AUTHOR’S NOTE

back in the day, dear reader it would be more accurate to say, that recipes had to be reconstructed from memory, and these were memories of having followed or watched the dish being prepared, or a memory of being told the steps, or, as it so happens with me, a memory as clear as day, vivid and almost like a dream, of the taste of something, and sometimes old photographs, or notes, books long tattered and eaten away by moths, a speculative document of re-invented and untested, an embodiment of collective food knowledge that calls not for blind following but encourages to re-create, as it perhaps does with you too dear reader, and also the foggy sensation of what needs to be done when your hands are moving and cutting and stirring in the kitchen.

recipes, in essence, act as artefacts to recall the physical and sensual memories, and the unconscious motor-driven movements of the hand to chop the onions a certain way, and the fusion of interpreted tastes and textures with multi-generations of knowledge infused, and recipes can be viewed as tools, perhaps, as defined by heidegger, who forever saw the action of using tools as an affirmation of their innate nature, each use and re-use, creation and re-creation, edit and re-edit of a recipe further created and then reaffirmed itself.

or it would perhaps be more accurate to say that the recipes would be reinvented altogether, all be constructed by hand, yes, i will use the word constructed, but also i think, dear reader, recipes as any other design of any other thing is designed and concocted and created and made?

ah the labour of it!

but i dearly enjoy it, dear reader, the laborious act of cooking, the steps and rituals, how the taste transforms at each, evolves, and you never know how a dish will turn out, and it excites me so, that if you follow a set of steps or your instinct or change the steps when something within you tells you that it should be done this way and not that, depending on what your process is, and you hope for the best, and the success of the result is only truly possible to know at the very end, as it is a procedure that could lend a dish, as such, the character of an artwork, with many different voices coming together, the aptest example of which, as i keep repeating myself here, is my Greatest Biryani. 

the wilful, in today’s time, corresponds with the basic skepticism that exists in the kitchen of the subcontinent, the sheer pragmatics of performing the various acts in exactly the right way, my grandmother would say, but well, not exactly but that is what she would mean, and not of the act needed at the moment but the act itself, as you cut the onions thin enough so they caramelize perfectly well in the first step of all south asian curries, and tears in the eyes mean you aren’t strong enough for the kitchen, but the onions do not affect me anymore, dear child, she would say, and someday they will not affect you either, but years later, dear reader, i still cry like a baby while cutting onions, more so with the red kind than the yellow, and this act of identification can be understood, from the subcontinental perspective as identifying and designating acts that are an essential part of the traditional process of creating the dish.

ah, the men await it at the table, hurry up won’t you, i would sometimes hear, and would, as a child, get a visual of cavemen with stone axes and hammers, fists banging on the table, waiting for the bird they hunted to be cooked and steamed and presented before them, and i still get the visual every time, till date, and to think that the men just a generation before me were still banging fists on the table waiting for food, because my maternal grandfather was very picky indeed about his biryani, and also, his qorma and his nihari, but those two, he would still like to eat outside at kiosks with his friends, but biryani was evidently the most crucial, and my uncle, my mother’s eldest brother, still seems to think he is of that generation and even after living in the west for years on his own, gaining a phd and lecturing in universities across the globe, he still makes the women, mainly his mother and his sisters, tremble (with anxiety or excitement, i fail to gather) when he comes down the stairs for dinner — especially when it is the day of the biryani.

