Padma Lakshmi Was An Ice Cream Mule (Reheat)

Is Padma Lakshmi a model-turned-TV-star who's grown accustomed to the finer things? Or a down-to-earth mom who reuses takeout containers for her leftovers? Is she warm and hospitable, the kind of person who's excited to share her food with you? Or is she frank and snarky, the kind of person who compares her favorite dish to old bong water?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

  My whole extended family and I went to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina this past spring. And I gotta say, I came away feeling like, number one, this is a great family destination. Number two, this is a great place to come all year round. The mini golf alone is probably worth, it's like the mini golf capital of the country. They have the most incredible elaborate mini golf courses. They also have more than 80 championship, full-size golf courses, plus 60 miles of beautiful coastline, all-season sunshine. Of course, you can relax by the beach or the pool. There's also jet skiing, fishing charters, paddle boarding, and of course, food. Oh, man, did we eat well in Myrtle Beach. From fresh local seafood to craft burgers and craft beers to kebabs on the boardwalk. With more than 2,000 restaurants to choose from, from legendary no-frill seafood shacks

• 0:43Dan Pashman?

  to chef-driven dining, Myrtle Beach has it all. Plus, live entertainment at the beach, there's always something epic going on. So, summer may be winding down, but in Myrtle Beach, you're gonna find the coastal vacation of your dreams all year long. Start planning your ultimate beach vacation at visitmyrtlebeach.com. As we turn to fall and the weather starts to cool down, I think of things like crunching leaves. I think of sharing from the sidelines of a soccer game, walking the dog in the woods. And when I think of doing all those things, I'm usually wearing something from LL Bean. Whether it's my puffer vest, my puffer coat, my scarf, whatever you're doing outside this year, you probably need something from LL Bean, whether it's their boots, their Scotch Plaid flannel, their rugged field coat, or more. Grab the layers and people you love and get outside.

• 1:28Dan Pashman?

  Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Sirius XM Podcasts.

• 1:45Dan Pashman?

  Hey, everyone. Dan here with another reheat for you. And, you know, look, obviously, as part of my job, I get to eat a lot of good food. It is one of the perks. But it's very rare, actually, that a guest brings me food in the studio. That has only happened a handful of times. At least Whitney showed up with a bunch of dips.

• 2:04Dan Pashman?

  I'm having trouble remembering another one, other than the one that you're about to hear, which is my conversation from 2016 with Padma Lakshmi. We started chatting, and pretty soon I was eating tamarind rice from her fridge. And as you'll hear, that's not the only food that it turns out we both love. Padma, of course, you know, is a cookbook author, food writer, former Top Chef host. We talk about everything from her memories of her grandmother's kitchen to adjusting to life in the US after moving to New York from India at age four. And a quick update on Padma, she left Top Chef back in 2023, and she's now hosting a new reality cooking competition show called America's Culinary Cup. It's on CBS. New episodes air Wednesday nights. And of course, as always, if there's a Sporkful episode you want us to pull out of the deep freezer and reheat, we take requests.

• 2:47Dan Pashman?

  Send me an email or voice memo to [email protected]. Tell me your first name, location, what episode you want to hear, and why. Thanks so much, and enjoy.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  I've had to learn how to eat on television and not soil my garments.

• 3:03Dan Pashman?

  This is Padma Lakshmi, cookbook author, writer, and host of the TV show Top Chef. After 10 years hosting that show, she's learned how to eat on camera.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  I think you just want to make sure that you open your mouth wide enough so that you don't, you know, I mean, it's harder for me than it is for you, say. I mean, you have a beard, which provides its own obstacles. But, you know, when you have lipstick and stuff, I try not to wear too bright of lipstick so that, you know, I'm always going like this, trying to wipe it off the wine glass or something. But I think it's just to take a small bite and eat slowly so you can really absorb the experience. Because Top Chef is unlike other competition shows on TV, like on The Voice, you can hear them sing for yourself, or on, you know, So You Think You Can Dance, you can see them dancing. But

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Top Chef, you're really relying on the judges, on Gail, and Tom, and Hugh, and I, or whoever the fourth chair is, to describe the experience with you and carry you with us.

• 4:03Dan Pashman?

  Right. And so that's very interesting, because I never really thought of it that way, but it makes. Total sense, because so much of watching any of those shows is, you know, you pick your favorite and you root for the person, you root for the contestant that you decide you're going to root for.

