ghazi52
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A woman from colonial-era Hyderabad, her descendants in present-day Karachi and a biryani recipe
The food passed down from Bari Nano continued to nourish us and be a source of joy, but her legacy is far more than that.
SANIYA KAMAL
It is a late January afternoon, breezy and comfortable. Karachi is passing through its transient phase of pleasant weather before summer heat barges in unannounced any week. It is a good day to attempt impossible things.
Mama and I are sitting together, slightly out of sync. I have just begun lunch while she is ahead of me, her plate licked clean and pushed aside to make room for a notebook and pen. She adjusts the reading glasses perched at the tip of her nose and scrolls through the contact list on her phone.
J-K-L…M. Mona mobile (India).
Mona khala is mama’s distant cousin and the closest source we have for a lost recipe.
Nano stopped making kachay gosht ki biryani a long time ago. For decades, it remained suspended in memory and acquired a legendary status. Wah! They would say swaying with their hands to their chest, aisi biryani hoti thi ke hum kya bataein.
But none of the khalas have ever tried making it themselves. Perhaps they thought this was a memory best left ornamental, that being tainted by reality would be too big a loss. Or perhaps they felt it was too towering a challenge, that as the legend around it grew it became impossible to match.
Regardless, I’ve recruited mama to my cause and together we’re working to retrieve it from the past where it’s stuck. Mama opens the Whatsapp chat for Mona khala and sends a cautious 'hello'. We wait.
I look at my plate: five plump hari mirchain slathered in a heap of golden brown masala sitting on top of plain white rice. A large glass of chilled water is on standby near me, ready to put out inevitable fires.
It is the fear of this threat from mirchain that elicits widened eyes and confused looks from guests whenever we serve mirchon ka salan at dawats.
“We can eat the hari mirch?”
They are right to fear hari mirchain. They were never meant to be eaten. Capsaicin, the chemical compound responsible for the mirch’s spiciness, acts on heat (and not gustatory) receptors in the mouth.
Spiciness is not a taste but an infliction of pain, a defence mechanism meant to protect the plant from being eaten by the wrong animal. Those that felt the pain would be deterred, or so the wisdom may have been.
As we rise to meet the challenge mirchon ka salan presents, in the span of a few bites curiosity gives way to surprise, then enjoyment. We are deepened by the experience, by what it says about the necessary abrasiveness of survival.
The human love for chillies says otherwise.
We are simultaneously stung and captivated by them. This apparent contradiction is resolved by the partial neutralization of chillies in our cooking; they are sliced, chopped, mashed, crushed, or simply put in proximity to food to have their spiciness extracted but cordoned off. Unlike this peripheral role, in mirchon ka salan they are not around the food. They are the food.
Seemingly fixed culinary rules that would presume to dictate what a mirch can and can not be (inedible accessory — yes, main dish — no) evaporate away with the steam and sizzle of the meal. The mirchain become edible as they distribute the spiciness concentrated in them to the masala all around. The confinement of the cutting and chopping is answered with complete expansion. This distribution in space becomes a distribution in time and slowly builds up in the mouth in an audaciously spicy crescendo.
As we rise to meet the challenge mirchon ka salan presents, in the span of a few bites curiosity gives way to surprise, then enjoyment. We are deepened by the experience, by what it says about the necessary abrasiveness of survival.
Metamorphosis of the thing cooked and its eater has been at the root of cooking since we first put food to fire. It is widely theorized that the emergence of cooked food was pivotal in shaping human evolution: more energy released from food meant our brains became bigger; the switch from raw, hard food to cooked, softer food moulded our teeth, jaws, and digestive tracts; and our patterns of food consumption diversified from individualistic to more communal.
We made cooked food and cooked food made us. Our present-day encounters with unexpected foods — an unfamiliar ingredient, an inspired combination, a different cooking technique, or (as in the case of mirchon ka salan) a role reversal — encounters that expand our understanding of the possible, contain traces of that ancient evolutionary dialogue, that symbiotic growth and transformation.
