My cousin's wedding, September, two hundred and ten guests, and one cauldron of plov standing over the fire in the yard at half past ten in the morning.
There were four men round that fire. This is the whole problem in one sentence.
Ravshan aka had put the salt in at nine. Then my uncle came out, looked at the rice, and put in some more, because he has been putting salt in that cauldron since 1998 and nobody told him not to. Then a neighbour arrived with the meat and added a lot of salt "for the meat". Then a fourth man, who I still cannot identify, went past with a ladle.
Nobody asked any questions, because in a wedding yard everybody thinks somebody else knows.
At eleven Ravshan aka tasted it and went completely quiet, which frightened everybody much more than shouting.
There was too much salt in twelve kilos of rice. There was no time to start again — the guests were coming at one — and there wasn't any rice left in the house, and the shop at the corner had plenty of sugar and not many other things on a Sunday.
My grandmother came out with her sleeves already up and asked one question: "How many of you put salt in?"
Four hands went up, slowly, in the way that men's hands go up when they are about to be told something by a woman of seventy-nine.
"Too many cooks," she said. "Bring me six potatoes, a lot of water and the big cloth."
She cut the potatoes in half, buried them in the rice, put the wet cloth over the top and made everybody leave the fire alone for forty minutes. Potatoes take up salt. It is not magic and it does not fix everything, and it fixed enough of that plov.
Two hundred and ten people ate it. Eleven of them said it was the best plov they had eaten that year, which tells you something about weddings.
There is a rule in our yard now, and my grandmother says it before every big cooking day, the same six words: one pot, one hand, no helpers. The four men still argue about who put in the third lot of salt, and none of them has ever admitted anything.