• 4:16Dan Pashman?

  And sometimes those judgments are because you like so and so's backstory better. But sometimes the judgment is, I think that person was the best dancer. That's the one who deserved to win.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  And often, we want you to really like or dislike somebody because that means you're invested in the show. From my point of view, I'm the host of the show. I don't know their backstory, and I don't want to. There's a reason why Tom and I are not involved in the casting, because we don't want to have someone we're rooting for.

• 4:42Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  You know, halfway through the season, you know, I may root for somebody, but it's not even who, often, it's not even the guy who's the best. It's that guy who can't get out of his own way and you know is better than this, or is making silly mistakes. I spend more time with these chefs than anybody else does. I see them the first morning they enter the kitchen. They are like shell-shocked children. They've had their phones taken away from them. They don't get newspapers. They're sequestered like a jury, you know? And so, I try to calm them down and, you know, I'm a daily presence in their lives. So, it's hard not to empathize.

• 5:21Dan Pashman?

  Today on The Sporkful, I sit down with Padma Lakshmi. She'll talk about adjusting to life in the US after moving here from India when she was four.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  You know, little kids in my class who, you know, were coming in with these neat little crust-cut-off sandwiches of peanut butter and jelly or bologna were really cruel. They're like, ew, what is that?

• 5:40Dan Pashman?

  She'll discuss her transition from modeling to the food world.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  My career in modeling honed my skill as a food writer because I was, the one thing that any seasoned chef will tell you is, travel.

• 5:53Dan Pashman?

  And she'll share her leftover rice with me.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  It came from our fridge, but it was made this morning.

• 6:00Dan Pashman?

  That's all coming up. Stick around.

• 6:10Dan Pashman?

  From WNYC Studios, this is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. Padma Lakshmi was born in India. When she was four, her parents got divorced and she moved with her mom to New York. She went back to India every summer, though, so she was always sort of straddling east and west. She talks a lot about that experience in her memoir, Love, Loss, and What We Ate, which came out this year. Before we even started recording, the two of us were chatting, and she was telling me about this tamarind rice that she had made that morning. And it sounded so good, and I was asking her all these questions about it. And suddenly, she said, "You know what? I want you to try some." So she turns around and asks her assistant to go back to her apartment to get the tamarind rice from the fridge.

• 6:54Dan Pashman?

  So as the interview began, I was getting excited for that tamarind rice. Until then, we talked about some of Padma's earliest food memories in India.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  My grandmother and my aunts cooked constantly. There were 10 of us, at any given time, that lived in a two-bedroom flat in Madras, which is now called Chennai. So by the time she was clearing the plates after breakfast, she was thinking about tiffin, which is kind of like lunch, only it happens at 4:00. It's a derivative of British tea. And then, you know, dinner. So we had a rolling meal constantly. And in fact, we had so many people that not all of us fit around the dining table. So the men and the children would eat first. And then I would eat next to my grandfather. And my grandfather and I were very tight. I loved pickles and anything spicy or sour as much as he loved anything sweet. In fact, my grandfather had a mighty sweet tooth.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  And so a lot of my food memories are about procuring contraband sweets for my extremely diabetic grandfather on the sly.

• 7:57Dan Pashman?

  You were like his foot soldier, basically.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:59Dan Pashman?

  He sent you on missions.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  I was his mule. Yeah, I used to run to the All-in-One, barefoot. And if I ran as fast as I could, I could make it there just before I burned my feet on the hot sand. You know, the streets weren't paved then in my part of the neighborhood in Madras. And then I would get a single-serve, little softie, ice cream, paper cup with the wooden spoon taped to the bottom, one for him, one for me. And we would eat them silently. And, you know, one time, we got busted, and that was the end of that scheme. You know, we really.

• 8:34Dan Pashman?

  Busted by your grandmother?

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was the only time I really, really saw them. I don't think fight is the right word, but I felt the energy in the air, like holy, you know, we're in trouble. Or like, I've, you know, I've just never heard her verbally cross him like that, although it was no doubt to anyone who held the power in that house. You know, she just didn't need to wield it. And at this point, you actually saw her sword.

• 9:00Dan Pashman?

