I spent time hanging around in Mrs. Asha Abraham’s kitchen in Kochi (formerly Cochin) in Kerala. She ran the guesthouse on Lily Street where we stayed, and she was a good cook. Because she and her husband had worked in the Gulf, they’d earned enough money to come back and open the guesthouse in Mr. Abraham’s family home. His widowed sister lived with them. The kitchen was equipped with a blender and several other labor-saving tools, as well as a traditional coconut scraper.