Gopal Pandey's disappearing act

The author is expressing her views on wedding season

As the wedding season approaches and we are inundated with invitations to “destination” weddings and “farmhouse” cocktail parties, I can’t help but wonder where the concept of a traditional home wedding has gone. Perhaps it is because more and more people now live in apartments with little space to host weddings, or it is that people now no longer have the time or bandwidth to deal with guests and meals. But till not so long ago, weddings in my family used to be long-drawn affairs attended by family and friends from far and wide. They involved the week-long enlisting of a specialist workforce — tent-house boys, florists and most important, the khansama or a cook who knew exactly how everyone liked not only their laddus and halwa, but also kebabs and biryani. For the Mathurs, the community I belong to, the hiring of the khansama was sometimes as crucial as the choosing of the bride/groom.

Gopal Pandey used to be the Old Delhi cook everyone wanted. He would arrive a few days before the ceremony and chart out an elaborate menu, which included a fresh mithai every day. His age was indeterminate, but his energy level was amazing. In fact, it was quite a sight seeing his small team orchestrate a sequence of frenetic chopping, vigorous stirring and frying. The old man, bent with age, would go about his craft like a virtuoso. Often, he’d know more about marriage customs than anyone else, and knew exactly how to pair them with the choicest food for the most auspicious outcomes. Just before the first wedding guests arrived, Pandey would materialise with his van-load of gigantic and suspiciously battle-stained cooking utensils. It was said, for convenience as much as tradition, that his pots and pans added their own unique flavour to every dish. Much to everyone’s enjoyment, from time to time, he’d send out melt-in-the mouth shami kebabs, sweets of all sorts and the pièce de résistance, his signature dish, the sublime badam pasanda, the Mathur specialty in which chunks of boneless mutton were beaten with mallets and then cooked with almonds till they melted with the merest of sighs in the mouth. 

Over the years, I watched Gopal Pandey continue to cook and improve his craft as our extended family navigated its long journey of celebrations. Around the dawn of the millennium, it seemed that the sun was finally setting on these elaborate home weddings. As the clamour for “live” counters of grilled fish, pasta and khao suey grew, without even realising it, Gopal Pandey slowly started going out of fashion.

Last I heard, his sons had given up the business of cooking and taken up office jobs, quite happy to cast aside their rich culinary legacy which, they believed, would ensure they stayed hungry and poor. The old man, however, crankily continued making the same old dishes and harping on the same old traditions that fewer and fewer people wanted to follow. I still had the tattered old scrap of paper on which he’d dictated his recipe for badam pasandas to me — only because he’d seen me grow up and cooked for my wedding. 

The other day, when my son asked me to make badam pasanda for his first meal home back from college, I found myself remembering old Gopal Pandey and his grimy pots and pans. On an impulse, I dialed his number only find it was no longer in service. Nobody seemed to know any more if the old family cook, once so much a part of our festivities, was even dead or alive. 

Change is inevitable, I know, but I’ll always remember the flavor of Pandey’s cooking…