  At this point in the conversation, Padma's assistant came into the studio with the tamarind rice. It was in a reused takeout container.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Pretty good, so you can have a taste there. So this is basically a tamarind paste that's cooked down to

• 9:19Speaker 02

  a pasty soot that is kind of like what happens when you don't change the oil on your car. That's, you know, that like really thick gooey. That's what it should be with fried curry leaves and red dried chilies and peanuts and chana lentils, split chana lentils. And it's also been coated with sesame oil and you basically cook rice normally, like steamed rice, and then you toss it with this condiment and it's great. And traditionally, we make this dish also when we go on a train journey. Because when you took a train from Delhi down south to Chennai, you had to have your own food. Nobody would trust the food that you could buy in these various train stations. And it was a long ride.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  It was like two nights and three days or something. So you packed food that would keep, especially in that heat. Is it spicy?

• 10:10Dan Pashman?

  I mean, I like spicy, it's not too spicy. It just hits you right in the back of the throat.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you're not, I'm sorry.

• 10:16Dan Pashman?

  No, no, no, don't apologize. I love it. It's fantastic. What I love, it's like, it's like this dish that sort of reveals itself to you so slowly. There's so much going on here. First, you get the kind of the oil and the fat. And you get that, then you get the tamarind sort of tart sour thing and you get the crunch of the peanuts. Then you get the peppers coming in, you start to feel the kick.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:36Dan Pashman?

  There's a lot going on here. I love it.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  It's like a Coltrane song. Every time you listen to it, you get a little more flavor out of it.

• 10:44Dan Pashman?

  So Padma still eats a lot of her favorite Indian foods from childhood. But her connection to that food is complicated because she essentially grew up partly in India and partly in the US. She remembers being four and getting ready to move to New York with her mom.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  I was going toward something, but I was also leaving behind everything I knew and all my cousins and the comfort of living in a joint family and never being alone and sleeping with three of your cousins. And I was leaving all of that behind and I didn't know what to expect. My grandfather was very much an American, Americophile, if I can say that. You know, he loved America and he prepared me as much as he could for my age. He made me memorize every state capital and capital and state in alphabetical order. He told me, you know, to be careful about food because there was always hidden meat lurking around like lard, you know?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  And when he described lard and if you're a vegetarian, then the idea of, you know, eating meat is very close to cannibalism. You are, you know, you realize you feel like you're going to this strange hostile land that somehow is somewhere that your mother has to go to make a life for us because, you know, she and your father are no more. But I think my grandfather was very prescient and he knew that once I had tasted the West, once I had watched American TV, you know, had all these experiences, it was going to also be hard for me to come back to India. That I would always feel a little bit of an outsider in both countries.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  And that certainly has been the case until very, very recently. And I think the point at which I achieved, you know, some modicum of success in my career and enough success to where I could create my own environment, I very much felt like an outsider in both places.

• 12:42Dan Pashman?

  Let's talk about young Padma in grade school in the US of A.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:46Dan Pashman?

  Do you have memories of bringing food to school?

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Yes, and not very happy ones. You know, the same container that you just opened that is filling this sound studio with smells and aromas that you find perhaps inviting because you've been exposed to it, you like it, you're an adult, you're not even going to be, you know, you're not going to be rude to me even if you don't like it because I brought it from my home.

• 13:07Dan Pashman?

  I do like it, for the record.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 13:08Dan Pashman?

  But go on.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  But I mean, you know, when you're in fifth grade, that's not the case. And, you know, it's not, in fifth grade in the 1970s or early 80s is not like it is now. You know, kids aren't exposed to sushi and vegan. And, you know, little kids in my class who, you know, were coming in with these neat little crust cut-off sandwiches of peanut butter and jelly or baloney were really cruel. They're like, ew, what is that? How can you eat that?

• 13:37Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  You know? And it kind of, I didn't want to try that mystery meat that was lurking between two slices of soft pillowy bread, you know? But I kind of forced myself. I still, you know, it was easier for me to eat baloney than peanut butter. Peanut butter was something I just couldn't, now I love peanut butter, but, you know, that, that was something I didn't understand.

• 14:05Dan Pashman?

  Coming up, my conversation with Padma Lakshmi continues. We'll learn about the Indian street snacks that are one of her favorite foods in the world. And when you're a former model, people make judgments about your looks and your brains. Padma will talk about how she deals with both. Stick around.

