A Recipe for Connection
by Kaia
Author’s Note: Before you begin to read, I ask that you take a moment to pull up your preferred music streaming service and queue the song Lucky Man by Courtney John.
“What is a kathi roll?” one unfamiliar with the varying street foods made in the sprawling urban areas of India may ask. As they were introduced to me by my partner, kathi rolls are a wrapped or rolled dish, usually made with a grilled, marinated chicken with fresh onion and cilantro, surrounded by a flakey flatbread.
I was taught to use roti, a flatbread made with atta flour and water and rolled into perfect circles using a thin tapered rolling pin, usually called a Belan rolling pin.
Traditionally roti is cooked on tawa, a type of skillet, over an open flame. However, in Bloomington, Indiana, we use a copper crepe pan and an electric stovetop, because you work with what you have (it actually works pretty well). There are other variations on kathi rolls using other types of meat, veg, and flatbreads, such as paratha.
Cut to the beginning of winter, my sophomore in college. Through a series of serendipitous swipes on my phone, in the waning hours of a blustery late November day, I found my soon-to-be partner.
It took two dates for us to learn that we would become inseparable, and I would quickly learn that he is an incredible and passionate cook.
So much so that one of his personal heroes is Anthony Bourdain, the travel documentarian and celebrity chef, and his favorite movie is Chef (2014), in which a prestigious chef, played by Jon Favreau, quits his job in order to road trip and rediscover his love of cooking with his family (The Chef soundtrack is phenomenal, by the way, I highly recommend. That is where Lucky Man comes from.). He began cooking for me early on in our relationship, making everything from Vietnamese pho broth from scratch to Mexican birria to Thai pad krapow.
Together on a steamy day in April, in the actually relatively large kitchen for a college house in Bloomington, my partner and I worked in tandem, as we do for most meals; I am the sous chef to his head chef.
I am a decidedly decent cook, whereas he holds the artistic brilliance to be great.
Where he can shallow fry whole shrimp exoskeletons to make a from scratch, at home pad Thai, I am generally relegated to garlic peeling, onion dicing duty, which I mostly take on with only minor teasing grumbles. (If you are familiar with the phrase about love languages that has developed on the web in the past few years of “I would peel an orange for you.”, my partner’s is definitely “I would peel a whole head of garlic for you.”). On this particular day in April, as I chopped onions, tomatoes, and cilantro, my partner simmered the chicken on the stove, expertly throwing spice after spice into the pot which filled the house with delightfully sweet, pungent aromas.
When all the prep work was done, we moved onto the roti dough. With great care, my partner showed me the rolling technique.
Ball, flatten, and delicately maneuver the rolling pin to form, theoretically, perfect circles.
In reality, mine were a bit more abstract, but he was still kindly impressed.
He told me, as we rolled, the importance of this process to him. Growing up in New Jersey within an Indian diaspora community, his mother made rotis for most meals the family ate and when he was tall enough to pull a chair to the counter and stand, she taught him. As he got older, she would tell him how when he grew up and brought someone home, they would also learn how to make roti.
To him, this was an incredibly important step in our relationship.
And as I stood in that kitchen making the roti, learning about the throughlines which led my partner to that moment, and watching him watch me make my abstracted rounds of dough, the idea that he could be in my life forever began to solidify.
You see, my partner has this magnetism, so great it is gravity-like. He is an incredibly kind, considerate, and competent person, with a deep love for helping others. He always wants to know the WHY things so he can understand them on a deeper level, whether that be to appreciate them more fully or to take better care of them. This shines through in his cooking. While we stand side by side in the kitchen, my hands smelling intensely of garlic and onion while he watches the pots and pans simmer, he often describes to me the region of the world our meal is coming from and its complex history. He tells me about how one spice from one portion of the globe may have ended up thousands of miles away from its motherland and how that has deeply impacted both cultures in entirely different ways. He might tell me about how this particular spice contains quite a bit of capsaicin and because of that he is actually making two different batches of dinner; one with what is probably considered the traditional amount of chili peppers for his advanced spice tolerance and one with probably a miniscule amount of chili peppers for my novice spice palette.
Both the story he tells and the action he takes illustrate his inquisitiveness and deep care for the things he loves.
Once each roti was fully cooked and nicely toasted on the crepe pan, kathi roll assembly could begin. The chicken was scooped from its thick, savory sauce and onto a waiting roti. After being sprinkled with my freshly chopped onions, cilantro, and tomato, they were ready to roll and devour. Before we dug in, he cut one in half, and I snapped a few pictures to share with our respective families. As we sat down to take our first bites, he told me he loved me.
I am a lucky person.