THE LONG WAY HOME.

Saturdays, when I was growing up, I would often be woken by the powerful, almost meaty stench of powdered asafetida hitting a pan, or the insistent drone of my mother's blender, pulverizing whole roots of ginger or a dozen heads of garlic. I would come downstairs and find her at the stove, all four burners going, the sink crammed with colanders, the spices she stored in large brown Cremora jars pulled down from the cupboards. She would have been up since four, preparing for a dinner party for a crowd of fifty or more. There was always, simultaneously, lamb and fish and shrimp, and a minimum of four vegetable dishes, and dal and chutney, and two or three selections for dessert, all of it preceded by an assortment of stuffed croquettes and breaded cutlets, which she served as appetizers. She had learned to cook by watching and helping her mother in Calcutta, and she insisted on undertaking the labor-intensive dishes that most of my parents' Bengali-immigrant friends no longer bothered to attempt. She got down on the floor to pound turmeric or chilies on a massive grinding stone. She boiled gallons of milk for fresh channa, made fritters out of shad roe, and prepared her own baris--lentil wafers that she would set out, like dozens of miniature cookies, to dry on our sundeck in Rhode Island.

If her hands were dirty, I might crack an egg for her, or pour some bread crumbs onto a plate. On rare occasions, she let me roll out a luchi and slip it into the bubbling oil in her karhai, but from the way she hovered, and monitored, anxious that the disk of dough would not puff up in my unpracticed hands, the message was clear: cooking was her jurisdiction. It was also her secret. My mother owned no cookbooks, just as she owned no measuring cups or spoons. To this day, if friends ask how she made a particular dish, she cryptically replies, "It's nothing, really, you simply take all the ingredients and put them in the pot." One Mother's Day, I gave her a pretty turquoise-blue blank book, asking her to write down some recipes for me. She filled in a page or two, with instructions on how to make samosas, then stopped. Some years later, my sister made the same request, with similarly evasive results.

When I was eighteen, I left for college in New York City, and for the next four years I subsisted on bagels, Granny Smith apples, and cold noodles with sesame sauce. It wasn't until after graduation that I started cooking. I had moved to Boston, where I took classes at Harvard and worked part time in a bookstore. Suddenly, there was time to do the sorts of adult things alien to undergraduate life. I was invited to my first dinner parties. Some featured casseroles of the Campbell's-soup persuasion; others introduced me to risotto, endives, mascarpone cheese. I shopped at the Italian markets in the North End, clipped recipes from the Times ...