• 14:45Speaker 03

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• 17:20Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to another Sporkful Reheat. I'm Dan Pashman. A lot of times, people want to ask me, like, oh, what are you cooking? What restaurants are you going to? They ask Emma and Andres and the whole Sporkful team the same questions. Well, it turns out, we provide a listener service to you that includes that information. It's our newsletter. We don't send it out all the time. We're not going to spam you. We're just going to send you useful information, recipes, restaurant information, links to articles that we're reading, shows that we're watching. And guess what else? You'll be automatically entered into giveaways for cookbooks featured on the show, as long as you live in the US or Canada. That's also where I'll email you to tell you about, like, special sales happening on this Folini website by discounts on pasta and stuff. So, there are a lot of benefits, and you can sign up right now while you're listening. Head on over to sporkful.com/newsletter to sign up today.

• 18:03Dan Pashman?

  Again, that's sporkful.com/newsletter. Thanks.

• 18:09Dan Pashman?

  Now, let's get back to my conversation with Padma Lakshmi. So, I have just started to learn about this family of Indian street snacks called chaat. They're sold from carts or stalls. There are a whole bunch of different kinds of chaat, but they mostly all involve some kind of crispy fried dough. Then there's often potato and/or chickpeas. And then some combination of salty, sweet, tart, and spicy seasonings. Chaats are full of flavor, and they really scratch all the classic snack food itches, especially in hot weather. But, while I will admit that I am still a chaat novice, Padma?

• 18:44Speaker 02

  I love chaat. If I could have one thing for the rest of my life, I would probably want to have a chaat stall, so that I could make, you know, the 15 million combinations of the same 17 ingredients. You know? But, it's sort of like tacos or nachos, you know? It's all...

• 18:59Dan Pashman?

  Right, right, right.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  But, so...

• 19:02Dan Pashman?

  Does, you know what I've been, again, and I'm far from an expert on Indian food, but what I've been getting so into is pani puri?

• 19:08Speaker 02

  That's my favorite.

• 19:10Dan Pashman?

  Seriously?

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:12Dan Pashman?

  Let the record reflect that at this very moment, Padma Lakshmi and I high-fived to celebrate our shared love of pani puri.

• 19:20Dan Pashman?

  I'll let her explain what it is.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  It is a crisp, puffed up, little crunchy ball that's made with flour that's fried, whole wheat flour that's fried. It's almost the size of a golf ball, but a little flatter.

• 19:35Dan Pashman?

  And hollow in the middle.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  And hollow, completely hollow, very thin. Poke the top of it with your finger, fill it with chopped boiled potatoes, fresh cilantro, boiled usually, if it's really authentic, black chickpeas, which are smaller and they're much more flavorful, and they're meant to be a little more toothsome. Anyway, you fill that, and then there are two different sauces that you put. One, which is a tamarind sauce, which is slightly sweet. And then there's a second thing, which looks like swamp water, you know, or really, really old bong water. And it's wonderful. It really has that army green murky color to it. It's thin like a broth, but it's cold.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  It is made of pureed chilies and mint and black cumin, which gives it that sulfuric thing. It is wonderful and very refreshing if you're living in hot India. So they put like, I would say, an espresso spoon of the sweet and sour sauce first, and then dunk the whole puff into...

• 20:35Dan Pashman?

  Oh, you do a whole puff dunk?

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, into what is traditionally a clay pot. And you dip inside, and you're all standing there in a semicircle in front of the chaat wala, or the chaat guys stand, and with little ever silver bowls waiting for him. And so he goes one by one by one, and the next time if he comes to you and you're still chewing, because you have to put that puff, it's like a soup dumpling.

• 21:00Dan Pashman?

  Yes, it's all gonna go in your mouth all at once.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Yes, it's a crispy, cold soup dumpling with a ton of flavor.

• 21:05Dan Pashman?

  And that bite, like you put the whole thing in your mouth, you bite it, you get the crunch of the outside and the softness of the potatoes and the tang of the tamarind and...

• 21:12Speaker 02

  And the cold water and the butteriness of the potatoes.

• 21:15Dan Pashman?

  So good.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  It's all good. And, you know, I knew where to go. Every time I came back from New York, you know, when school let out in June, I was on a plane back to India, and I had a mental list, I think like we all do when we go home, of what I was gonna eat. And certainly chaat and pani puri is on the top of that list.

• 21:35Dan Pashman?

