Desserts

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 …

The first time I tasted the sweet behind this double ka meetha recipe, I was nineteen and wearing a borrowed sherwani at a Hyderabadi wedding in Karachi. The biryani had been demolished, the qorma bowls were empty, and I assumed the food was finished — then the waiters carried out wide, shallow dishes of something …

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 …

There is a mithai shop on Burns Road in Karachi where the pedas are shaped by hand behind the glass, and as a child I was convinced the man doing it was performing a magic trick. A lump of milk dough would roll through his fingers and come out as a perfect disc, pressed with …

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 …

In our house, mango season was never announced by a calendar — it was announced by a crate. My father would come home in June with a wooden peti of chaunsa packed in straw, and for two days the whole house smelled like a orchard had moved in. We ate the firm ones sliced, cheek …