Sharm ka Nivwala
On Pakistan and my morsel of shame
Welcome back to the Empress Market newsletter. This is the last issue of Autumn 2024. I began the season writing about the first bite, and went on to reminiscence about the idea of the perfect bite. Now, as we’re reaching into winter, I close with the last bite. December is for contemplating the year gone by and that is what I’ll do.
I like to save my favourite Substack newsletters in a folder I’ve appropriately named READ AGAIN (all in caps lock), a little treasure trove of ideas and stories to reach into when I need to spark my own imagination. I spoke of Farah Yameen piece about the dastarkhan for Vittles before, and I return to it now. She describes how good etiquette is preserved through the last morsel of a meal that no one reaches for. This is the “sharm ka nivwala”, literally translated as ‘the morsel of shame’.
The morsel of shame. The phrase struck me in more ways than one.
I’ve said it before, my relationship with Pakistan is a complicated one. Where even to begin? Shall I start in Tooting, the place where I was born, the South London hub for desis, where drunk punters outside the pub shouted Paki at my nan as she bought fruits and vegetables from the shop next door? Or in Lahore, at the British medium school I attended, where we were taught Urdu as a second language? Or at university, where other desi kids shouted ‘coconut’ at me - brown on the outside and white from the inside - as I ran around campus in my miniskirt, with drunk English boys from Teddington? Or now, in London in 2024, after years of unlearning internalised racism, as I watch Pakistan from a distance, a country that is suffering relentlessly, in every way imaginable. The plight of the nation baffles me and I’m realising that I don’t know my people, I never have.
As we finish off this meal of a year (and what a meal it’s been!) I want to present you with that last bite, one to contemplate and to consider, something to reflect upon in order to move forward. I want to talk about Pakistan truthfully – as my morsel of shame.
After facing years of racism, I felt ashamed of being Pakistani. And, I am ashamed now of being Pakistani today, for what its people are doing to the country. More than that, I feel ashamed of my own helplessness and confusion. What can I do to help, why are the people of Pakistan so hellbent at hurting themselves?
Few people have the audacity, the jurat, to talk about this shame. We aren’t ones to hang our dirty laundry for others to see - heck my mum doesn’t even hang her clean underwear on the washing line lest the neighbours see her marks and sparks panties. Over the years, I’ve found Pakistani people at ease with shifting the blame on others. We are quick to identify the perpetrators of our political, religious, climate catastrophes on our colonial British oppressors, our neighbouring foe, India, or more recently, the turbulent Afghanistan.
When we can’t blame them, we resign ourselves to speaking in vague terms, refusing to look at ourselves in the mirror.
We need to admit, for our own sake, that the call is coming from inside the house. We are the cause of our own problems.
Addressing this national shame is controversial, and I will be the first to admit that I’m always ready for a fight if anyone who isn’t Pakistan says the same thing.
But, like a good millennial, I’m also a firm believer of talking therapy; ‘let’s talk through our problems to heal them.’
If you’ve been confused by Pakistani news and ever thought of reaching out to learn more, usually I’d be my cantankerous self and tell you to google it. But I’m right here with you in my lack of understanding of Pakistani national politics.
For the purposes of this newsletter, I started researching what’s been going on in the month of November alone -
The state of affairs is chaotic and overwhelming.
I recognise, this isn’t the full overview of the nation. I am not an expert. I step into these sorts of conversations with trepidation, for fear of being like the many Pakistanis who love to engage in drawing room political analysis - we all pretend to be experts as we try to make sense of our nation. And, as the people who are sitting in drawing rooms, we are the privileged ones. We have the luxury to look at the situation from a distance and to reflect.
I believe this is where my responsibility as a diaspora Pakistani woman lies. I write to bridge the cultural and political history with its ailments and the present. Mainly I write to moan. I write to acknowledge there is a lot to work through and there is no way around it.
And then I also do the other thing. I cook.
