heating up food

The principal use of bread, unlike some western households, should not be sopping. There are no meat juices, runny eggs or olive oils on my plate that require an eatable towel to clear it. At our house, bread comes out toasty, gets buttered or turned into dahi toasts and bread pohas, and gets consumed while it is still hot.

Not until much later in life, sadly, did I realize I was pretty lucky to get hot prepared meals on my plate at least four days a week. My mother, likely influenced by her parents' sensibilities, actively discouraged us from eating cold or lukewarm food.

But it's clear to me, from people who weren't that lucky, that any positive physiological and psychological effects of food temperature are a product of experience. People will happily consume a lukewarm pizza napulitana because that's what they've grown up eating (notwithstanding, the people growing up eating pizza napulitana absolutely fuck).

So that's me now, imploring you to heat up that food that you ordered an hour ago or prepared midday. I'm confident that the additional ten minutes spent transferring the food out of white plastic containers, understanding how it's cooked and then applying that knowledge to heat it back up again will elevate the experience beyond the usual outside-food self-pity. You are now a better person because you systematically reheated your food before consumption, not because you avoided ordering it in the first place.

This table is a small starter kit to help you build an intuition for reheating. Foods that lose their fundamental textural quality in transit or foods that are initially deconstructed but served together should be avoided for delivery.

Happy eating.