My First Cooking Class

By Audarya Gupta

My mother entered the kitchen, petrified by the scene in front of her: A five-year-old Audarya stood on a stool, holding the sharpest knife in his hand, slicing thin beetroot slices. She ran to me and yanked my Excalibur away and said, “Promise me that you will never touch this”. I hesitantly nodded in response and left the kitchen with her. After a few minutes, she saw me in front of a blazing oven, checking on my beetroot cheese toasts, followed by a repetition of the whole ordeal. That day, as terrified as she was, she was also proud and amused.

Nine years later, as I rolled my knife bag out and set pots on my stove, I felt like Po from Kung Fu Panda when he was handed the responsibility of training the other warriors. My stomach was churning with nervousness; at fourteen, I was going to teach a cooking class to dozens of people. “What if I forget a step or the dish doesn't turn out to be as good?”, I thought to myself as my first student, a fifty-year-old lady, joined my Zoom room.

I was going to teach my world-famous ‘7 petalled ravioli’: a recipe I had developed after a year of hit and trial. I began the class with enthusiasm, guiding everyone through the process of making ricotta cheese for the filling, engulfing the room with an aroma of fresh milk and lemon. With the cheese cooling, I moved on to make the dough - but when I reached for the bowls of flour and eggs, my heart sank. My mother had used the last of them to make pancakes.

I was blank and could feel my pulse quicken, and panic set in. I had planned my class in detail, and now my entire lesson was falling apart. How could I admit that I, their instructor, will have to stop the session? My confidence was swept away, much like when Po realized that the dragon scroll was blank. As I started to push myself to apologize to the class, I turned to my ingredients once again. I saw my reflection in the stainless steel bowl my eggs were supposed to be in.“The lesson wasn't about raviolis, it was about me- the person who came up with their recipe and that like Po, it is only me who can make this lesson a success.”

I turned to my class and informed them that I was out of flour and that- now like any other good chef, I'll have to improvise. Though many of them weren’t pleased to hear this, some were interested in seeing how I would handle this scarcity. I grabbed a pack of bread and eyeballed a big chunk into the food processor with some soaked rice and a pinch of salt, blending it into a dough. As I put the dough to rest, I saw two of my students leave the meeting. I was ready to break down, I was internally crying, feeling that my lesson had failed. I carried out cooking- making the pasta sheets from the dough, shaping the raviolis, and preparing the sauce.

The water to poach the raviolis roared like a dragon, ready to devour its prey. If my improvisation didn’t work, my raviolis would crumble and turn the contents of the pot into a medieval stew. I reduced the temperature on the water and slowly lowered two pieces of ravioli, letting them bathe a bit before I turned up the heat. It had been two minutes, and my raviolis seemed ready, so I slowly picked them out and placed them on a plate. They were as perfect as they could have been, with a glistening shine over them and a perfectly al dente bite to them.