Question 1 As used in paragraph 1 ("Late... salt). divert" most nearly means
indulge
shift.
entertain.
This passage is adapted from Scaachi Koul, "There's No Recipe for Growing Up. ©2016 by BuzzFeed, Inc.
1 Late last week, I called my mom to get a refresher on a few of her recipes. I wanted to make rogan josh,
aloo gobi (potatoes and cauliflower), chicken biryani (chicken and rice), and paneer with palak (spinach).
But my mom, like so many Indian mothers I know, has always avoided giving me complete recipes. Even
when I visit home and watch her, she somehow manages to divert my attention by, say, dangling in front of
my face a gol gappa, a globe of fried wheat flour filled with chickpeas and potatoes and yogurt. I'm always
missing a spice, a cook time, a stove temperature. I'm never clear if when she says "ginger" she means
"fresh ginger, about a pinky-size, cut into strips or “ginger powder, a teaspoon or two. Or, if she's feeling
really casual about a recipe, she'll say, "Add the usual spices'a mix of 5 or maybe 10 different spices that
might be usual to her but are patently unclear to me. Salt? Does she just mean salt?
2 Worse, her measurements are not based on any contemporary or commonly used metric. A teaspoon, to
her, is the size of the white plastic spoon with the snapped-off handle that she uses in all of the containers
in her spice drawer that originally came from Dairy Queen when I was 6 or 7 and abandoned a half-eaten
Oreo Blizzard. A tablespoon, conversely, is anywhere between two or three of the teaspoons. A cup is the
cup she uses to scoop basmati rice out of the five-gallon plastic tub in the pantry on the bottom shelf. It is
unclear where the cup came from, but it is cloudy and cracked and significantly smaller than an actual cup.
3Every other measurement she has then, is specific to her grocery store, to her homemade spice mixtures,
to her butcher who hands her a hunk of lamb the size of a small toddler, leaving her to break it down into
digestible and cookable pieces. "How much frozen spinach do I need?" I might ask her, and she will answer,
"One. One block, she says, as if I can go to a grocery store and say, "ONE BLOCK OF YOUR FINEST FROZEN
SPINACH, SIR.
41 suspect some of this is intentional. Indian women-mothers, in particular-hoard some of their recipes.
maintain
SP