Beef Ularthiyathu.
Magic implies fantasy, but the food Gomez makes is very real.
She uses only fresh curry leaves, which she calls irreplaceable.
“Curry leaves and curry powder have nothing in common,” she
tells me. “In India, we don’t have curry powder. It doesn’t exist.”
As Gomez drags her fingers along the length of a curry stem,
dropping the leaves into hot oil, the fragrance begins to fill the
room, and Gomez tells me, “That’s the smell of Kerala.”
The senses have always been important to Gomez, who for
years ran an ayurvedic spa in Atlanta. After massaging her clients,
she would ask them if they were hungry (her apartment was right
next door, so she always had food handy). It got to the point
where clients would call to ask what Gomez was cooking that day
before making their appointments. This pleased Gomez, who saw
food as a natural extension of her job: “Food culminated the
experience beautifully. We nourished their bodies.”
In addition to touch, smell, and taste, the visual is important to
Gomez. “I like things to be beautiful,” she tells me. Her plates are
all white and she uses different shapes for different dishes. When
she makes her thoren, a stir-fry of carrots and green beans, she
doesn’t add turmeric because she doesn’t want it to turn yellow.
At last, the food is cooked—in addition to the beef and the
thoren, there’s yogurt rice—and we’re at the table, about to eat
with our hands.
Bobby shows me how to compact the rice into a patty that can
then be used to scoop up the beef and the thoren. At first, I must