***
The food passed down from Bari Nano continued to nourish us and be a source of joy, but her legacy is far more than that.
SANIYA KAMAL
It is a late January afternoon, breezy and comfortable. Karachi is passing through its transient phase of pleasant weather before summer heat barges in unannounced any week. It is a good day to attempt impossible things.
Mama and I are sitting together, slightly out of sync. I have just begun lunch while she is ahead of me, her plate licked clean and pushed aside to make room for a notebook and pen. She adjusts the reading glasses perched at the tip of her nose and scrolls through the contact list on her phone.
J-K-L…M. Mona mobile (India).
Mona khala is mama’s distant cousin and the closest source we have for a lost recipe.
Nano stopped making kachay gosht ki biryani a long time ago. For decades, it remained suspended in memory and acquired a legendary status. Wah! They would say swaying with their hands to their chest, aisi biryani hoti thi ke hum kya bataein.
But none of the khalas have ever tried making it themselves. Perhaps they thought this was a memory best left ornamental, that being tainted by reality would be too big a loss. Or perhaps they felt it was too towering a challenge, that as the legend around it grew it became impossible to match.
Regardless, I’ve recruited mama to my cause and together we’re working to retrieve it from the past where it’s stuck. Mama opens the Whatsapp chat for Mona khala and sends a cautious 'hello'. We wait.
I look at my plate: five plump hari mirchain slathered in a heap of golden brown masala sitting on top of plain white rice. A large glass of chilled water is on standby near me, ready to put out inevitable fires.
It is the fear of this threat from mirchain that elicits widened eyes and confused looks from guests whenever we serve mirchon ka salan at dawats.
“We can eat the hari mirch?”
They are right to fear hari mirchain. They were never meant to be eaten. Capsaicin, the chemical compound responsible for the mirch’s spiciness, acts on heat (and not gustatory) receptors in the mouth.
Spiciness is not a taste but an infliction of pain, a defence mechanism meant to protect the plant from being eaten by the wrong animal. Those that felt the pain would be deterred, or so the wisdom may have been.
As we rise to meet the challenge mirchon ka salan presents, in the span of a few bites curiosity gives way to surprise, then enjoyment. We are deepened by the experience, by what it says about the necessary abrasiveness of survival.
The human love for chillies says otherwise.
We are simultaneously stung and captivated by them. This apparent contradiction is resolved by the partial neutralization of chillies in our cooking; they are sliced, chopped, mashed, crushed, or simply put in proximity to food to have their spiciness extracted but cordoned off. Unlike this peripheral role, in mirchon ka salan they are not around the food. They are the food.
Seemingly fixed culinary rules that would presume to dictate what a mirch can and can not be (inedible accessory — yes, main dish — no) evaporate away with the steam and sizzle of the meal. The mirchain become edible as they distribute the spiciness concentrated in them to the masala all around. The confinement of the cutting and chopping is answered with complete expansion. This distribution in space becomes a distribution in time and slowly builds up in the mouth in an audaciously spicy crescendo.
As we rise to meet the challenge mirchon ka salan presents, in the span of a few bites curiosity gives way to surprise, then enjoyment. We are deepened by the experience, by what it says about the necessary abrasiveness of survival.
Metamorphosis of the thing cooked and its eater has been at the root of cooking since we first put food to fire. It is widely theorized that the emergence of cooked food was pivotal in shaping human evolution: more energy released from food meant our brains became bigger; the switch from raw, hard food to cooked, softer food moulded our teeth, jaws, and digestive tracts; and our patterns of food consumption diversified from individualistic to more communal.
We made cooked food and cooked food made us. Our present-day encounters with unexpected foods — an unfamiliar ingredient, an inspired combination, a different cooking technique, or (as in the case of mirchon ka salan) a role reversal — encounters that expand our understanding of the possible, contain traces of that ancient evolutionary dialogue, that symbiotic growth and transformation.
***
