The recipe itself was never the hard part — my mother walked me through it over a video call years ago, and I’ve made some version of it dozens of times since. Kudampuli instead of tamarind for the sourness, coconut oil, curry leaves I now grow on a sad little windowsill plant because the grocery store ones wilt within a day. The fish is the real problem. Whatever’s freshest at the Boston market stands in for whatever she’d have picked up that morning at home, and it’s never quite the same fish.
It still comes out good. Good enough that it disappears fast at family dinners here, good enough that my kids ask for it by name. But every single time, there’s a moment partway through cooking where I catch the smell and I’m thirteen again, standing in her kitchen in Kozhikode, in the way, being told to go sit down.
I’ve stopped trying to make it taste exactly like hers. I don’t think that’s actually possible outside her kitchen, with her stove, her fish, her hands. What I’m really making, I think, is a way of remembering it — which turns out to matter more than getting it exactly right.