Was queen of hearts and flavours...

Rishabh Kochhar

With the world mourning the loss of former US President Bush, we almost forgot the demise of Karre Mastanamma, dubbed the world’s oldest celebrity chef at 107, from a village near Guntur in Andhra Pradesh. Popular for her simple, yet delicious recipes of egg plant curry, scrumptious concoctions of meat cooked in banana leaves, and more recently, chicken pizza, Mastanamma loved feeding people. It was on my last night in Hyderabad, before I left for Mumbai for two years, that I saw her video on YouTube and in that instant, all my failed plans of road trips across Andhra Pradesh and Telangana came back to haunt me. 

Mastanamma never found a mention in the few road trip suggestions in and around Hyderabad, but just one look at her video recipe of vermicelli upma left me in no doubt that I would have enjoyed visiting her more than the trips to vineyards and Matheran that I have planned for the future.

Mastanamma was a living legend, and rightly so. Married off at the tender age of 11, she had five children. Her husband passed away when she was just 22. She cried, worried about the family’s well-being, as her husband muttered some of his last words to her: ‘you’re clever, you’ll manage’. Mastanamma later lost four of her sons to cholera, but showed great resilience in the glowering face of adversity, toiling hard in paddy fields around Guntur to feed her huge family of daughters-in-law and grandchildren.

It was sheer chance by which a video of Mastanamma cooking egg plant curry, shot by her grandson and his friend, went viral on YouTube. The video crossed 75,000 views in a single day, as the world was enthralled by the simplicity with which the grand old centenarian prepared the delicious curry she is most known for. The fire burning in a makeshift stove of bricks, and Mastanamma sitting on her haunches in the wilderness, surrounded by coconut and banana trees, soon became her trademark, as the number of subscribers to her channel crossed 1.2 million. People remember her smiling face, radiating ebullience, as she would search for her dentures, often reprimanding her helpers with motherly strictness. 

She breathed her last, a few days ago, aged 107, months after her last son passed away. 

We often talk about age being just a number, but Mastanamma actually lived the maxim, and continued to experiment with food, with some of her wackiest dishes, including roasting a chicken in watermelon, emu eggs, and an egg dosa. With a fan base extending up to Japan, she continues to live on as a legend, with eulogies appearing in the New York Times and BBC. But the most heart-warming tribute came from her grandson on their channel, with a simple message:  ‘Miss you, Granny!’ 

Actor Rajesh Khanna would have been proud of her: she lived a life that was not only badi, but also lambi.