How many of you people have heard this term before? It is very prevalent in kids growing up in rural Tamil Nadu. In an attempt to make their dramatic play realistic, kids bring in real ingredients and cook a meal. One child brings in rice, another brings in daal, another the veggies. They mix all this in a pot, add a little water and put it on top of a small fire made from wooden sticks(suLLi) and cook it. The resultant mixture is called kootanchoru. The name symbolizes the team work that went in to the dish. It can be roughly translated to ‘community lunch’ in English, but is one of those Tamil words, no matter how well one tries, cannot translate in to another language and capture the complete meaning of the word.

Having spent what can be called my childhood, in a concrete jungle, I never made kootanchoru. My first and only kootanchoru was when I was knocking at the door of adolescence. I was 13 and we had moved to what was then the suburbs of Chennai(Now this suburb is swallowed by the ever-expanding Chennai and is one of the prime centers of the city!) A good 18 years, later, I still vividly remember the details. A lazy Saturday afternoon, three teens, making a small fire under a mango tree in the backyard and cooking rice in a small ever silver utensil. At the end of the process, the utensil was so black from the soot and I still remember the said friend’s mother rolling her eyes. We found the smoky flavor of the rice unbearable and didn’t eat even a morsel of it, but I still remember the experience.

Some thing about the different textures, the independence, the creativity involved, problem solving, team effort and most importantly the stimulus to the sense of smell involved is unique to the process if cooking. Hmmm, sense of smell, tell me about it. The part of the brain that is responsible for sense of smell is also in charge of memory and feelings. That explains why I end up smelling tea/idlis steaming/yummy tomato chutney when I think of my grandma’s house!

Anyhooo, all this memories about kootanchoru came flooding back when I had to do a presentation on cooking experiences for children. The main difference being, the general norm in India was ‘LEARNING TO COOK’ and now experts in the field view it as ‘COOKING TO LEARN’.

Any one has ears for more details on how cooking can be a learning experience and what are the concepts that can be taught by cooking, give a holler. *Pointing fingers at people who think that this is a cheap ploy to get more comments*, ‘Yes, I am an extrinsically motivated person. Now stop that train of thought and hit the comment section.’

, , , , , ,