when i go back to these memories of food and the biryani, i understand more clearly now why i look at food as a disrupter, food as a communicator, food as an object, and sometimes, i lose track of what, in my memories, is real and unreal, and my childhood, you see, was primarily spent in the various kitchens of my household and those of my extended families, most times — preparing, creating, and eating humungous potfuls of biryani, for religious events, for political statements, and for celebratory or mourning days, prepared over charcoal in big earthen cauldron pots in the backyard, and my maternal grandmother, originally from agra in india, now at least touching eighty although she gives me a different year of birth every time i ask her, still sits next to it as the leader of a tribe, and hunches over as she gazes deep inside to gather insights on its development, and fathoms next steps, and she, i can confidently say, makes the best biryani i have ever had, dear reader, anything she creates is pure magic, her hands are magic, and as she goes in and with no scale of measurement juggles spices and spoons and massive cauldrons, sprinkling and mixing and jostling, and her biryani is a golden glory of such perfection, so much so that you cannot identify what was in it except exactly everything that was needed, and till date for her biryani, she grinds almonds with home-grown ginger and garlic to make a smooth paste with her own hands in a grinding stone, of which she has many varieties, such as my favourite which is the regular round bowl-like mortar and pestle you can find in the market today, but also an older version that she asked her sister, who stayed back in india during the great partition and still resides there, to send her and it is a flat surface for the ingredients, and a cylindrical stone that is rolled back and forth on it to grind the spices to your desired consistency, and the masalas she grinds by hand are unique, chastely and earthy, mostly sourced from old contacts in the old city that have been selling the best spices for generations, even before the partition, and the curd she uses for her biryani is home-made in a special dark grey cured stone pot, with a beautiful granite-like stone pattern, that keeps the curd from turning sour too quickly even in the scorching heat, and it is almost always served in her as-old-as-time hand-hammered copper dish with twin embossed brass handles, with an extra garnish of (also home-grown) coriander and mint leaves, and as you can tell, dear reader, my maternal side is very particular when it comes to food and their backyard of homegrown vegetables, herbs and some spices, but they especially do not joke about their biryani.

and you know, dear reader, i love her because she is the smartest woman i know, and she is also not an institutionally educated woman, but she learned how to read herself, and is an excellent narrator of stories, fiction and non-fiction alike, but she still does not feel comfortable writing, and that is why she never jotted down a recipe, and when i would ask her to, for me, she would say, ’araey, bas dekhlou aur seekhjao, yehi asli tareeqa hota hai’ (come on, it is just done like this, look at me and you will learn).

i do agree, sort of, it is learning-by-doing, the design process dictates, does it not?

she had some recipe books in urdu in her time, but they are now completely tattered and worn out, and she can also read and understand persian, and punjabi and arabic and some sindhi and bits of pashtu, influence of all of which are in my language urdu, but i remember going through the recipe books with her as a child, whenever we would visit pakistan, she had them in a drawer next to the stove, and the margins of countless recipes showed critical commentaries or poetic comments as mostly visuals from generations of women, and sometimes, dear reader, those margins, even though they were more figurative than descriptive, as the women of generations before her were mostly uneducated, they would tell you more than the pages of the book, i would say, just like the tips i will give you in the next part with my speculative recipe, that comes from generation worth of hints and learning by seeing that do not come from any one recipe or from particular recipes, but from everything and anything.

another great biryani, that i have learned much from, is the one from my paternal grandmother, the longest ruling female power of that household and an almost systematically thorough terror for the young women and men alike, and my paternal side, dear reader, always had more powerful and assertive women, while my maternal side was more about the loudness of the men, and the playful directions of the women, but still, it seems to still be that way, sadly, but it’s fascinating to observe, dear reader, and as she would often talk about the other side of the border and her memories of india, such as the biryani her mother would make with saffron infused milk, and another one their tamil neighbours would send over a plate of, the malabar or thalassery biryani, with bone marrow meat, coconut milk, some malabar spices and a dash of rose water or kewra water, and she was, as you can tell, dear reader, a strong and stubborn and smart woman, who had the excellent memory of an cheetah that could navigate through complex environments and changing conditions, and learn survival at each step, and this was mostly due to living with her quite hardy mother-in-law for a few years, i would suppose, but she decided to maintain that hold over the generation that came after.

she was also, oddly dear reader, an avid collector of green and red chillies from across the country that she would dry and keep in a cabinet by her bedside, and she inscribed almost every single one of the chillies in her collection, and the first time i saw them i was shocked and a little scared and i thought it was some sort of magic that required chillies, because dry they would, so magically, and to the horror of the other members of the household, but to my delight, every piece, including the one drying in the further most corner of the cabinet, was scrawled with a historical date and a commentary, for example, this chilli ’is so powerful, it can be used just on its own to have an impact’ or ’was commodified from the rare fields of a landlord in the village of dhakkan and i shall use it when i want to experience dhakkan in my food’.

