The Poetry Of YouTube's 'Village Cooking' Videos

A LITTLE OVER five years ago, hanging out with friends had taken one of our standard turns. From making fresh drinks to catching-up on daily goings-on to filling up our second drinks to breaking down tweets. Then, another round of refills before reaching the stage of outdoing each other with our latest discoveries from the inexhaustible abyss that is YouTube. While it was usually a visually-arresting music video of a familiar song, walking through celebrity cribs and their favourite objects or deep dives into significant pop culture moments, on this particular night, a new genre was added into our regular mix: My friend, and now neighbour, owned the night (of course, it is a competition for cutting-edge culture capital) with her showing of “Cooking a 40 Pound Shark in My Village — Cooking a Shark in the Traditional Way” from the channel My Money My Food. 

                             Image: Youtube/My Money My Food

 From the first shot of the huge shark being presented in front of fruiting chickoo trees in an orchard, every frame in this eight minutes and eight-second video was impressive. The production values are superb. The lush, open-air farm setting with chickens, cows, ducks, dogs and cats roaming around is curious but never distracting. The instructions (such as those for the cameraman to move to the next shot) are minimal, or murmured. The clanking of the vessels; the water gushing in the constant, reassuring washing of ingredients, vessels and hands; spoons scraping meat off bones; the sizzling of spices and onions in oil, the palta or spatula tossing ingredients in a giant kadhai; the rush of the wind, the chatter of the company form the soothing sounds to these videos. Best ASMR, baby! 

                            Image: Youtube/My Money My Food

Follow the order of cooking and you’ll have the recipe. Here, nobody is stopping to hand-hold you through techniques. The transfer of knowledge is old-school, innate and timeless: monkey-see, monkey-do. And it was also the quantity of food being prepared: giant, generous and giving. It wasn’t functional or fussy, but fiercely festive. A little bit is given on a banana leaf to a nearby creature before being passed around to everyone else gathered. Some complimentary comments are passed by the diners and the video ends, no big deal. 

After that night, I have spent many hours down the rabbit-hole of YouTube, searching for and savouring these kinds of village cooking videos. It was a departure from the hi-definition details of prettily plated meals made from ingredients I have never tasted. And it wasn’t familiar food that was forced into the presentation format of fine-dining, like [in] Indian versions of international cooking competitions. It wasn’t predicated on restraint but rather it played with excess. Cooking wasn’t precious, it had purpose and promised perfection from regular preparation. The cooks in these videos don’t have tutelage or training from the top dogs in the industry. They aren’t teaching techniques but testing out and twisting traditional dishes to reflect their own tastes and traditions. These improvisations feel like invitations to do the same in our own kitchens. It eggs us on; it says, try making a dish from one’s memory, don’t be imprisoned by method alone. Sure, there’s logic but there’s also latitude. And it is within this space, that these YouTube village cooking video creators revel. 

Also Read: Tamil Nadu’s Village Cooking Channel Receives Youtube’s Diamond Play Button; Hits 1 Crore

Through these videos, the idli-dosa-slash-butter-chicken Indian food story is completely destroyed. There’s a granny making watermelon chicken and another walks through her garden picking vegetables for her meals — farm to table, anyone? You’re invited into their daily lives — a child playing with his new car is given as much attention as the recipe. Then, one is fed a little lesson on good practices, like sharing half the catch if you fish from your neighbour’s pond… the catfish is stirred up with foraged medicinal herbs. Hi Noma! Hi Rene! *Cough Cough* 

I know, I know, it sounds like I’m being one of those uncles lounging on porticos on cool evenings and declaring “our country has everything, so it must have this also” in response to any presented fact. While this statement always brings forth furious arguments, the best plan is always to sidestep this silliness, and focus on the real trump card that isn’t being deployed in the debate: the snacks on offer. And now, through this trend the curtain is being drawn further to show us the lengths that our grandmothers, mothers and aunts had to go to, the labour they had to do, to provide heft to these loosely flung lines. These videos are also evidence of intelligent borrowing of what works for us from the global (read: American) ideas of “content creation”. It still remains resolutely representative of its terroir, it isn’t precious, precise or pretty alone. And these videos blast out the truth: that real ruchi is released on dishes being divided up and shared with as many people as possible… it is rarely in the single perfect portion.