Sunday Cooking for a Thursday I Cannot Predict

Two hours on Sunday evening. Dal, one dry vegetable, rice portioned out, and a jar of something sharp to put on top of whatever has gone dull by midweek.

The failure mode is not the food going off. The food is fine. The failure is that Sunday me is optimistic and organised and cooking for a person who does not exist, and Thursday me comes in at nine, opens the fridge, looks at three sensible containers and wants toast.

I have stopped treating that as a discipline problem. It is a forecasting problem, and the forecast is bad because it is made by somebody with two free hours and a clean kitchen.

So I have cut the Sunday cook by a third and started leaving one deliberate gap. Thursday now has nothing in it, on purpose, and Thursday can decide. It has decided toast twice and it has decided to actually cook once, and the once was the best meal of that week.

It did not fail dramatically. It simply stopped sealing, which announces itself as a cooker that hisses continuously and never builds, and I stood there for a full minute assuming the problem was the flame.

The shop had one. Eighty rupees, correct size, five minutes to fit. The part is not the story.

The story is that the new gasket seals properly, and a cooker that seals properly comes to pressure faster, and every single timing I have in my head is now wrong by somewhere between one and two whistles. Eleven years of not thinking about it, gone in an afternoon.

I burnt the dal on Monday. Not badly, but audibly, and I want it on the record that this is a hardware upgrade behaving exactly like every hardware upgrade I have ever read about in Mr Iyer-Brooks's paper: strictly better, and it broke everything downstream of it.

Onion, lime, green chilli, salt, sits in the fridge, ready on Sunday and best on Wednesday. That is it. That is the entire technique.

What it does is not flavour, exactly. It is contrast. Anything that has been in a fridge for three days has gone soft in a way that is not about texture — the edges have rounded off, and a spoonful of something sharp puts them back.

I did not work this out. I watched my mother do it for twenty years without ever once explaining it, and I assumed for most of that time that it was a garnish. It is not a garnish. It is the thing that makes cooking once and eating four times survivable.

If you take one thing out of this paper and you are cooking for yourself, take the jar. Not the dal, not the schedule. The jar.

It is in the masthead of this paper because it is the one fixed point in my week, and until about a month ago I had never actually said it to another human being.

What I did instead was absorb. A call at 7:40 that would obviously run over, a friend who says he will come at seven and arrives at nine, a work thing that could be Tuesday and was made Thursday. Each one individually is nothing.

Collectively they had moved dinner to somewhere between nine and never, and I had started eating standing up at the counter three nights a week and telling myself I was being flexible.

Now I say it. Not as an ultimatum — I say it the way you would say a train time. Dinner is at eight, come at seven thirty or come after. Nobody has objected. Nobody has even reacted, really, which is the annoying part, because it means the whole thing was mine to fix and I left it for a year.