Nazneen Sheikh has lived among the kings and queens of Mughal food—in fact, they're family. Through tales of her Kashmiri relatives and the wonderful meals they have shared together, she brings alive the food-mad history and enduring culture of the Mughal people.
Pink tea served in a samovar by her grandmother, a gift of wild black mushrooms from her matinee-idol uncle, her aunt Khush's secret recipe for Kashmiri hareesa—the sight, smell and taste of these and other delicacies infuse Nazneen's memories of her childhood. From entertaining Pakistani cabinet ministers to feasting to end Ramadan and picnicking in the countryside, Tea and Pomegranates is a culinary delight.
In ten chapters, each accompanied by a rare and delicious Mughal recipe, Nazneen invites us to enjoy a banquet that starts at the break of day and ends at night. As captivating as a novel, this unique memoir takes the reader on a fascinating journey into a culture that never fails to celebrate the rich possibilities of food, life and love.
1
A Handful of Green Tea Leaves
Ah, Moon of my Delight, who know’st no wane,
The Moon of Heaven is rising once again
How oft hereafter rising shall she look
Through this same Garden after me—In vain!
—Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat
My grandmother poured the pink tea from the samovar into a cup. I watched the straight line of her black eyebrows crease as she shredded a spiral of gossamer-thin pastry into the tea. Flakes of gold bakarkhani danced on the surface then formed a mouth-watering lump at the bottom. I was ten years old, and this was my first exposure to a typical Kashmiri breakfast. This was also my first visit to my grandmother’s home, in a town called Rawalpindi in Pakistan.
She slid the cup toward me across the white tablecloth. As I blew on the surface, my grandmother’s kohl-rimmed eyes widened, and a smile tugged at her lips. She leaned forward and exhaled deeply over the cup, subtly reminding me to modify my exuberant breathing, while acknowledging that everything served at her table was boiling hot.
With my first sip, I felt as though I were being pummelled by a wave and accidentally swallowing seawater, but what lingered on my palate was curiously pleasant. My grandmother told me that the rose-coloured liquid had been flavoured with salt. As I sipped the tea and spooned up the drowned pastry at record speed, she poured another cup and handed me another pastry. She alerted me to the sound of pastry snapping, in her seamless fashion imparting a lesson in detecting freshness. I wondered if this was a breakfast made specially for me and hoped that it would replace the beige-coloured milk and Ovaltine I was used to drinking at tea time.
The dark green Kashmiri tea leaves resemble the oolong tea of China. As Kashmir borders China, it was assumed that the Silk Route merchants had imported this green tea, until 1773, when the British East India Trading Company found indigenous tea bushes in the hillsides of Darjeeling, Assam and Nilgri.
Kashmiri tea tastes unlike any other because of the way it is brewed. The leaves are brewed with milk, which softens the bite of tannin and tinges the liquid pale pink. The simmering milk also brings cream to the surface, soothing the palate and banishing any disagreeableness.
From my grandmother, I learned that the ratio of tea to water was critical, as was the quality of fresh milk that would give not the first, but the second cream. Any digression from the formula evoked a characteristic response from her. Rather than openly expressing disdain, she widened her eyes until grey light shot through her topaz-coloured irises, drawing back from the impostor tea with movements as stylized as those of a kabuki performer. This inability to accept lack of perfection hinted at her Mughal temperament—it was as though she had directly inherited the precision with which her ancestors laid out a geometric design or a blueprint for conquest.
My grandmother’s rejection of carelessly prepared food and drink was theatrically duplicated by three generations of my clan. To my grandmother, the desire to savour a well-prepared meal not only heightened the pleasure of anticipation, but also placed responsibility in the hands of the person cooking. Preparing and consuming food was a life-sustaining ritual that depended on more than mere ingredients, for there was also the emotional palette to consider. Respect, appreciation, consolation and even seduction sprang from what others would consider simply a meal.
