The Rustic Kitchen Tool That Connects Me to My Mother's Cooking

An object is often worth more than its material form. It can bring with it cultural echoes, family history, and personal memory. In The Things We Treasure, writers tell us about their most priceless possessions—and the irreplaceable stories behind them.

My mother’s mortar and pestle is a black granite beauty, its nooks and crannies smoothed out from years of service. She bought it 53 years ago, as a newlywed setting up her first kitchen in Mumbai, and has used it every day since—sometimes, twice a day. I tease her, saying she is one in a country of a billion who has stayed faithful to it; everyone else we know uses a three-jar Vitamix-esque grinder to churn out the pulps, pastes, and powders so central to Indian cooking.

My mother is an excellent cook, but nowhere is her “hand”—a word used in India to describe that personal stamp of flavor that every cook imparts to their food—more evident than in her searingly hot, spicy-sour, and creamy chutneys. Tomatoes, opo squash, mint, green chile peppers, fresh or dry coconut, the five-point star fruit, green tamarind—she’ll turn anything into a chutney. Her mortar and pestle is her loyal aide in this endeavor, reinforced by her tireless hands and unflinching belief that a modern blender will never come close.

That sentiment is not without merit. You may have read that a mortar and pestle is generally considered superior for making pesto or aioli—and the same is true when it comes to chutney. An electric blender or food processor works, but isn't ideal: it shreds the ingredients into super-fine pieces, chopping but not necessarily blending. In contrast, a pestle pulverizes, forcing the ingredients to release oils and marry flavors, without so much as a drop of water needed.

Nothing exemplifies this better than my mother’s tomato and green chile chutney. She first sautés the tomatoes and peppers in a tiny bit of oil till the tomatoes break down and lose moisture, and the peppers soften. Once this mixture cools down, she pours it into the mortar with salt, cumin seeds, and some roasted peanut powder. Now she pounds as well as churns: tomatoes get crushed, peppers loosen from their skin and dislodge their explosively hot bits. A chunky paste emerges. The trick, she always says, is in choosing the ingredients to go after and how much to pound, in order to retain the grainy texture. This level of selective precision is impossible in a blender.

The four-inch granite mortar and pestle in my kitchen in Virginia is about half the size of my mother’s. Just like her, I use it to grind freshly toasted spices or tiny portions of garlic, ginger and peppers that just don’t reach the economies of scale justified by a blender (or the cleaning after). I also have a stainless steel version that my mother bought for me and lugged all the way from India several years ago, wrapped up in her many saris. As we uncovered it from meters of cloth, we poked fun at her, but had no qualms about polishing off the carrot halwa she made us after, flavored with the cardamom and nutmeg powder she ground in it. I now reserve that one solely for special occasions.

It’s not unusual for Indian kitchens to have more than one mortar and pestle, and in multiple materials—stone, steel, brass, wood—each reserved for a specific use. The granite one, the kind my mother has, is called “khalbatta” in Marathi. Another type of stone M&P is “silbatta,” a set of flat stone and a cylindrical grinding stone for roller-grinding wet masalas and chutneys. And then there are the 3-foot-tall wooden behemoths, often seen in our ancestral homes, and set aside for mass-pounding dry masalas and red chile powders.

I’ve been trying to replicate my mother’s recipe for thecha for a while now, a firecracker of a chutney whose star ingredient is green chile pepper. Essentially farmer food, thecha, topped with a swirl of oil, is paired with a rustic sorghum bread. To validate my mother’s instruction, I’ve attempted it in both my blender and my granite mortar. I hand-ground my thecha first—the pestle releasing a tongue-searing punch of flavor with a texture not pasty yet not grainy either. The thecha from the blender on the other hand, even with a few drops of water, was full of seeds and paled in comparison, both in texture and flavor.

My mother’s hand had spoken.

It was only recently that she told me that the well-shaped hollow of the mortar I see in her kitchen today, has actually deepened by more than two inches with decades of repetitive pounding. Now, she says, the pestle has more depth to pound, like a cast iron pan that seasons with age and function, or a person who’s wisdom is burnished with the passage of time. Some day, I tell myself, my kitchen, my cooking style, every dish I churn out will reflect my indelible stamp—my own hand. Until then, there’s my mortar and pestle that mirrors hers.

What is your treasured kitchen tool? Tell us in the comments below.