Being an army family, it goes without saying that we moved house a lot. But whichever corner of the country we found ourselves in, once a year, like homing pigeons, we would find ourselves making for the green hills of Coorg. Here, we would converge on my mother’s family home in Mercara (Madikeri), joined by aunts, uncles and cousins.

It was one large household filled with noise and bustle.The noise was mostly provided by a gaggle of unruly cousins and the bustle came mainly from the region of the kitchen, which had to cope with some rather gregarious appetites. And we were fed and watered from morning to night with unflagging devotion and patience by my grandmother and her trusty handmaidens and sometimes the odd handyman too.

What did we eat? Stick around, we’ll get to that soon enough!

My grandmother lost her mother when she was very young. Being the fifth of seven sisters, she learned to cook by observing her older siblings’ efforts. A photograph of her, taken early in the twentieth century, shows her as a young schoolgirl at St Joseph’s Convent, simply known as “Convent” in Mercara. (In the third picture above, she’s the one peering nervously over the right shoulder of a rather stern looking nun).