Authentic Pakistani Recipes, Made Simple
The sound reached me before the plate did. I was standing in my own kitchen doorway, of all places, watching my younger brother slice into a chicken cutlet he had fried while I was out, and the knife made a noise I can only describe as gravel crunching under a shoe. He looked up, far …
The winter my friend Ruma got married in Karachi, her Bengali mother sent our house a steel tray of sweets she had made with her own hands, and in the middle of the tray sat a dozen little parcels folded like tiny purses, fried to a deep gold and each one pinned shut with a …
My first soya chaap recipe lesson happened standing up, in Delhi, with traffic honking behind me. I was in the city for a cousin’s wedding, and the evening before the mehndi a friend dragged our group to a cramped stall near the metro station, promising me “the chicken tikka that isn’t chicken.” What came off …
The first time a proper chicken teriyaki recipe mattered to me, I was not in Tokyo or anywhere near it. I was in a small Japanese restaurant off Boat Basin in Karachi, the kind of place with six tables and a chef who worked an open grill like he was conducting something. My cousin had …
Arbi never arrived at our house with any ceremony. It came in a string bag from the sabzi wala, dusty and hairy and honestly a little ugly, and my grandmother would tip the whole lot into a steel basin of water. As a child I could not understand the fuss adults made over it — …
The first time this hariyali chicken recipe stopped me in my tracks, the monsoon had just broken over Lahore and everything on our street had turned the colour of wet moss. My uncle had set up his little coal grill under a tin awning, rain hammering above us, and he pulled off a skewer of …
Outside my school in Karachi there was a man with a wooden cart, a block of ice the size of a suitcase, and a hand-cranked shaver that sang against the ice all afternoon. We spent our pocket money on his gola ganda — rainbow ice drowned in syrups the colour of traffic lights. It was …
The bhindi in our house was bought by my father, and it was bought like a man inspecting gemstones. Every Sunday at the sabzi mandi he would pick up each okra pod, bend the tip, and listen for the snap — if it bent without breaking, back it went, and the vendor would sigh the …
The first time I met the dish behind this general tso’s chicken recipe, I was sixteen and far more interested in the general than the chicken. A school friend’s father had taken a carload of us to a Chinese restaurant on Tariq Road in Karachi to celebrate exam results, and there it was on the …