Aatul Jain, group executive chef for Sodexo at Novartis in East Hanover, N.J., grew up in India, where his love of food grew from his daily responsibilities as a kid.
“Growing up in India I had a lot of early experiences with food. I was raised in a joint family, where many of my extended family members all lived in the same house. Food was the common bond—dinner was one big affair where we all got together.
I had the chore of picking cilantro leaves and red chilies every morning. We also went fishing for guavas and mangoes in a well in our backyard. When you shook the guava tree the fruit would fall and hit you in the head or fall in the well. During summer vacations we would go on mango binges where all of us kids sat on the floor with a basket of 30 or so ripe, tennis ball-sized mangoes set before each one of us. Thus began the slurping mess of biting into the fruit, making a mess of our clothes and the floor. Licking the juice from my elbow to palm was one of the best experiences of this exercise.
My favorite pastime became sitting on a stool next to the coal stove, just staring into the vessels and woks that spewed out magic. My cute sitting next to the stove soon developed into stirring the sauce and flipping the bread. My responsibilities had grown. This was more fun to me than playing outside.
The one story that sealed my culinary fate happened when I was a teenager. I decided to bake cashew cookies despite mom’s denied permission. So, as she left for the office, which was adjacent to our house, I decided to get to work using a recipe from our local newspaper. The cooking tired me so I decided to take a nap on the couch only to be jolted awake by my mom’s shriek. The smell of charred cashew and burned flour brought mom and some office employees running to the house who spread out looking for a fire. My mom found an oven chockfull of smoke, and that instantly led to the end of my nap.
My adventures in cooking didn’t end there. I was encouraged through high school by family and friends, with my culinary skills being benchmarked before the female cousins, who could care less about cooking. This led to persuading mom to allow me to attend hotel school—that was the only way I would formally experience more food.”