by I remembered every ingredient and still somehow made something that tasted like a stranger’s kitchen
I stood in my kitchen this evening surrounded by every ingredient I could remember from my grandmother’s curry, the specific combination of spices I’d watched her toast a hundred times growing up, and produced something that was, by any objective measure, a perfectly decent meal that tasted absolutely nothing like the thing I was actually trying to make.
I know the ingredients. I could recite them from memory faster than I can recite most things I actually studied formally. What I apparently don’t know, and what no ingredient list was ever going to give me, is whatever specific, unmeasurable thing happened in her hands that turned the same components into something that tasted like an actual memory rather than a technically correct approximation of one.
What I Actually Got Right
To be fair to myself, a fair amount of it landed close. The base was right, I think, the specific order of toasting the spices before adding anything wet, a sequence I’d watched closely enough over the years that it’s genuinely embedded somewhere in my hands rather than just my memory. The colour was close. The smell, in the first few minutes, was disorientingly, almost painfully close, close enough that for a moment standing over the pot I felt convinced I’d actually cracked it this time.
Then I tasted it, and the gap between smell and taste was its own small, specific heartbreak. Technically balanced. Missing something I couldn’t name, still can’t name, sitting here hours later with a full stomach and a strange, unresolved feeling that has nothing to do with actually being hungry.
What the Feed Says About This Exact Failure
I posted about it afterward, mostly just venting, and the responses came from what felt like every corner of the internet at once, people describing the identical experience with their own grandmother’s, mother’s, or aunt’s specific dish, ingredients memorised precisely, technique studied and copied as closely as memory allows, and the result still somehow, stubbornly, not quite it. Several people offered the same explanation in slightly different words, that a lot of these dishes were never actually measured in the first place, that the person who made them was working from decades of accumulated instinct rather than any fixed recipe, adjusting by feel in ways that were never going to be fully transmittable through observation alone, however closely I was watching.
One reply in particular stayed with me, someone who said they’d finally gotten close to their own grandmother’s dish only after years of failed attempts, and that the final missing piece turned out to be something almost embarrassingly unmeasurable, the specific, slightly worn pot she’d always used, decades of seasoning built into metal that no amount of ingredient precision could substitute for. I don’t know if that’s my missing piece too. I don’t currently own anything close to the pot my grandmother used, which is either a genuinely useful lead or a comforting excuse, and I haven’t fully decided which.
Why This Matters More Than a Recipe
What’s actually sitting with me tonight isn’t really about the curry as food. It’s that I didn’t think to ask her enough specific questions while I still could, assumed, the way you assume things about people who feel permanent, that there’d be more time to actually stand beside her properly, hands in the same pot, rather than simply watching from across a kitchen the way I mostly did. The ingredients I remember. The specific knowledge that lived in her hands rather than in any list, I apparently only absorbed a fraction of, and there’s no ingredient substitution available for the parts I missed.
I keep thinking about one specific afternoon, years ago now, when she tried to explain how she knew the onions were ready, and the actual explanation amounted to something like “you can just tell,” delivered with total confidence and zero further elaboration, as though the sentence itself was a complete and sufficient teaching. At the time I remember finding it mildly frustrating, wanting an actual measurable cue, a colour, a texture, a number of minutes I could write down and rely on later. Tonight, standing over my own pot of onions, guessing, I understood the sentence considerably better than I did the day she said it, and understood too, more painfully, that the understanding arrived roughly a decade too late to actually ask her the follow-up questions I should have asked at the time.
The Small Comfort I Found Afterward
My mother, when I called to tell her about tonight’s attempt, said something that helped more than I expected. She said her own early attempts at the same dish, decades ago, apparently went through a nearly identical stretch of technically-correct-but-somehow-wrong results before something eventually clicked, and that she couldn’t point to the specific moment it clicked any more than she could explain exactly what changed. It just, gradually, over enough repeated attempts, started tasting like itself. That’s not a satisfying explanation in any concrete sense. But it’s oddly reassuring to know the gap I’m currently standing in isn’t a sign I’m doing something fundamentally wrong, just a sign I haven’t yet done it enough times.
What I’m Going to Try Next
I’m going to make it again this weekend, and probably the weekend after that, treating each attempt less as a failed reproduction and more as its own small, ongoing conversation with a memory that isn’t going to hand over its full secret in a single evening. Maybe eventually my own hands develop whatever instinct hers had. Maybe it never fully arrives and I simply end up with my own version, related but distinct, which might, honestly, be a more honest outcome than perfect replication ever would have been anyway.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
