Modern kitchens are showpieces of design and convenience but they have few links to the antique cookhouses of the last century. My grandmother’s kitchen was light years away from the I of T, push-button gadgetry, ceramic hobs and wall-mounted ovens. The only common element was the heat that did its job and kept the family fed and burping three times a day. To their credit, it must be said that those archaic kitchens produced better food than the kitchens of today with their modular units, hoods and island counters.
My grandmother’s kitchen was a spacious L-shaped room that was connected to the house by a long and covered corridor. You smelt smoke when you entered it and smelt of smoke when you left it. One end of the kitchen opened on to the kitchen well with the familiar pulley, bucket and rope and a little sunken wash area. The other end was the cooking space with a mud-and-cow-dung plastered platform that had hollows for keeping the firewood and three raised surfaces for keeping the stoneware pots and urulis.(A wide-mouthed cooking vessel)
Firewood was the fuel of choice except at times when the order book of the local saw mill was overflowing. When the mills worked non-stop, they gifted saw dust free of charge to the residents of the area. In doing so, the mills saved a lot of money on disposal of the saw dust. The saw dust was packed into a cylindrical iron stove keeping a rod in the centre to create an airspace. Once packed, the rod was lifted out and the saw dust was lit for the first pot of the day to go on the fire. A high level of heat management expertise was needed to cook on the saw dust burner. There were no means to control the heat, and no way the flame could be put out till it had exhausted itself. These shortcomings were peanuts when compared to the ferocity of the heat it generated and the volume of food it cooked for no less than twenty people, for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The wood fired hole-in-the-platform was another challenge. Every morning the first person to enter the kitchen started the fire using a long hollow iron rod to blow and old pages of the Madras Mail to spur the flames. Once up and burning, the idea was to place one vessel after the other on the flame so that there was no loss of heat. To reduce the heat, the only strategy was to pull out a log of the firewood and place it on the side. At the end of the day, the embers were just right for a few jobs on the side. The plantain for grandfather’s dinner was thrown over the coals in its metal container and the egg custard was left to set and caramelise on the hot embers. In summer, the last of the embers roasted an endless supply of jackfruit seeds and occasionally a few cashew nuts as well.
There was little by way of equipment and utensils in grandmother’s kitchen. There was a cutting board that time had turned concave and a blunt knife that was called by its original Arabic name. There were two grinding stones and a long and slim iron skewer that was used to pull papads (lentil-based crisps) out of the boiling coconut oil. There was a quern for grinding grain and a coconut scraper that looked exactly like a fossilised baby crocodile with its serrated head held high. On festive days, the cook would sit astride this gadget and scrape over fifty coconuts and cut over a hundred bananas for the day’s fare. Of the two grinding stones, the round one was used to grind the rice and lentils for the breakfast idlis (steamed rice and lentil cakes) and the rectangular one was used to grind grated coconut and spices. Both stones were washed with great care after every use and the wash-water was to the ground mix to ensure that nothing was lost. In the wash area near the well was a wooden trough that looked like a dug-out canoe. The cook emptied the water from the cooked rice into this and saved it for the buffalo in the backyard.
There was a built-in cupboard with oil-soaked shelves with nothing much in it and over the fire place hung bunches of okra and beans being dried for planting. Thrice every day, the cook carried the food up the corridor to the pantry and the dining area inside the main house. On days when the cook had made something special, all the children followed him to make sure that he was not waylaid on this journey.
The storeroom was in the main part of the house. Every morning the rice, lentils, vegetables and oil for the day was laid out on a muram( a winnowing tray) and carried to the kitchen in ceremonial style and every evening the empty muram was brought back.

How did one clean a kitchen where soot was the dominant feature? The fireplace was emptied of coals and ash at the end of every cooking session and fresh firewood was put in place. When all that was done, the floors were cleaned daily with a cow dung mixture and left to dry.
When age caught up with my grandmother, she bequeathed the rights of the main kitchen to her daughter-in-law. A relative had gifted her with an imported Butterfly brand kerosene stove that came all the way from Malaysia. It was easy to light and regulate the heat and was placed on a table in the pantry. With the Butterfly, she treated us to French toast, scrambled eggs, coconut toffee and the daily fish curry. This was as smart as cooking could get in middle of the last century.