As a child, I remember making an 'eeks-I'm-going-to-throw-up' face at the sight of cream or 'malai' in my glass of milk. I also remember my mother trying to use every bit of malai. She collected it in a bowl by skimming it from the top of cold milk, one or two teaspoons every day, till she had enough to make butter. She would then spend a precious evening making pure ghee from that butter. When she kneaded atta, she ran the dough through the empty milk vessel, to collect the cream stuck in it. If they could have afforded it, my parents and many more people of their generation would probably have bought and used full-cream milk; my parents often talked about the taste of curd made from that milk.
Today, my generation can afford full-cream milk. We can buy a whole pack of cream from the supermarket without a second thought. But, when we see malai or ghee, we think 'saturated fat' and 'high cholesterol'. We'd much rather buy olive oil, which is much more expensive than pure ghee or cream ever was.
To a generation that valued it, it was out of reach. To a generation that can reach it, it holds negative value. Makes me wonder whether value is the inverse of what money can buy.
