Casement

While sour curd is something I detest completely, I seem to have developed a taste for sour cream. From potato chips to vegetable salad, there is no vegetarian dish in the North America that comes without sour cream. Even if it makes me feel that westerners lack imagination when it comes to variety in food, I don’t conclude against them. I give them the benefit of doubt because I have no idea about their non-vegetarian cuisine. Having relished sour cream for days, I wanted to find out what exactly goes into its preparation except cream-turned-sour. Eventually it turns out that there is nothing other than what its name suggests. Sour cream is simply the result of bacteria action on heavy cream and the fat content is a good 20%. After learning this, my taste for sour cream suddenly soured.

Then, there is this eternal confusion of setting curd Vs. buying curd. I stuck with Dannon like many others do. I started to fall in love with its consistency and flavour. I used it with everything, adai, dosai, idli, rice, upma, bread. As a result, I ran out of stock every other day and it made no point to visit the grocery store just for Dannon. Therefore, I resorted to setting curd. But, there was a slight problem. The set curd tasted like Dannon, but had a stringy consistency that made me hate the very idea of setting curd. Thus, my love for freshly set curd came to an abrupt end.

One fine day, my cousin invited me for dinner and the authentic taste of freshly set curd was amazing. She, another ‘thayir sadam’ like me had brought the culture of curd from India which she had carefully carried over for years together. I waited no longer to request a small box of curd and started to set curd at home since then. Believe me, there is nothing to beat the taste of freshly set curd. There is always a reserve box of curd lying somewhere in my fridge for the fear of losing the culture. Every morning, when I tilt the box of curd slightly to check if it is set properly, there is an enigmatic fear in the pessimistic part of me. But, day after day, the sublime white thing would sit there, still, ordering instant calmness in me.