Desserts

The first true sign of winter in our house was never the fog or the sweaters coming down from the trunk. It was a round steel dabba on the shelf above my grandmother’s stove, filled to the brim with pinnis from one long, patient afternoon. Every morning she lifted the lid, took out one, and …

My peanut chikki recipe starts with a sound I have loved since childhood: the crack of a brittle slab being broken at a railway station stall, loud enough to hear over the announcements. On long journeys, my father would buy chikki wrapped in old newspaper — sheet after sheet of it, amber and shining — …

The first time I had a proper kunafa, I was not in Nablus or Beirut — I was standing at a crowded counter on Karachi’s Boat Basin food street, watching a man work a huge round tray over a burner like he was conducting an orchestra. He flipped the whole thing onto a second tray …

The first time I understood what a real milk cake recipe demands, I was standing in a mithai shop in Alwar with a piece of palang tod melting on my tongue. It was grainy — properly grainy, in a way that made each bite feel like a hundred tiny, milky pearls — and the middle …

In our house, you could smell a besan barfi recipe before you ever saw it. The moment my mother set besan to roast in ghee, that warm, nutty perfume drifted out of the kitchen and down the hall, and my brothers and I would materialise like cats. She never bought besan barfi from the halwai …

The pista ice cream recipe I spent years chasing comes from a tiny parlour near Burns Road in Karachi, the kind of place with marble-topped tables and a freezer drum that hissed every time the lid lifted. My grandfather took me there on Sunday evenings, and I would stand on tiptoe to watch the man …

The first time I tasted a proper moong dal halwa, it was at a winter wedding in Jaipur, served warm in a little leaf bowl while the dhol was still going somewhere behind us. I remember standing there in my good shoes, ignoring the dance floor, trying to work out how a bowl of plain …

In my grandmother’s house, winter announced itself with a sound: sesame seeds crackling in a dry karahi, popping like tiny firecrackers while she stood over the stove. All through the cold months she kept a dented tin of til ladoos beside the stove — one with her morning chai, one pressed into my palm before …

The first time I ordered a mastani, I honestly did not know what I was asking for. I was in Pune on a tar-melting May afternoon, and a colleague dragged me into a mastani house near Fergusson College Road saying only, “You cannot leave this city without one.” What arrived was not really a drink. …

The first time I bought apricots for this sweet, I was not in a kitchen at all. I was standing in a cramped dried-fruit shop near Charminar in Hyderabad, watching the old merchant scoop golden qubani from a burlap sack. He weighed out my kilo, tied the bag with string, and then — like it …