Cooking Pakistani food has been my way to reconcile my relationship with my people. I have learned to understand their complexity through the depth of our food. The recipes are stories from the motherland, and also from those who have travelled to far flung places. It’s about my great grandmother baking meethi tikkian, desi shortbread biscuits, with the leftover ghee, sugar and flour as she embarked on the dangerous journey from Rhothak to the newly formed Pakistan in 1947. It’s about my Nani and the spices stowed away, tied in the corner of her kameez as she left Rawalpindi for London; would they have chillies and turmeric over there, she wondered. It’s about my seventeen year old dad learning how to cook daal over an electric burner in his bedsit on Chesham Place 55 or so years ago. It’s about my rainy days selling Bun Kababs at London food markets, as a way to share the story of Karachi, my family hometown.
There is so much literature out there, about food being an expression of culture and love and hospitality for others to experience. I’m here sharing stories about my Pakistani heritage with you, so you can understand me and my world a little bit more. Yes, all of that.
But my food and my writing is mainly for me. It is the way I can sit comfortably in this state of chaos. Rather than being overwhelmed by the complications, I approach them like I would when cooking a meal. I take it one step at a time, a meditation of sorts. I might choose to follow a recipe and to retread the steps thousands have done before me, or I may find new paths, which lead me to new corners of the world, or shed new light on what I had taken for granted.
The sharing of food and the pleasure of eating, well, that’s just a happy by-product.
In the first issue of the Empress Market newsletter, I spoke about the tragedy unfolding in my husband’s homeland, Lebanon, and as the year comes to a close, I find myself writing about the tragedy of my own home, Pakistan. I wrote about Khichdi, Mujaddara style, a simple rice dish that brings comfort in the opening issue. This month, rice heals us once again as I’m sharing my family recipe for Kheer.
Cardamom-infused, carmalised milk and rice, Kheer is a classic Pakistani dessert and one of many versions that exist across South Asia. In fact, nearly every culture has a take on a rice pudding. It’s comforting to know how so many of us soothe our souls through rice and milk and something sweet.
For full disclosure, this recipe is only one part of my Kheer Laddu from my Empress Market winter menus. I thought about sharing the whole recipe but then realised, like Pakistan’s state of affairs, it would be too complicated. So, instead, I’m going to stick with sharing the one step. A small part of a bigger recipe. A small part of me.
Before we get cooking, some feelings about my Kheer Laddu.
My Kheer Laddu 🌝
coconut milk and cardamom jaggery rice laddu, with a split chickpea halwa centre, dusted with cinnamon coconut nectar sugar, served with burnt cinnamon plums
I love the way this dessert makes me feel.
Memories come to me all at once.
My Kheer Laddu are closer to the Italian arancini in technique, breadcrumb coated fried rice balls with a special stuffing. However, in their truer sense, they are laddu, that well known South Asian spherical sweet. Like kheer, there are countless varieties of laddu out there as far wide as Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, The Maldives and Sri Lanka. Food balls of this kind date back to 2600 BCE from the Indus Valley Civilisation, as I’ve learnt. In my research, I’m yet to find one made of kheer. the chickpea (besan ke laddu) version is the most popular recipe out there, so I decided to keep this at the heart of my own laddu. My mum’s fudge-like split chickpea halwa (a recipe for another day) sweetens the centre of my Kheer Laddu, a dessert within a dessert.
When I’m rolling the sweet rice balls, fiddling my fingers between flour, egg and panko, then hot oil, I’m taken to my early days as a junior chef, freelancing at catering companies. The job of frying hundreds of arancini canapés for weddings and parties would somehow always land at me. Those were learning days, understanding the discipline of a kitchen, the comradery of a chef brigade and the sense of achievement that comes with having cooked the perfect wedding banquet.
Tossing the sweet arancini in sugar and cinnamon straight out from the fryer, I’m at the fairground, eating fresh doughnuts out of a greasy paper bag. I rip the pillowy sweet dough, still warm, my hands and mouth sticky with sugar. Those were simpler times, without a worry in the world except where to wipe my hands clean and what ride to take next, the flashing lights of the fairground luring me this way and that.
