How roofs can shelter and support cooking

Goa’s monsoon season highlights the vital role of roofs, from sheltering homes and drying food like onion braids to providing space for community cooking. The article explores how these overhead structures, often overlooked, connect us to nature and tradition, influencing culinary practices and offering a unique perspective on daily life.

At the height of Goa’s summer, you see old ladies selling onions by the roadside. These are small, locally grown red onions, twisted into beautiful braids. They are more expensive than regular onions, but Goans say they are medicinal and worth the premium. I think it’s also a reminder of past times, when braids were hung from the kitchen roof, staying dry and good to use through the monsoon.

In urban apartment blocks, ceilings don’t matter unless the person above makes too much noise or their pipes leak. In a house, you realise how little separates you from the elements above. Roofs made from wood, thatch or tiles can seem almost alive, creaking and rustling. Sometimes they are literally alive, giving shelter to snakes, bats or civet cats.

Which is why, as the monsoon approaches, people in Goa obsess about fixing their roofs. Timing matters: Too early and monkeys dislodge the tiles, nullifying the work; too late and you risk a leaky roof during summer thunderstorms. Names are circulated (or guarded) of roofing specialists with a magic touch at getting tiles to fit just right. Tiles must be bought to replace broken ones, and handling them is a reminder of how earthenware like this can be used for cooking, too. Japan’s Kawara-soba is a dish said to have originated when soldiers, lacking cooking vessels, par-boiled buckwheat noodles and cooked them with meat on heated roof tiles, gaining an earthy taste.

When the tiles are removed for cleaning, the sudden sight of the sky is a reminder of how roofs have many values. Cooks across the world have hung foods, like those onion braids, from ceilings to keep them safe. Excess milk in India was made into dahi, and the pots were suspended till there was enough to churn into butter, which is recalled in Janmashtami’s human pyramids built to break a symbolic dahi-handi. “In old southern Ukrainian kitchens, you’ll see bunches of dill, red hot peppers and garlic hanging from the ceiling close to the oven to dry, as if they are some kind of aromatic lanterns,” writes Maria Kalenska in her sadly elegiac cookbook Cuisines of Odesa.

There is a reminder here that kitchen ventilation is tricky. Allowing too much exposure risks rain entering, but too little — and this has been the norm — and the ceiling fills up with heat and smoke. But this can be used to dry suspended meats, herbs, seeds or, in parts of northeast India, tea. Long before the British ‘discovered’ tea growing wild there, local tribes were plucking leaves and ramming them into bamboo tubes that were then suspended over kitchen hearths. This phalap tea was aged for years, developing a mellow, smoky flavour. Today, it’s being purpose-smoked, but with luck, you can still find hard-smoked cylinders of the old kind.

Roofs support as well as shelter. Flat roofs are used in Indian summers to dry grains, spices, discs of papad dough and fruits and vegetables to make into pickles. In Salil Tripathi’s book The Gujaratis: Portrait of a Community, he quotes Manisha Joshi’s poem ‘Athanu ane Andhkar’ (Pickle and Darkness) where “she is unable to sleep, she is thinking of the pickles, recalls the searing heat of the terrace when she walks barefoot, looking at mangoes being dried…” Roofs can grow crops, though in Sitopia, Carolyn Steel’s study of how food interacts with environments, she tempers some extravagant claims that have been made for rooftop farming. The sheer labour involved in moving earth and produce up and down is impractical without a freight elevator.

In Axone (2019), a film set in Delhi, roofs offer another kind of support. A group of young people from the Northeast, trying to find a place to cook a wedding feast, are constantly rebuffed by locals prejudiced against their ‘smelly’ food. Finally, they cook between the tanks and TV dishes on a rooftop, smoke and smells disappearing into Delhi’s summer sky.