Author's notes:

This piece describes how the end-product of a dish usually has a lot of work being done in the background. Often, household cooking can consist of the efforts of several members of the family – or one member doing several tasks to prepare one final product. When seeing the final dish, one does not often question: Who buys the ingredients? Who takes them apart? Who cleans them? Who puts in the condiments and masala? Who gets the credit for creating the end-product ready for the dining table? The moment of saag-kelaune (take apart vegetables) I share with my mother reveals particular techniques and memories which are passed down the generations involved in specific processes behind the dish unique to each person, and how these details remain, for the most part, always invisible.

(Note: Kelaune (केलाउने) will be translated to ‘sort out’ or ‘take apart’ in the context of grains or vegetables respectively)

We sat down for lunch together, when Mamu informed everyone that I had made the bhanta-aaloo tarkari [eggplant-potato dish]. That made me pause mid-movement as I put my plate down. I recalled that I’d only contributed to the part that involved putting in the seasoning and stirring the vegetables as it cooked. I said as much to both Mamu and Buwa as I sat down, “Maile ta chalayeko matra ho.” [All I did was just stir it]

“Haina,” [no] Mamu insisted, already beginning to eat as she mixed the tarkari and rice together on her plate with her hand, that’s the main part, she insisted, “Masala ta timle haleko ho.” [you are the one who put the seasonings into it]

And then I countered with, “But you washed, diced and prepared the vegetables.”

However, Mamu still insisted that I deserved full credit, I even asked her specifically, “So the one who puts the masala gets the credit, ho?”

“Ho ni,” she said [of course]. Then lunch commenced.

I went on to ask if the one who’d contributed to the rest of the process – the one who buys the vegetables, the one who does the kelaune or the washing – should also get credit too, “What do you think?” I asked them.

“Tyo ta ho,” Mamu agreed, “kelaune manchhe ma pani bhar parchha.” [That is true. It depends on the person who is taking apart these spinach] Then she shared a small anecdote about her Bajai, her grandmother. This is ‘Lagan-Bajai’ specifically because she used to live in Lagan tole.

“She hated the way we (”The kids”) took apart saag especially. She said it made the saag tough and less tasty. So she would do it herself,” Mamu said. Then Mamu went on to explain what she meant when Bajai used to do the kelaune herself.

Any type of saag will have a central stem out of which there will be branches and leaves. Or if it’s the case of Raayo-ko-saag [Mustard Greens], there will only be a central main leaf. The stem needs to be torn apart, and when that happens, small tendrils of fibre stick out from the broken parts – this is what my mother calls tyandro, the tendrils that are wiry and tough, quite unpleasant to chew even after it is cooked. This taking-apart of the tyandro during the process of kelaune apparently will ensure that even the tougher stems will be soft when consuming them. Bajai used to take all these tyandro out when she took apart the saag; she did so painstaking with her fingers, with patience.

After lunch, we sat down on a table before a baata [large steel container] full of clumps of latte-ko-saag [Amaranth leaves] from our garden. Mamu was showing me how the kelaune was done, by taking apart the leaves and stems, and explaining what pulling out the tyandro meant by demonstrating them to me. I was helping her do the saag-kelaune, and so practiced it myself:

The tyandro would stick out from the stems stubbornly, so one had to go at them individually, picking at the end with the tips of one’s fingers – especially with the help of the fingernails – then pulling them out long and satisfyingly, as if pulling out tape from a flat surface. The motion is smooth, and with an expert hand like my mother’s a whole long strip of tyandro can be pulled out at once, as opposed to how I could manage only shorter strips at a time.

“She [Bajai] used to do it on kauli [Kauliflower] as well,” Mamu told me, “she hated those tough stems in kauli, so she used to pull out the tyandro to make them softer.” This surprised me, because kauli doesn’t seem to have such thin fibrous tendrils when they are broken apart, and the stem would also be tougher to manage with just the fingers as opposed to the more tender saag. I asked her this, “Wouldn’t it be difficult?”

To which Mamu didn’t answer to the affirmative nor did she negate it, only explained how Bajai did it, which was by breaking each individual floret from the main stem, grabbing the outer layer of the stem from the bottom and peeling it upwards towards the flower part. “You’d need your fingernails for it,” she explained.

Imagining it itself felt quite painful to me, I couldn’t help but shudder a little as I imagined my fingernails going through that constant abuse. “Tara hamile ta gardainau ni?” [But we don’t usually do it, right?] I asked.

