The dough won’t obey the rolling pin.
The palm-sized balls should stay round as I roll them flat. But the shapes evolving before me look more like maps of Tasmania. No matter, I think as the hotplate heats, if the texture’s good they’ll taste good. That’s what counts.
Here I also fail. They should be soft and pliable but mine crispen as I remove them from the heat and place them in a thali lined with a tea towel to stay warm. I sweat over the stove and feel a tantrum coming on. When I’m finished, there are tears in my eyes and a stony lump in my throat. I plonk the thali next to dhal and a vegetable curry. Once again, my roti is a pile of leaden Rorschach tests.
My earliest food memory is of hovering near the stove in our Auckland house, waiting for Mum to hand down roti fresh from the hotplate, rolled up with butter that dribbled down my chin.
I had to stand on a stool to reach the bench the first time she handed me a rolling pin and asked for help. The results were patchy. "What’s this?" Dad said peering over my shoulder. "Viti Levu?"
He saw in my creations maps of mainland Fiji, where he grew up. At least they reminded him of home.
Roti has eluded me ever since. I took for granted their delicate texture and the way they soak up rich masala sauces and nestle fried, spicy vegetables. It is the humblest of breads, made with mixed and kneaded flour and water, rolled out and cooked on a greased hotplate after the dough is given time to relax.
Roti has played an enduring role in the writer's life. Source: Ainsley's Caribbean Kitchen / Dan Jones
Which is more than I can do when faced with the prospect of making roti. The seemingly simple process is a minefield of possible missteps. Too much water makes the dough sticky. Not enough water makes it hard. Unevenly rolled, it becomes raw in parts yet crisp in others. I’ve made all these mistakes. I’ve tried all the recommended flours: atta, the wholewheat flour used in India (where roti is also called chapati); sharp flour, made from hard wheat and used by my more immediate forebears in Fiji; wholemeal flour from the supermarket, which my aunts say is perfectly adequate; and plain white flour, the mistake of a true rookie. Thanks to me, people have eaten roti better described as crispbread and leathery concoctions incapable of digestion. I am haunted by the faces of guests chewing politely, eyes averted, clutching their water glasses, forcing a swallow. My roti is a conversation stopper (and on occasion would work as a door stopper).
Too much water makes the dough sticky. Not enough water makes it hard. Unevenly rolled, it becomes raw in parts yet crisp in others. I’ve made all these mistakes.
I’m not a bad cook, I just lack culinary instinct. How I’d love to be able to casually whip up a masterpiece with ingredients scrounged from a half-empty fridge. The person who sees a silky pasta sauce in a bunch of wilted spinach and a half bottle of cream nearing expiry.
I am not that person. Cooking came not at my mother’s apron strings but in the first form, when our home economics teacher instructed us to copy out recipes written on the blackboard before cooking. I loved the precision of that exercise almost as much as I admired the novelty of the measuring cups and scales in Mrs A’s kitchen. The excitement of doling out flour in half cups and weighing butter in grams was hard to contain.
The Home Ec quiche recipe was the beginning of my love affair with pastry and my ticket out of Sunday church. "I’ll make a quiche for lunch," I’d promise in return for a sleep-in and a background soundtrack of the weekly top 40 while whipping up an egg custard.
Soon after, I discovered the cookbook, a New Zealand favourite and one of the few recipe books in our kitchen. Its simply laid-out pages, crammed with recipes and free of photos, opened my inner chef to the world of scones, cupcakes, and roast chicken.
Making quiche meant a break from church duties. Source: John Laurie
When I re-embraced the Indian heritage I spurned as a teenager, there were no books to teach me how to cook the dishes of my childhood. I moved to Wellington and would ask my parents to dictate recipes down the phone. Dad’s lamb curry was top of the list.
"Well, you cut the onion and the lamb…," he said uncertainly down the phone one day when I was homesick for his hallmark dish. The recipe was so intuitive to him, he didn’t think of it in words.
"How many grams of lamb? Do you dice or slice the onion?" I could sense him shrugging at my questions.
‘Maybe five cloves, maybe six,’ he said when interrogated about the garlic.
My book of handwritten recipes grew to include dhal, and chicken pilau. The Delights of Indian Cooking, self-published by a group of Indian women in Auckland, and were added to a growing collection of cookbooks. Both proffered roti recipes; neither of them helped.
Roti recipes come looking for me now – offering new hope when I search for dinner inspiration on my laptop. Like a devotee who flagellates themselves every Easter, I try once a year to cook the impossible. While others nurtured sourdough starters during the second COVID-19 lockdown, I tried my luck again. A Zoom lesson with my sister and three hours later, I was a bawling, flour-coated mess.
Roti comes in many forms around the world and can be enjoyed with curry and other dishes. Source: Adam and Poh's Malaysia in Australia
I am happy to have raised my son on many of the dishes I grew up eating. Our local supermarket sells roti, too, kept fresh with sealed plastic, silica gel sachets and preservatives I know only as numbers.
But I’ve seen him scoop up curry with achingly soft roti made by the women in Natabua, the Fijian village where my family has been present for more than a century. To cook roti like them, over a wood fire, surrounded by wandering cows and chickens destined for the pot would be a feat. I’d swap a drawer full of measuring cups to be able to do that.
This story was longlisted in the SBS and Diversity In Food Media Australia' . You can find out more about the competition and the winning entrants .