That morning, with my parents, my brother, Shahid, and my elder sister, Mahjabin, yet to arrive at the table for breakfast, my grandmother sat attentively as I ate, making me feel that keeping me company was a pleasure for her. On the wall of the simple white-washed dining room, a portrait of my bearded and heavily jowled grandfather watched over us. This was the man whose personal mythology was so overwhelming that it threatened to overshadow the living presence of my grandmother. I almost expected him to jump out of the sepia-toned photograph and demand why kulchas, hard, round flour-and-soda biscuits studded with sesame seeds, had not been served with Kashmiri tea. My grandmother told me he was a purist at heart, yet she had served the more refined pastry to indulge me. I felt her indulgence was a sign of favour that was to be a special secret between us.
My grandmother sat at the table with a regal posture, like a queen who had stepped from the pages of a fairy tale. She was a slender woman with a sharp aquiline nose, high cheekbones, fine lips and multihued topaz eyes—pure Kashmiri features in which the Mongol and the Persian were entwined, while my grandfather had the dark flashing eyes, fleshy nose and sensual mouth of the Turks and Afghans. She wore her dark hair, sprinkled with silvery strands, gathered into a braid or a tightly coiled chignon at the nape of her neck. In her home her hair was uncovered, but when she went out she would drape a length of georgette over her head. In a country where women wore sandals in the summer, she wore fine socks and soft-soled leather pumps. She dressed in soft pastels—whites, sky blues and on the rare occasion a pale violet—and her vivid beauty was unadorned by any jewellery or cosmetics.
Her resilience and grace gave her a particular style that I would secretly try to mimic. When she spoke, she articulated words majestically, but when amused, she would giggle like a young girl. At those moments, I forgot that she was a grandmother.
Seeing that I had finished my breakfast, she rose in a flutter of grey crepe garments, and I followed her toward the kitchen. Entering the dimly lit room, I felt her pull me close to her. She informed me that the samovar was being cleaned, and I was to observe this ritual because when I grew up I would have to know how to do this in my own home.
My grandmother’s samovar was a large jug-shaped container of embossed silver metal with a pouring spout on one end and a handle on the other. Her kitchen helper, a young man with close-cropped hair, lifted the lid, tilting the samovar so a stream of fiery coals descended from the latticework base and through the central column into the open fire of the stove. He allowed the samovar to cool for a few minutes, then scrubbed the inner chamber. Finally, he placed it on a small stone disc on a shelf for the next morning, when the pink tea would be brewed for breakfast.
While the samovar was being cleaned, my grandmother gently recited a history lesson. I could hear the hoofbeats of Mongolian ponies cantering across the vast Gobi Desert as they headed toward the Hindu Kush Mountains and the Karakorum range, which guarded the frontiers of India. The Mongolians, a migratory people, conducted their entire span of existence in motion. Eating and cooking utensils had to be designed for travel, and so they designed the exquisitely logical samovar, with a chamber for fuel and a separate chamber for brewing liquid both in one container. Later, the samovar would be imported into Russia and other parts of Europe. In southern Asia it was decorated with regional craftsmanship and motifs. The Turks and Persians added glittering discs of enamel featuring detailed motifs and intricate sets of spigots. Silver was used only as a plating device, while the favoured metal was copper.
My first exposure, years ago, to Kashmiri tea in my grandmother’s home was tinged with mystery. I left the kitchen and walked into the open courtyard of her home. A flood of sunlight cascaded down, and for a moment the green kitchen door across the courtyard shimmered like a mirage. Even the three-storey house looping over the courtyard tilted at surreal angles. I was instantly catapulted into an image from my earlier childhood. I was seated in a tiny alcove beneath a wooden structure. Seated next to me was a little boy who was my playmate. We were both holding a little metal bowl, which was filled with fresh green peas sprinkled with sugar. It was apparent that the peas had been given to us by an adult, but sugar was a contraband item, which led to our hiding.