  Now, most Americans aren't familiar with chaat. It's not exactly chicken tikka masala at this point. But if anyone can help chaat cross over, it's Padma Lakshmi. She's become one of America's leading ambassadors for Indian food, as well as flavors and spices from all over the world where she's lived and traveled. She's done it in her cookbooks, Tangi Tart Hot and Sweet and Easy Exotic. Last year, she launched a line of frozen foods at Costco called Easy Exotic. Now she has an Easy Exotic line of housewares at Walmart. We talked about the challenges of translating other cultures and cuisines for a new audience.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  I think it's easier to get people to try something new if it comes in a vehicle they're familiar with. So if I want my daughter to have sumac, which is a beautiful berry that has a lovely vermilion color, it's dried and powdered, it's used all over the Middle East, it's as old as the Romans, they used it before citrus was discovered.

• 22:31Dan Pashman?

  It's one of the key ingredients in zatara, right?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Yes. So it's easier for me to put that sumac on a sour cream dip that I know she's going to want to dunk her cauliflower into. If I start doing something funky and perhaps more, not funky, but more authentic, she's going to be like, what is that on my meat kebab? And she's going to rub it off. You know, we did that with Tangi Tart Hot and Sweet. We made a Mexican macaroni and cheese because by using pickled jalapenos and shallots, which are closer to Mexican onions, because they're less sulfuric than the white onions that are left raw and things like that, you can get somebody to try something and it becomes almost a gateway. It's what happened with Chipotle.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  You know, I think a lot more people were eating Chipotle mayonnaise before they actually went out and said, well, what is this Chipotle?

• 23:23Dan Pashman?

  And when you do those things with food to make them more accessible, do you ever get pushback from the Indian community?

• 23:30Speaker 02

  I will say this, that you'll have Indians all over the world contradicting themselves. Because you can drive by car for an hour and people are speaking a different language, praying to a different god, dressing a different way and eating completely different food. It becomes very hard to make any kind of generalization about, you know, anything Indian, but especially about Indian food for that reason.

• 23:55Dan Pashman?

  But so when you, when you make these changes to a dish to make it more accessible, have there ever been times in your work that you had misgivings about it? Where you feel like, you're, you're, you feel like, maybe I'm moving this too far away from what is, and I use in air quotes, authentic?

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Well, it's not authentic. I would be the first person to say that it isn't. I'm also not a fan of tandoori chicken pizza, you know, like because I, you know, I spent my twenties in Italy. That's like, you know, blasphemous to me. But for me, it was always coming from the point of view, I guess, you know, I'm a good cook and I love to cook all kinds of things when my friends and family come over. And as a food writer, I'm looking at what would be interesting rather than writing another cookbook and teaching you how to make carbonara or, or, you know, vindaloo, which by the way, nobody actually calls it vindaloo in India. But, um, you know, like for me, I'm coming at the point of view where what do I want to eat? I have a very specific point of view and it's very idiosyncratic and I am my best

• 24:59Speaker 02

  customer. So I'm often creating things that I just want to eat at midnight. And then if they work, I serve them to my friends. And if they like them, then I write them, I write the recipe down. And, and, you know, so it starts like that. And often it comes from a place of longing. It comes from a place of wanting to feel closer to home.

• 25:20Dan Pashman?

  I want to segue a little bit, talk a little bit about body image and femininity, which you talk about so eloquently in your book. I know you write in your memoir, since I can remember, people have asked me the same question, how do I eat so much and stay slim? The answer is simple, a lot of hard work. Much of the work is physical, some of it mental, all of it involving vast amounts of willpower and discipline I don't always have.

• 25:42Dan Pashman?

  I'm curious to know, where do you think that willpower and discipline to stay slim come from?

• 25:47Speaker 02

  My vanity. You know, I think it's as simple as that. I think I have enjoyed a successful career in front of the camera as a model. I think it was easy to eat whatever the heck I wanted when I was 20 or even almost 30. You know, Mother Nature is a very good equalizer. At the same time that my metabolism was changing, my diet was completely, exponentially much richer because of doing the show. And I consume like 7,000 or 8,000 calories a day.

• 26:19Dan Pashman?

  Oh, my god.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it's fun for the first, you know, 20 minutes, and then it's not fun.

• 26:25Dan Pashman?

