut correctly. The muslin cloth had to be ready. The broth in which the rice would cook had to be prepared. The ghee had to be measured. The dough to seal the dekchi had to be made. Every component mattered. 

He made tiny packets of ingredients and labelled them. If the recipe called for four cloves per kilo of rice, there would be four cloves per kilo of rice. Not three because no one would notice and not five because a little extra spice sounds harmless. Four. There is a kind of discipline in that which I did not fully appreciate when I was younger. As children, we mostly notice the fuss and waiting, the fact that everything seems to take longer than it should. But now, looking back, I realise that the fuss was the method. The waiting was part of the outcome.

At some point during this biryani operation, one of the men helping Pa saw the amount of ghee required and became genuinely worried. This was not a small amount of ghee. It was a quantity that makes practical people pause and rethink life choices.

He went to Mum in concern and said something along the lines of, “Madam, saab itna ghee use kar rahe hain. Bacche chhote hain, dono ko padhana hai. Itna paisa mat kharcha karo. Itna ghee mat use kijiye. Aadha tel ya dalda daalne ko bolo saab ko.” It was an absurdly funny thing, but also very touching. His concern was sincere. He was not trying to interfere for no reason. In his mind, he was protecting a family from culinary extravagance. Ghee was expensive. Surely one could make a reasonable compromise. Surely half the ghee could become oil or dalda and everyone would survive.

Mum gave him a weak smile and asked him to try telling Pa that. Pa, of course, was not having it. If the recipe required five litres of ghee, then five litres of ghee it would be. Not a compromise disguised as economy. I understand that so much better now. Because with some dishes, the ingredients are not just ingredients. They are the structure. You cannot remove them and expect the same result. You may still get food, but you will not get that dish. Pa knew this. He may not have said it in chef language, but he knew that a recipe has an internal logic. If you want the result, you must respect the structure. And the result was extraordinary.

When those dekchis were finally opened, the aroma came first. It always does with biryani. The smell rose out of the vessel before anyone had taken a bite. Warm rice, ghee, whole spices, meat, steam, broth, dum. It was the kind of smell that made conversation temporarily useless. After that, it was war. Everyone ate. And ate and ate. Not a single grain of rice went to waste that January afternoon. At one point, the vegetarians were checking if there was rice left in the chicken biryani dekchi. That is the highest compliment a biryani can receive.

Pa made that biryani one more time after that, I think. Then he retired from cooking. Except for the Christmas cake. For years, I think I understood my culinary inheritance mostly through Mum. She was the one I watched more often in the kitchen. She was the one from whom I learned the movements of everyday cooking. How to peel, chop, taste. How to adjust salt. How to tell when something has cooked enough by looking at it, smelling it, pressing it, hearing it. From her I learned that food is alive and responsive and that recipes are useful, but circumstances matter. That sometimes the market will not give you what you want and you still have to feed people (I say this while hoping my vendor comes through and gets me the fennel i have been hunting for weeks now!)

But Pa gave me another kind of education. He taught me front of house before I knew to call it front of house. He taught me how to clean glass and crystal so no spots remain. Not even fingerprints. And no, you did not need fancy gloves. You needed the right cloth, the right method, and the willingness to check the glass properly in the light.

He taught me how to iron tablecloths and handle fabric placemats and napkins. How plates should be placed, where cutlery should sit. How glasses should be arranged. He taught me that a table begins before the food arrives and that hospitality is not only in the cooking, but in the way a space is prepared for people to receive that food.

I did not think of it as training then. It was just Pa being Pa. Another instruction. Another correction. Another “do it properly.” But now, as I think more seriously about food, hosting, supper clubs, menus, beverages, service, and the experience of a meal from beginning to end, I realise how much of that came from him.

I also think my interest in wine and mixology comes from him in some way. Pa does not drink, except for the occasional glass of wine, but he has always appreciated a good beverage. A drink had to be made well. Served well. Balanced properly. He may not have approached it with the language of bartenders or sommeliers, but the instinct is there. The drink matters because the whole experience matters.

I like being able to connect these things now. My mother’s improvisation lives in me. Her ability to cook on the fly, to recover a dish, to work with instinct. But Pa’s systems live in me too. His need for mise en place and attention to sequence. His belief that if a recipe has been tested and trusted, it deserves to be followed properly before you begin making it your own.

This was all sitting somewhere in my mind when I watched Evan Funke on Chef’s Table: Noodles. I had not expected to be so moved by a man making pasta but I was.