I felt upon recovering this memory that I had just been tapped on the shoulder by a ghost. It was the ghost of Bashirabad, my grandparents’ house in Srinagar. The little alcove was underneath the bottom step of the staircase in that home, and the little boy was my first cousin. As the image receded, I had no knowledge that a country had been divided and a homeland lost, or that my enthralling grandmother had lost every privilege to which she had been accustomed.
Despite the reshaping of their lives by civil war, my grandparents’ life together, in a town called Srinagar in the state of Kashmir, had been a charmed one. At the age of sixteen, in the early 1900s, my grandmother, whose name then was Zuun, consented to marry my grandfather, Khan Sahib Sirajud-din Ahmad Dar. He was a widower in his early thirties, with five children, a claim to an ancestral village and a title; he was also fluent in four languages and enjoyed a reputation as a literary scholar, poet and gourmand. Zuun was the flower he transformed into Dil-Aram, meaning “heart’s ease,” for he felt this name did more justice to her beauty.
Without a dent to her composure, she lived up to her name. She bore him another eight children, took lessons in English and catered to every whim of her charismatic yet autocratic husband. Throughout her life, she remained passionately in love with him and his ideals.
This willingness to be mentored by an older husband in both domestic and social matters without sacrificing her individuality set her apart from the conventions of her time. Indian wives of that era were raised to be deferential to their husbands and were not necessarily active companions. Yet despite a brood of children, Dil-Aram and Siraj shared time alone together. He educated her about his greatest passion, poetry, and she kept his notebooks, crammed with poetry, safe after he died.
In Srinagar, my grandparents lived in a rambling wooden house with bay windows and sweeping verandas, which my grandfather called “Bashirabad” after his eldest son, Bashir, from his first marriage. It was a patriarchal gesture designed to ensure continuity.
Tacked on the wall in the kitchen of this house was a recipe for lamb pulao. Many years later, my youngest uncle revealed to me the source of the recipe. During the early 1940s, in pre-Partition India, a renowned chef, Baba Rorha, came from Lucknow to visit Srinagar. My grandfather dragooned the chef into preparing this dish so the recipe could be recorded for his young bride, Dil-Aram. The magical ingredient was a pink shallot, called praan, added to the lamb stock. In a home stocked with a library of first editions, rare carpets and a collection of hunting rifles, this recipe was considered of equal value.
The arrival of another legendary chef to Bashirabad became a memorable family anecdote. The wazwan was secretive beyond belief. The young Dil-Aram only saw ingredients sail out of her storeroom as the chef worked in the open-air kitchen in the large back garden, reminiscent of the travelling kitchen brigades of the Mughal armies advancing into India. A visiting uncle of my grandmother, by some stroke of genius, convinced the chef that he would consider it a great honour to sit unobtrusively on a folding camp stool nearby. He carried out his role as the family spy to perfection. Blessed with a superb memory, he passed along a compendium of techniques to his young niece, Dil-Aram. This genius at cooking from memory became a celebrated family trait.
My grandfather, a master of ambience, also assumed a significant role in the proceedings. When the sizzle of caramelizing onions, pounding of spices and clanging of oversized cooking pots reached deafening heights, he headed up to his library to compose a poem for the occasion. Shifting metaphors and even using culinary references, he later regaled the guests with recitations. This twinning of poetry recitations with the consumption of good food is part of Mughal culture. The Mughals believed that to do justice to a meal, one must harmonize sensation; the melody of language prepares the digestive system and stimulates the palate, while firing the imagination.
Although Bashirabad could not compete with the Mughal palaces, with their recitation pavilions surrounded by shallow pools of water, my grandfather’s passion for poetry never abated. He expressed a love of Persian poetry and conducted a lifelong correspondence with Muhammad Iqbal, the most important poet of Muslim India in the twentieth century. His own poetry did not go unnoticed. During World War I, the British resident administrator for the state of Kashmir, hard pressed to recruit soldiers for England’s war effort, requested that he compose and recite a poem to inspire men to volunteer. This act of poetic virtuosity rested quite simply in an unlined brown notebook.