  Top Chef is fun for the first 4,000 calories a day.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. Especially the first half of the season, when there are that many more chefs who have not yet been eliminated. They don't care about my waistline, right? They want to make it as juicy and succulent and luxurious as they can. And I don't blame them. You know, they want to win, and I would too. So it is very hard to keep my figure. I am, I am still a woman on television. It is still a visual medium. It is still entertainment. You know, I'm not under a chef's coat in the back of a, you know, restaurant kitchen.

• 26:59Dan Pashman?

  Is there any part of you that resents having to look a certain way as part of your job on television?

• 27:09Speaker 02

  I don't resent it because I would be disingenuous if I didn't, if I didn't acknowledge the fact that I also am on TV, probably because of my physical likeness as well. You know, I'm self-aware enough to know that I've probably had advantages because of that. But I do think, you know, because Bravo had so much success with our sister show, Project Runway, and they had a model helming that, which made sense, because, you know, she knew about fashion and whatever, that because I had also modeled, they figured, oh, Bravo's just taking another model and, you know, put her in the template with food.

• 27:48Dan Pashman?

  Right, just a pretty face.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Right. So it took a long time for me to gain the acceptance, either empirically or in my mind, from an audience that was or wasn't judging me, and also just feel that I had a place at that table, at that judge's table. And, you know, somewhere along the line, I just realized that I don't have to be a chef to know what good food is. You know, when people say, oh, what does a model know about food? Or what is, you know, all that. My career in modeling honed my skill as a food writer. Because I was, the one thing that any seasoned chef will tell you is travel. And just eat your way through the world. And see how other people live. See what grows on the other side of the planet.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  You know, see how other people peel potatoes, you know, versus the way we do it at home.

• 28:36Dan Pashman?

  You say you've always associated food and cooking with womanhood and femininity. Can you elaborate on that?

• 28:42Speaker 02

  There was a definite hierarchy in the kitchen, in my grandmother's kitchen, like there is in most professional French kitchens. You know, she is certainly the chef. And she has her lieutenants or sous chefs. And then they have their comies. And then the comies have me, which, you know, I'm running to the store 15 times to get, you know, the knob of ginger that they forgot or whatever. And you were only allowed to do certain things in the kitchen when you had matured. You know, first I could only break the ends off beans. Then I got to peel potatoes. Then I actually got to measure out the spices. But I was not allowed to touch the chili or any of the spices until I was probably like 10 or something.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  And then, you know, about the time when you went through puberty and started wearing a half sari. See, in traditional South Indian culture, you know it's when a girl has matured because they're asked to dress differently. They wear a half sari, which is a long maxi skirt with a veil that's wrapped around and thrown over one shoulder, rather than a full sari. But, um, so you got to make, you know, you got to finally stand by the stove and make the dosas or the rice crepes. Then, you know, at a certain age, when they started to look, not even when you went to college, when they started to look for your groom, that's when they gave you the secret recipe for the sambar powder. You know, and every, every household had its own unique recipe for, the sambar powder's a spice blend.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  It's a South Indian spice blend that's used in all kinds of sauteed curries, as well as lentil soups. So that's why I think I associated food with femininity. You know, it's like a little girl who always wants to grow up and wear makeup. You know, when can I wear lipstick? When can I wear your heels? For me, it was like, when can I be at the stove? When can I hold the ladle? When do I get to stir the sambar?

• 30:49Dan Pashman?

  That's Padma Lakshmi. Her memoir is called Love, Loss, and What We Ate. It came out earlier this year. And she has another new book that just came out this fall. It's called The Encyclopedia of Spices and Herbs: An Essential Guide to the Flavors of the World. This show is a production of WNYC Studios and The Sporkful. It's produced by Shoshana Gold, Anne Sanni, and me. Editing help from Dan Charles. Music help from Black Label Music. Special thanks to Paula Schuman. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  And I'm Dylan James from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

• 31:19Speaker 07

  And I'm Amanda from Binghamton, New York.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  And this is Cedric Ching from Melbourne, Florida, reminding you to eat more.

• 31:25Speaker 07

  Eat better.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  And eat more better.

• 31:47Dan Pashman?

  This reheat was produced by

• 31:48Speaker 07

  Gianna Palmer.

• 31:50Dan Pashman?

  The team that produces The Sporkful today includes me, along with managing producer

• 31:53Speaker 07

  Emma Morgenstern.

• 31:54Dan Pashman?

  And senior producer Andres O'Hara. Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcasts. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app, all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 32:40Speaker 04

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• 33:23Speaker 04

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