There was something about the way he spoke about pasta, and especially about sfoglia. Sfoglia is the sheet of pasta dough rolled by hand. A sfoglino is the person who makes it. But that definition is too small. It makes it sound like a job description, when really it is closer to a discipline.

A sfoglino does not simply make pasta dough and roll it out. A sfoglino learns the dough through repetition, pressure, and their palm. Through resistance and knowing when the dough is too dry, too wet, too tense, or too relaxed. It is not only measurement, though measurement matters. It is not only instinct, though instinct matters. It is the place where both meet after years of practice.

Watching Funke work with pasta made me think about what it means to take a craft seriously. Not as some romantic idea of tradition, but as daily obedience to method.

There was something almost stubborn in it. The insistence on doing it by hand, on learning from people who had inherited the craft, on preserving not just the recipe, but the technique. The movement. The knowledge that lives in the body and cannot be fully captured in instructions.

And suddenly, I found myself thinking about Pa again. Pa is not a sfoglino. He does not make hand-rolled pasta. He did not train in Bologna. He has not devoted his life to preserving Italian culinary traditions. And yet, I recognised the seriousness - the refusal to treat food casually when the occasion required care. The understanding that technique is not decoration. The belief that things should be done properly, not because perfection is the point, but because care has to take some form.

For Evan Funke, that form is pasta. For a sfoglino, it is the dough, the rolling pin, the table, the sheet. For Pa, it was the Christmas cake. The biryani. The polished glass. The ironed napkin. The exact number of cloves. The beans lined by length. The more I think about it, the more I realise that meticulousness is often misunderstood by people who do not need it.

It can look like fussiness from the outside. It can look like control or a person making everything more difficult than it needs to be. And sometimes, yes, it can be difficult to be around. I am not going to pretend otherwise. There are moments when you want the bean-lining person to simply chop the beans.

But in a high-stakes kitchen, meticulousness is not a personality quirk. It is infrastructure. It is what allows consistency. It is what protects flavour and keeps texture intact. It is what makes sure that the mouthfeel of a dish is the same from one serving to another and it prevents panic when the heat is on and people are waiting.

When your mise en place is done, cooking changes. You are not running around looking for ingredients. You are not measuring spices while onions burn. You are not discovering too late that the rice was never washed or the stock was never strained or the garnish was never cut. You are present with the dish because the thinking has already been done.

That is what Pa’s systems gave him. And, whether I realised it or not, that is what they gave me. If I ever run a full-fledged kitchen, I don’t think I will be starting from scratch. I will have a lot to learn, of course. Skills to sharpen and professional systems to understand. Speed to build. Discipline to deepen. But the foundations are already there. They were laid over years of watching my parents.

Somewhere between Mum’s instinct and Pa’s precision is the kind of kitchen I want to build. One that can adapt, but does not wing everything. One that respects recipes, but is not trapped by them. One that understands that hospitality is both feeling and structure.

A meal is not only what is cooked. It is also how it arrives. Whether the glass is clean or the table is ready. Whether the cook is calm enough to taste properly and the dish has been given what it needs instead of what was convenient.

I think this is why the sfoglino moved me.

Because underneath the pasta was a larger idea: that craft is built through devotion to small things. Things that may seem excessive to someone who only sees the final plate. The pressure of the rolling pin, the hydration of the dough, thickness of the sheet, the exact fold and or cut. The repetition.

In Pa’s case, it was the labelled packets of spice, measured ghee, clean crystal. The Christmas cake caramel, table linen and the insistence that if you are going to do something, you may as well do it properly.

That kind of care can be hard to live with in the moment. It can slow a house down. It can make simple things feel ceremonial. It can turn cooking into an operation. But it can also produce the kind of food people remember years later and it can teach a daughter, without announcing itself as teaching, that there is dignity in preparation.

I did not expect all of this to come from grape soda. But memory rarely asks permission. It does not arrive in chronological order. It comes through the side door, carrying a popsicle, a kadhai, a cookbook, a glass polished in the light, and a man on a screen rolling pasta by hand. And suddenly you understand your father differently. Not completely. Maybe we never understand our parents completely, but differently.

You see that what once felt like excess was also a form of love. That his meticulousness was not separate from his care. It was how his care moved through the world - measured, labelled, polished, counted, folded, sealed under dough and cooked on dum until the whole room knew.