The plums served alongside my Kheer Laddu are from my garden. And it is September and the last of the summer. And the setting sun beats against my head as I reach high to pick the ripe fruit from the branches. I gather the fruit in a plastic bag, some I eat fresh, some I stew into a plum jar to be spread over toast during the depths of winter. Others I halve, sprinkle with cinnamon, a squeeze of lemon and roast in the oven. I store them in the fridge for a few days, where they soften and sweeten into a jammy texture. I eat them scattered over yoghurt or porridge for days to come.
And then there is the scent of simmering cardamom-infused milk rising from the pateeli that takes me to Eid morning in Lahore. My mum would be making Kheer, watching the milk and stirring slowly. “I know you’re hoping I burn the milk so you can scrape the bottom of the pan”, she would say with a smile. She was referring to the kuhrchan, the brown milk residue that builds at the bottom of the pan. No amount of stirring can avoid the kuhrchan, it will happen whether you like it or not. Your task is simply to contain the build up and prevent it from developing that burnt milk smell.
I am thinking of the kuhrchan even as I begin to think about making kheer. A mistake and fear of it, that conspires itself into existence well before the cooking begins. In some ways a little bit of kuhrchan is a happy mistake that reveals itself only when the dessert is finally served. I love kuhrchan. You take a metal spoon and scrape the bottom of the pateeli to eat the fudge like frayed ribbons of caramelised milk from the empty saucepan. Chef’s treat.
I am ready with my spoon, to scrape for the last bite. I am ready, always, to take life and what it offers me at the end of each day. But be warned, if taken too far, anticipation of this last bite can leave the whole dessert, and hours of gentle stirring, tasting a bitter burnt.
My mum’s Eid Kheer, a recipe:
The recipe traditionally calls for blue top dairy milk but I think coconut milk adds that lovely tropical flavour! Plus now, it’s vegan.
4L coconut milk
4 cardamom pods, crushed (do not lose the seeds!)
A pinch of saffron or a splash of kewra
2 cups basmati rice
1 cup caster sugar
50g coconut cream
25g flaked almonds
25g flaked pistachios
50g flaked coconut
In a large saucepan, bring the milk to a rapid boil with the crushed cardamom and saffron. Once boiled, reduce the heat to a gentle simmer. You need a saucepan with a thick base to prevent the milk from burning. My mum places a tawa under the saucepan to further manage the heat. Do not let the milk scald and boil over, so keep an eye on it. The best thing to do is loiter in the kitchen with another task, stirring the milk regularly to lower the liquid heat.
You want the milk to reduce by a third.
Meanwhile, toast the rice in a separate saucepan on medium heat. The dry grains should release a subtle nutty smell but be careful not to brown them.
Add 3 cups of water and parboil the rice. This should take 5-7 minutes. Test the rice by taking one or two grains out with a spoon: break them with your fingers, the centre should still be firm and white.
Pour the starchy water and rice, along with the sugar into the milk. Continue to simmer, stirring regularly, until the kheer has thickened. I can’t tell exactly how long this will take, this is all about patience. Give it an hour or so. You’ll know the consistency is right if you run your finger along the back of the spoon and it takes a good second to come together.
Turn off the heat.
The kheer will thicken and the sweetness will develop as it cools. You can add more sugar if you like, this is really about personal preference.
Add the coconut cream. I usually cut a ¼ chunk of the solid coconut cream block, avoiding the yellow oil bit, and throw it in whole. It will gently melt down in the heat of the kheer. Add the dried fruit and stir in. Some people add kishmish (raisins!) but my mum and I are not fans.
Add a splash of kewra right at the end if you didn’t have saffron to start with.
Numra x
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PS. head to my website for more recipes and to learn more about my catering and supper clubs.
Beautiful writing. Enjoyed reading specially the first half mainly about Pakistan. This is the whole truth.