Mamu agreed with a chuckle, “Gaarho ni. Tesari kelayera sadde nai chhaina.” [It’s very difficult. It’s not worth it to take it apart like that]

This sudden dismissal of Bajai’s careful process reminded me of Ma (Mamu’s mother). Ma has her own way of doing things in the kitchen, ways I find particularly creative and efficient. She has a surprising attitude of nonchalance when it comes to making up her own ways around practices that are more conventional; for instance, Ma doesn’t even do the ‘saag kelaune’ like we were doing. I had witnessed her taking whole clumps of saag in one bundle – a fistful – and after checking their leaves cursorily, she’d have at them mercilessly on her chuleso, sharp cuts at about 2 inch intervals. In that way she didn’t worry about the tyandro thing at all. (It should be noted that she doesn’t use the chuleso for all types of saag.)

We proceeded to take apart the saag more. It was a repetitive, almost meditative process, taking apart the stems, but also tearing apart the leaves – it consists of a sudden, sharp motion, grabbing them and flicking the wrist outwards. In between, Mamu would instruct me and answer any questions I had about the kelaune process I wasn’t sure of. Things like:

You need to check both sides of the leaves, there might be insects or their eggs on it

You need to take out the tyandro from all sides, not just one side

That red stuff? I don’t know what it is either, just brush it off like this.

There was another thing she then said at some point, how if she were doing this alone, she wouldn’t even be halfway done by now. “Jhyau kaam ni yo saag kelaune. Mitho bhayera k garne?” she said. [It’s a tedious process, so what if it tastes good?]

She also told me how to wash the saag after we would be done with the kelaune part. I remember seeing her preparing 3-4 baatas of water all at once, and she’d wash the saag in each of them turn by turn. “But it’s not just about washing them several times, you have to pat at them against the water, and when you take it out you can’t dive your hand all the way in because you’ll just be collecting the sediments at the bottom of the baata again.”

It helps that Mamu is very particular about these details, especially when she’s also very articulate about explaining them to me. I can’t always get the same responses from Ma, who often seems surprised whenever I ask her about the minutiae of the various small choices she makes in her own kitchen. I can no longer question Bajai as she has passed, but can only get through to her from the memories Mamu and Ma have of her. These three generations share the same recipe of making saag, yet the way they tackle this same ingredient differs according to their personalities and personal tastes. I never knew to associate the way someone would take apart saag with the way they are as a person.

There does not seem to be a specific Nepali or Newa word for ‘credit’ – at least not one that I know of in everyday spoken language. And perhaps it may be one of the reasons why these mundane details of how women take apart their saag and wash them even before they start cooking them gets blurred behind the curtain of household tasks that aren’t always seen nor spoken about in everyday language. Why is it that the main credit for ‘making’ the dish falls on the very end process – the cooking? Is it different from the time and very specific effort spent on – often quaintly particular to a person’s idiosyncrasies – the other behind-the-scene tasks such as kelaune or washing vegetables?

As is the nature of the mundane, perhaps these tasks of washing or kelaune are forever destined to take place amidst the invisible – meant to be unseen nor talked about. Taking them out of the realm of the mundane would be taking them out of the place where they belong – it would be unnatural to celebrate the finished task of saag-kelaune, for instance.

However, what comes to attention – if that – is that the completion of these tasks exist in perfect harmony alongside these women, so much so that the invisibility of the tasks takes these women with them – their portraits get blurred alongside the unseen nature of these tasks. If it is true that saag-kelaune is inherently unremarkable, the same is not true for the women who practice it: my Bajai does it in a different way compared to my Ma, and my mother does it differently compared to both these women who came before her. They bring their own subjective personalities, habits and choices into what is generally labelled as unremarkable or mundane - and perhaps this subjectivity is what at stake when the work they spend so much time in goes unappreciated. In these tasks are not just their personal stamps but also the way each woman is intricately connected to the other, in a series of shared skills and knowledge turned into memories that are sometimes not even residing in the mind nor in words, but rather, in the hands, the body.

The importance of giving credit thus assigns the importance of language and meaning to these tasks and to the people behind them. One doesn’t think of nor can they know all these details when one comes across the finished saag – steaming, ready and delicious - sitting innocuously silent at the dining table. Who gets the credit in making it, then? No one will answer that question until one asks the khana banaune manchhe [the person who makes food], and perhaps, they may not always question back: giving credit to which part, exactly?