When I was pregnant with our second child, my husband and I went to visit friends of ours in Sendai, a town in northern Japan. We couldn't have been the easiest of house guests. We had our two-year-old daughter with us and I was suffering from terrible morning sickness. There was almost nothing that didn't give me heartburn, and keeping food down had almost become an obsession.
Our friends Glen and Jayanthi, were a couple I'd known for years, since my own time in Sendai. They too were foreigners, from India. I am crazy about Indian food, so our first night there it broke my heart that I was suddenly surrounded by it and could not really enjoy it.
The first morning at their house, I dreaded the thought of breakfast. Glen, the husband, was stirring something on the stove that looked like oatmeal but smelled like an Indian spice shop. When I asked him what he was cooking, he said simply "Porridge." Then he laughed and added "Indian style porridge, I suppose."
Now in my family, oatmeal was something that was cooked to the consistency of wallpaper paste. It was tough and gluey and there were little chewy bits in it. With the best will in the world, I cannot say that I was a great fan of my mother's oatmeal.
This was something entirely different -- intoxicatingly spicy. I could smell cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg. And I noticed that Glen kept stirring the pot, and he kept adding milk. When it was finally finished, the porridge had an almost creamy consistency, and it could be poured into a bowl, not scraped out in hard clumps. Glen sprinkled a generous helping of jaggery over the top, then dusted it with extra cinnamon. He served it with roasted cashew nuts, honey and sliced bananas. It looked so good, I had a bowl myself.
Ever since then, I have never made oatmeal any other way. Even if you use nonfat (skimmed) milk, 'Bengali oatmeal' -- the name my husband and I gave this -- is far nicer than the traditional stuff.
Some hardliners I have met pooh-pooh this. They say that the only way to eat oatmeal is cooked with water to a wallpaper consistency -- and that the only seasoning permissable is a dash of salt. But since these tend to be meat-and-two-veg types who wouldn't touch a lime pickle with a barge pole, I don't pay them any mind.
And perhaps it was the ginger, but I found that Bengali oatmeal was the perfect thing for my heartburn and morning sickness.
