Indian festivals and the life cycles of old clothes
Indian festivals involve new clothes. Onam, which is today, will see Malayalis receiving new mundus and saris. What isn’t often appreciated is that new clothes mean more old ones, which in time will stop being worn entirely — and then possibly cut up and reused at home.
This may seem weird in these days of fast fashion, where nearly new clothes are jettisoned (hopefully ending up in ‘pre loved’ sales rather than the garbage dump). But old clothes were ideally suited for many kitchen tasks. Most obviously as dusters, but for culinary uses too like making paneer or hung curd, which needed fine thin cloth to drain away the whey.
This is so integral to cheese-making that cheesecloth is manufactured for this purpose. The Oxford Companion to Cheese notes that it is made “in a variety of thread counts, ranging from coarser weaves in the range of 60 threads per inch… to finer fabrics at 90 threads per inch”. Coarse cloth is used for harder cheeses, drained of more moisture, while finer fabrics retain more, for softer, creamier cheese.
Old clothes were also repurposed where their fabrics were most suited. Even knitted garments had a use, like the old sweater that, in north India, is kept to wrap around the dahi-making pot in winter, to keep the milk warm enough for yoghurt-making bacteria to do their work. But fine undyed cotton fabrics like those used in mundus or the plain white saris worn in Kerala had the most multipurpose uses.
Ammini Ramachandran, the Kerala born, US based food writer, sadly passed away