but chillies and odd eccentricities aside, she made glorious biryani too, even though, dear reader, my paternal side was a bit light on the spices mostly because of upset stomachs that were genetic, and the traditional routines of working hard in the kitchen, you see, because my grandmother had much else to do, such as keep an eye on the street, her bahuein (daughters-in-law), her daughters household, the neighbours household, the neighbourhood servants and most importantly, on her husband, and so her version of the biryani was more subtle than my maternal counterparts, with a milder and lighter spice profile, and more like rice cooked in the broth of a curry, but equally delicious, dear reader, equally delicious, ah, all variants of the biryani are delicious, and how can they not be!

the duchampian act never intends to be something modest and mechanical, as it is not just about breaking the dominant patterns of cooking, maybe that it is about re-using, re-understanding, and re-defining, and it has little to do with such banalities as the demonstration of the exact method of cutting red-onions or tomatoes or chillies, or when exactly to add which spices during the cooking process, or the commodity character of the potatoes, or the relative intensity of the tears that the onions entice, and reflections like these have more to do with the fallout of the act, which is how well enough was something done, infusing things and acts and ingredients with a life of their own is much more radical,and forces both the mind and senses into a belief and activity entirely beyond their control, triggering a moment of fear, of almost agitation, the loss of self, and the confusion, and realization of skin colour, the positioning of status, the reality of gender, and then back to the profound, strange ingredients presence, which is all to blame, partly, and the rest is up to, as the chef, the artist, the designer, the woman of the household, the daughter equipped with responsibility to feed, the man who cooks well, whatever you may call it, all equal partners in the game, and all of which at some points reminds me of my Greatest Biryani as i closely analyse the future turning into the present, or is it the other way around, through a pre-emption of my fears and anxieties and conceptions of joys and ecstasies to a harmonious past that, i do not know, is real or not.

my mother would cook biryani every saturday, i remember dear reader, because friday, which is usually biryani day in most islamic households for no real apparent religious reason but more the kind of unbeknowst reasons that become a part of a society and cannot be distinguished as religious or not, but as i was saying dear reader, friday was machli ka saalan (Fish curry with boiled rice) day in mine, and so every saturday was the biryani, slow cooked from the very morning, simmering and sweltering, cutting and gathering, the aromas of cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, mace, nutmeg and cumin overtaking the entire apartment, and it would cook over a slow flame, with the rice, light and fragrant, each grain separate from the other, meat tender and comforting, the potatoes soft and succulent, allowing it to melt together, and as did we all, when we took its first bite over the dinner table, and we would often have guests staying over, such as the son of the neighbour looking for a job in dubai, the brother of the friend of the brother passing by dubai, the daughter of the son of the sister here to visit the husband who shares a co-living space and so on, and so our dining table could be extended to accommodate over 20 people, and more would spread out on the floor or sit on the sofas with plates in their laps, and we who would all sit together, and we would forget about all our financial and social and personal woes as we gorged on the delightful saturday biryani.

but back to my recipe for the Greatest Biryani, dear reader, by holding the act of cooking to the same standards as i set to the element of play in life, and treating recipes as not the holy book-status cultural touchstones but as the more revokable and flexible clay that can be moulded and rediscovered, and reading into history as the expert on the what-how-why, and the dream to demonstrate the dish as (un)common as a biryani as not identical with itself, and i would like to help redefine the act of cooking, but head ahead, dear reader, and read carefully because i will reveal generations worth of tips and tricks and recipe steps, and to follow or unfollow is up to you and i do not dictate anything but only want to share, in the next part, the performative steps towards the creation of the Greatest Biryani.

‘There are a hundred different ways of breaking an egg,’

said my mother to me, with a fervent bizarreness,

‘let me show you, but wait first see,’

she tacitly explained,

‘you grasp the bottle, chuck some salt in your palm and

sprinkle it around the pan, like this’

while some specks tumbled everywhere else but

the pan. Her unconventional Turmeric Rice with Blueberries,

like every other object and performance,

existed somewhere

between reality and her natural state of fantasy.

- me