About Nusrat Jaan

 Havana, Cuba, opposite Che Guevara’s house.

The Introduction to PPP sets out the background to this blog; scroll down under ‘July’ to the very first post to read my Introduction.

Just a few facts about me: I live in Highgate, North London and teach in central London.  Cooking came to me through my mother and her family who were originally from India and then migrated to Pakistan after independence.  Back in Karachi, where I grew up,  we lived in an extended family, with several generation occupying different parts of a large house that was segmented into living quarters so that we all had our own space too.  But our network of family didn’t end there!  Spread across the city were similar households, each one containing uncles, aunts, their children, grandparents, in-laws, unmarried siblings of uncles and aunts and even the odd unknown person whose position in the family we didn’t understand as children.

There were odd balls like an uncle who took siestas wearing an eye mask, which we then thought was weird; a bejewelled granny of a cousin, who wore bridal hair jewellery of jhumar and tikka and dressed in flowing Moghul gowns all year round. Then we had a string of eccentric visitors passing through the house, most interested in older cousins as future brides; we had a gentleman, very popular with the children, who brought baskets full of pineapples, or mangoes but all the time eyeing our beautiful older cousin with long flowing hair (she rejected him as a suitor because he had middle parting!); another not so young a man, claiming to be young, and pursing another older cousin suffered with nystagmus, his constant and rapid moving eye pupils fixated us naughty children to his jolly face!  We would all have belly full of laughter after these deluded men left and our older, pretty cousins gave their verdicts: “Not marrying him … did you see the way he ate the banana!” would be enough to banish some of these would be suitors to land of no return! Then we had living with us a sad, older, rejected first wife, who took to talking to herself; in fact, there were several first wives of various relatives lived alongside younger, more cuter wives. We were surrounded by a motley of the Good, Bad, and the Ugly crew of extended relatives plus hoard of visitors that visited them!

Our year was littered with religious events such as Ramadan, Eids, Muharram, various holy nights, engagements, weddings, birth related events; food was at the centre of all this. Given the extent of our family network, there was always an event to attend where food took an important place. Often, the food served was unique to the event: harleem in Muharram, sheer maal at weddings, biryani at Eid-ul-Fitr and grilled meat at Eid-ul-Adha, finger food at breaking of the fast in Ramadan, halwa and puri during holy nights when grown up stayed awake and so on.

When I left at eleven to come to Britain, all this was replaced by one continuous year with no sense of occasion for the important days as life revolved around school or work.  It must have been difficult for my mother to adjust to a way of life where all activity involving food was solitary: shopping, cooking and eating only with the immediate family. Back in Pakistan, we ate, sitting along a long ‘dastarkhan’, a long table cloth some 3 metres long, on which the food was laid out, and we ate with our parents, our siblings,  uncles, aunts, granny, cousins and anyone else that was in the house that day.

 

When I turned 15, I began to help my mother by doing menial task, such as fry onions, chopping coriander, peeling garlics and it was an ordeal because my mother was a perfectionist. She insisted on slicing onions so thin that they were transparent and you had to stand, watching carefully,  while the onions slowly fried to a golden brown over 45 minutes!  Straight forward jobs like preparing okra were made laborious as my mum implored that they be wiped gently, each one, with a not too wet cloth, rather than washed.  Shopping for food was similarly traumatic for me.  I remember trailing from shop to shop looking for perfect tomatoes, fresh coriander, bright, green chillies – surely, I would roll my eyes and think, they make no difference once cut and slung in the pot!

For a long time, I rejected cooking as a pleasurable activity, choosing instead Art to channel my creative energy.   And when I married a traditional Pakistan man, where cooking was central to marriage, I survived cooking a few basic meals and, for guests, secretly bought cooked food from a trusted local Indian restaurant!

Age teaches you to embrace things from the past that you once rejected, opening your eyes once again after you had them shut. Memories play a part too. My childhood home of intergenerational living with meals cooked by different aunts, cousins, my mum, cooking familiar and weird combo (goats feet, sheep brain) gradually began to revive my need to visit the food of my childhood again.  It could also be a way to reclaim part of my identity that got lost in the assimilation into mainstream Britain – a prerequisite for those back in 70s wanting success.  Back then, we all became ‘immigrants’ with limited choice of either be ‘ethnic’ and stay in lowly jobs or assimilate and prosper. Age gives you the confidence to break free from enforced shackles and be who you are. So I embraced cooking in later years and nothing gives me more pleasure. Each time I cook a recipe, I am reminded of something from my childhood home, a peepal tree that we sat under chewing tamarind, drinking crushed ice watermelon juice sitting in our veranda with ten other cousins or playing a prank such as cutting up a white soap into pieces and offering it as ‘burfi’ (Pakistani sweet) to wannabe cousin-in-law!   Walking around London’s food halls of large glamourous stores in Knightsbridge and Oxford Street is a favourite past-time after work, both for picking up tips on food presentation but also to get a free education on the many different varieties of an item.  Frequently, I get flashbacks of my time shopping with my mother, when it didn’t make sense to me, but could now see the pleasure to be had by just looking, admiring, learning and searching for the very best of ingredients even if it is just a bunch of fresh coriander. I could never settle for one that has been lying around, has lost its lustre, the leaves limping downwards;  no, I go on until I find one that is bright green with straight juicy stalks. Every shopping trip now feels like a homage to my wonderful mother.

http://www.nusratjaan@hotmail.co.uk