Even culinary mishaps prompted him to reel off comical limericks, although within the kitchen, catastrophes were dealt with severely. A careless cook who had overcooked rice was asked to consume a plateful of it under my grandfather’s supervision, in order to be sensitized to appropriate texture. My grandparents considered the food served at Bashirabad as a reflection of their life. The quantity, quality, presentation and ambience created to serve a meal all were as important as an academic examination, reflecting their exacting temperaments.
When their elder children were married at Bashirabad, my grandparents held wedding banquets prepared by legendary wazwans, Kashmiri chefs. The word waaz means “cook” in the Kashmiri language, and waan means “shop.” My grandfather hired the maharajah of Kashmir’s premier chef, Bara Ama, to cook the twenty-course banquet. Freshly slaughtered young lamb was pounded so the fibres were transformed into a foamy, sponge-like substance; dishes were scented with cardamom, saffron, black cumin and yogourt. The chef personally served each course to guests seated on tablecloth-covered carpets. People sat in twos to share the large plate filled with steamed basmati rice, on which he heaped delicate portions of each course. To ensure that guests sampled all of the preceding courses and to add suspense, he saved for last the crowning glory, the gushtaba, a large foamy meatball. A satiated appetite mid-course was frowned upon; one simply had to be a champion eater, and the ancient Roman practice of regurgitation was unthinkable.
Even during summer vacations, Kashmiri hospitality was never treated lightly, for it was the guests who brought honour to the host simply by their presence. In the days of my grandparents’ life in Srinagar, friends and relatives descended into the bowl-shaped valley of Kashmir in the summer to escape the heat. The favoured spot was lotus-festooned Dal Lake, where the family kept a houseboat, called the Shikara. My grandfather carried out lengthy correspondence over the planned vacations, involving many requests for Kashmiri cuisine from devotees who claimed to have dreamt of one particular dish all winter long.
The houseboats were like sumptuous and baroque floating palaces. Wood-panelled bedrooms and living rooms were decorated with Kashmiri carpets and silk tapestry curtains. Hammered copper, filigree silver and glistening papier-mâché objects completed the decor. Linked to the houseboats in an umbilical fashion were kitchen vessels packed with dry provisions, fruits and vegetables, supplemented daily with fresh meat and fish sold on small merchant houseboats.
It was my grandmother’s duty to supervise the purchased food provisions based on my grandfather’s sensitively concocted menus for the arriving guests. A closeted academic overwhelmed by ink and paper would be transported by the fragrance of fresh apricots and figs. An ailing cousin was to be presented with Kashmiri yakhni, a delicate lamb broth garnished with almonds. It was critical that the almonds be young, with the green husks still on them. Houseboat cooks were interviewed, cajoled and convinced that any culinary travesty would mar my grandfather’s reputation as the local gourmand.
This theatrical panache of my grandparents left its mark on three generations of the family. Myth making reached absurd proportions. The only cuisine worth indulging in was Kashmiri—every other cuisine in India was an impostor. One Kashmiri apple could perfume a room. The scent of aged basmati rice cooking could waft down an entire street. Fresh Kashmiri kale had the ability to change its flavour seven times. A Kashmiri fig was the size of an adult fist! These were some of the utterances of the kings and queens of food who galloped through my childhood.
Sometimes even a simple object can become a symbol of family history that is passed down to the next generation. In my history, a samovar became a time machine as it travelled through three generations. A copper samovar hammered out in the North-West Frontier town of Peshawar, Pakistan, travelled to my Canadian home. A sentimental gift sent by my father, it sat on the top shelf of my kitchen gathering dust until one day when I broke charcoal briquettes from the barbeque into bits, lit them and placed them with tongs down the central shaft. I brewed tea and served it to two little Canadian girls, my daughters, for whom the terms Mughal and Kashmir were simply an exotic inconvenience. Yet years later, one of them, who could have doubled for a Mughal princess, autocratically demanded that I give the samovar to her. I was convinced that she had heard the drumbeat of Mongolian horsemen in her university residence, and so I allowed her to carry a minuscule portion of my history away.
