Culinary Journeys with Indian Cuisine
Packing for a trip to London in late November 2016, I tucked along some recipes to share with our niece Kashya who was hosting a multi-generational gathering of Salters from Missouri and Madrid. Born in Pakistan in 1961, Kashya loves reconnecting with her culinary roots when cooking in her kitchen in the London borough of Chiswick. One of the recipes was her sister Faerial’s Pakistani Chicken recipe—one Kashya was eager to prepare again.
Decades ago, Kit and I visited his sister Kate—Faerial and Kashya’s mother—in Hamden, CT. I recall rooms filled with pictures taken with Kate’s Leica camera recording scenes from her years in Pakistan in the 1950s and 60s. Family pictures in lovely bejeweled frames filled surfaces throughout the house, along with teacups and saucers that were part of her daily early morning and afternoon tea rituals.
One evening, Faerial prepared a chicken dish with spices that instantly took me halfway around the world. Watching her as she marinated this, browned that, and assembled a rich masala of traditional Indian spices in which the chicken would simmer, I took notes and asked her to guestimate amounts each time she added another spice to the pot. It was, I realized, a Mahmood family recipe from her childhood—one she’d recorded before leaving Pakistan as a teenager. Now she was recreating it for her uncle and auntie in her American mother’s Connecticut kitchen.
Once you’ve inhaled and been warmed by the aromatic spices of the Indian subcontinent, the experience stays with you forever. Thus, it was a joy for me to spend an afternoon while in London cooking with Kashya as her beloved sister Faerial watched our every move in spirit. Before long, pungent fragrances simmering in a pot melted away time and distance, taking us on a culinary journey that connected us through tastes, aromas, and the power of memory to the kitchen of our nieces’ childhood home in Pakistan half a century earlier.
This week, I felt a powerful need to recreate Faerial’s recipe. After searching through old recipes that have survived our move from Missouri a year ago, I found my notes for Faerial’s Pakistani Chicken and was eager to recreate and savor again the tastes I experienced while cooking with Kashya in London. Chicken thighs (skinned) marinated much of the day in Greek yogurt, cloves of minced garlic, cayenne pepper, grated fresh ginger and a touch of salt. Later, when the meal was being prepared, the chicken is browned a few pieces at a time in butter and oil (or ghee if available).
At this time, a miraculous sauce gets going in a separate pan. Garlic cloves, grated onion, ginger, cloves, peppercorns, cardamom pods, cumin, ½ inch stick cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, cayenne, coriander, and Garam Masala are browned in butter or ghee. “Once nicely browned and cooked up,” I could hear Faerial say as if she were standing next to me, “I add water and the left-over marinade to make a nice sauce and put the cooked chicken in the pot. If there is a lot of good stuff left in the chicken browning pan, I put that in too and let it all simmer until it is tender and yummy.”
I also prepared Moog Dal—red lentils cooked with turmeric, fresh ginger, cumin seeds, and a dash of cayenne pepper—like a dish Kashya prepared in London. The recipe is one I borrowed from my Columbia friend Nina Mukerjee Furstenau who wrote Biting Through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America’s Heartland. Her award-winning memoir is a memoir about growing up in her mother’s Indian kitchen in Pittsburg, Kansas.
Should Nina have a trip to London in her future, I’ll recommend an extraordinary Indian restaurant near Hyde Park called La Porte des Indes—Indian cuisine as it is prepared in Pondichéry, a former French colony on the Indian subcontinent. Like Faerial’s treasured family recipe, London itself is a rich masala of culinary experiences that never fail to create memories.