Kate Ray recently interviewed Suresh for her newsletter, soft leaves, as part of a series called The Secret Ingredient. In these interviews, she speaks with chefs and food practitioners about an ingredient that they love to use or that means some special to them. Suresh chose rhubarb, which was the first plant he and Carrie encountered on Atina’s land. He speaks about finding local ingredients to take the place of foods he grew up with, and how he rediscovers himself as a new person each day he cooks.
Suresh: Secret is a very interesting word, because it provoked me to think, what is a secret? “Secret” is a grandmother’s word. In any country, if you look at the secret ingredient, it would be the grandmother’s food. As children grow, there is a set of things which we can never learn, because if you want to learn cooking from an elderly woman, she has her own discipline and her own knowledge system, like usage of certain ingredients in a particular context. She could show all the ingredients, all the process, but still there is a mystery. The secrecy of the success of food is always a factor which we will never be able to measure that is called love.
So secrecy is a word which I don't know. I mean, for me, the most important ingredient in my cooking practice here, is that I try to use a lot of locally grown ingredients, but still I am not able to find certain equivalents. Every habitat has its own medicines, but sometimes I don’t know.
Kate: Well, is there a local ingredient that stands out to you or that you’ve been able to really explore or transform?
Something that surprises me, or that I continue to explore, is rhubarb. Rhubarb is a weird plant. Only the stem can be used, the leaf is so big, and the way the root grows and expands and all these things are fascinating about the plant [Editor’s note: Rhubarb is a rhizomatic plant, which means that the roots divide and spread underground, to produce new shoots and leaves]. But the reason that I was looking at the plant, was that I was making one of our native condiments, called ginger tamarind [inji puli], which is a very popular food. But I had this problem of localization, which was: What is the best vegetable to replace tamarind, from the taste perspective? Tamarind is very strong, very pungent, it’s a heavy plant. I ended up with rhubarb, because it has the same savory taste, and it shares other qualities, like other healing qualities. The healing properties of rhubarb are everywhere, even in fiction — in Don Quixote they make one of the strangest concoctions ever, and they put rhubarb in it. So it’s no secret.
K: Yeah, I mean the secret has more to do with your relationship with it, or the way you put it in a new context. So the ingredient may be common, but your context is new. Do you remember first having rhubarb, was it after you moved to Catskill?
It was the only plant on the property when we moved in. It was July, and there was thick growth everywhere, the property had been abandoned for many years. We couldn’t enter most of it, but the owner or somebody said that there was a little garden in the back, and there were maybe eight or nine plants [of rhubarb]. Since then we’ve multiplied it, and now there are 100 plants.
K: It’s sort of like you moved into the rhubarb’s home, and then you used it to recreate some essence of the flavors you knew from far away. Can you tell me more about the herbal jam, inji puli?
Inji puli is one of the most ancient recorded foods. You can find references in 50 BC. Ginger and tamarind are two ingredients important not only to Indians, but the entire Indian Ocean — South Africa up the coast to Egypt, and the old Arabian coast, and Cambodia, India and China. It is not known, but it is believed ginger was born on the Western coast, Kerala, where I am from. [Ginger tamarind] is a widely used combination because of its stability factor. You can cook it at high temperatures and it doesn’t destroy the active ingredients. This is a food which developed through sharing of knowledge for a long long time. So it was natural for me to make inji puli because I was born into that place.
K: Have you always loved to cook?
Naturally, you’re born into a habitat — I was born into a habitat of fresh coconut and mango and jackfruit. So an animal like me or anybody will learn through love of food. If you love food, it’s triggered by one bite.
I make food every day because my body changes every day. So every day I eat, my new body is eating new food. This is the process in which I make myself conscious that I am a new person. Which is what every animal and plant is doing, actually. So I try to practice what others are doing and be conscious about everything.
I’ve been cooking and sharing all of my life. I left my home at the age of 18, to Bombay, and after that I was living alone, but never alone, always crowded with people. Because when you cook, people will come. And I always enjoyed making and sharing food, that’s a simple truth I learned from my mother, grandmother. A lot of people gave me food, so it’s my responsibility to give back whenever I can. I would say that in the human habitat, the most important sacred space is the kitchen. The kitchen is a sacred space because that is where the food is being processed and food is what the body needs.
Cooking gave me a lot of opportunities to survive in one way. But I would also say, it’s a natural thing of the body, like smell or taste or vision or using your fingers and hands. I believe the Ayervedic theory that the body is designed to naturally taste the six different tastes [Editor’s note: sweet, savory, salty, bitter, hot, and astringent — it is believed that by balancing these tastes in a food, you are balancing the nutrition and energy of the food, as well as your own metabolism]. I think that makes sense, because taste is basically a cognitive element of the body. There is an understanding that takes place, a knowledge is formed that is a natural functioning of the body. It’s a wonderful thing. If there is any wonder in life, this is the wonder.
I’m naturally designed to grow food, cook food, and share food. But the majority of people are not able to do it, because food is controlled. If you look at human animal history and domination, human collectives are not like animal collectives: when we come together, we want to occupy a huge space and habitat. In spiritual terms, it’s called the delusion of time and space. The delusion of time is speed, we need more more more speed, and the delusion of space is that we need more space. You don’t need that much space, like this apartment is 600 square feet, technically I don’t need it as an animal [he waves his arms to show exactly how much space he needs as an animal]. When we’re doing that, we’re actually occupying the space of other people, other animals, other birds, other plants, and many many other things. And any expansion, any collective, begins with the controlling of food. Once you control the food, you have a population that is enslaved. Food is always being used as a weapon. So my proposition as a practitioner is: What can I do to do the opposite? Because nobody has any right to control another person’s independence.
It gets more complicated every day. The way the food industry is. And Atina Foods is not a viable thing. It’s too much energy we put into it. But we put it because we love it. It’s not a sustainable business proposition, you can’t continue like this forever. And this is what the majority of the small farmers, small producers are doing. So I’m not alone at all. I look around at New York City, so many Mexicans are on the streets selling tamales, mango. A lot of changes have taken place over the years, and I think there will be more street vending in the future. Because I’m here [in Williamsburg] and there is all this grocery shopping, and it’s ridiculously expensive. The food that’s delivered here is not decided by the people who are buying, it is decided by someone else who is doing the algorithms. So let’s see how it’s going to change, you know, what secret ingredient it will take to subvert it.