The enchanted space of my grandmother’s domain, where food combined with familial love became high art, was an even greater gift to me. I had the privilege of being exposed to a family fairy tale of sorts. I felt responsible for preserving this cultural heritage, for I found that the Mughal dream was shrouded in dust and its grand cuisine appropriated, fused and relegated to oblivion. Yet members of my large extended family behaved as though the baroque splendour of the meals they prepared and consumed were simply a way of life. I perceived the dimensions of a much larger tablecloth, where art, history and food became interchangeable.
Many years after that memorable breakfast, when I first discovered that a handful of green tea leaves could be transformed into a rare delicacy called Kashmiri pink tea, I sensed the tapestry of my grandmother’s life unfurl before me. It was 1986, and I was standing on the edge of a lake in Srinagar, shadowed by an Indian intelligence officer who thought I had come like my Mughal ancestors to seize the land. On this visit, complete strangers who were related to me treated me like a prodigal child. Their hospitality was unending, and they served me exquisite meals in their modest homes.
My eldest aunt had a samovar that was a metre tall, from which her strapping sons consumed gallons of Kashmiri tea throughout the day. When I asked them about the legendary Bashirabad, they fell silent for a moment. They informed me that the Indian government had appointed a custodian, as many of the heirs to the property lived in Pakistan. Days later, when I insisted on seeing the family home, I had to scale a huge pile of lumber barricading the front of the house. Silently, I walked through the first floor of the abandoned home, resolving never to tell my family about the emotions I experienced. The burden of loss and anger would not replace the gift I intended to bring back to them. It would be enough to say I had visited their home.
Although Bashirabad is lost, my grandmother’s history lives in every cup of Kashmiri tea I drink. Offering her recipe is a way to preserve it. Sitting at Dil-Aram’s table that morning, and discovering that a handful of green tea leaves could be transformed into a rare delicacy called Kashmiri pink tea, I hoped the lunch that would follow a few hours later would leap out with the same element of surprise. If tea, which I knew to be beige, had turned to pink, I was convinced that she also had the power to alter meats and vegetables from their customary hues.
Pink Tea (Kashmiri Chai)
Kashmiri tea is a loose green tea available in South Asian grocery stores. It is also referred to as gulabi chai—the word gulabi means “pink” in Urdu. Chinese oolong tea, a semi-fermented green tea, also can be used in this recipe. As you drink, remember not to exhale too deeply over the cup. It is entirely possible that the spirit of my grandmother Dil-Aram will issue a reprimand.
2 teaspoons Kashmiri tea leaves
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
3 cups water
2 cups milk
1/4 teaspoon salt
In a small metal saucepan, combine the tea leaves, baking powder and 2 cups of the water and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for an hour. Strain the reduced fluid and discard the tea leaves. Add the remaining cup of water to the reduced fluid and boil until foam rises to the surface. Whip the liquid with a fork and reduce the heat. Stir in the milk and salt and simmer for 3 to 5 minutes.
Makes 3 to 4 cups.
"Tea and Pomegranatesis a delightful offering of romance and history, celebrating culture and memory through the medium of food."
—M.G. Vassanji
"In Tea and Pomegranates, Nazneen Sheikh weaves past and present into a fascinating memoir. Her loom is the history of Kashmiri Mughal cuisine, her silks are the exotic, mouth-watering dishes of a privileged childhood. I wanted to run to the kitchen to try her recipes, but I couldn't put the book down."
—James Chatto, author of The Greek for Love
"Nazneen Sheikh is a most sophisticated and enchanting storyteller. In Tea and Pomegranates, she gives readers a privileged seat at the continuous feast of a loving family in a lost corner of the old world."
—Byron Ayanoglu, author of Crete on the Half Shell
