Sumayya Usmani - Andaza

Contents

ABOUT ANDAZA

When I imagine my mother, I see her in the kitchen, immersed in the act of preparing a meal, measuring spices with her fingers. My memories of my Nani (maternal grandmother) Nani Mummy, as I called her are of her crouched over her white enamel cooker, stirring rice pudding. In my reminiscences of my Dadi (paternal grandmother), she is always in the kitchen, silently commanding my five aunts as they cooked large family meals.

Both of my grandmothers, and my mother, cooked without recipes, recollecting and recreating meals using their senses. I grew up around this way of cooking called andaza , which translates as estimation, but really encompasses what I like to think of as the art of sensory cooking. Even as a young child I was fascinated by the idea that a recipe could turn out differently when it was cooked by someone else, that we all had a different flavour in our hands that made a dish unique to us this felt like alchemy to me.

In my family, the processes involved in creating a meal were sometimes laborious and painstaking, beginning with the careful selection of produce at the market each week, but no one questioned them and there were never any complaints. No meal was just a one-dish affair; daily meals involved simple dishes, but there were always many of them to share, each with an abundance of flavour and texture. Mealtimes meant more than just eating together; they were a time to savour the labour and the bounty laid out before us.

I began to appreciate that part of our role as women was to provide nourishment and nurturing. The kitchen was a space exclusive to the women in the family, who would gather there to cook or to keep each other company, to laugh and joke, to share recipes and stories. There was always life in the kitchen it was almost a sacred space, the female domain, willingly occupied not from a sense of duty but rather a sense of ownership and togetherness. The kitchen was a place of effortlessness, of belonging and of strength, and as a child it was my place of consistency and comfort.

Growing up, I always felt a little displaced. I was born in Karachi and lived there until I was a year old, but then led a wandering life aboard merchant ships as a child, interspersed with spells in Karachi and short bursts in England between voyages, before spending my adolescence and adulthood back in Karachi. I struggled with conformity, convention and what it meant to not have had a normal childhood. My teenage years in Pakistan took place during a turbulent time of martial law and restrictions, followed by political strife. The kitchen was the one place I felt secure, there was something about its dependability in my life that made it feel like home. There was such familiarity and security in knowing that the same aromas, flavours and textures my mother made on the ships could be recreated in another place, at another time. So whenever I yearned for a sense of belonging, I gravitated towards the kitchen. For me, home was never just a place; it was a sensory experience that began in the kitchen.

This is my coming-of-age story, a story about how cooking offered strength in times of weakness and ease in times of sadness, and about how trusting my senses in the kitchen helped me to trust my intuition and equipped me with the confidence to navigate lifes challenges. Its also a book that explores the hidden world of Pakistani women, based on several generations of my family and what the kitchen means to them. Although this is my personal story, I hope it will resonate with other free-spirited cooks and believers in the magic created in the kitchen.

The kitchen was a place of effortlessness,
of belonging and of strength, and as a child
it was my place of consistency and comfort.

CHAPTER 1

You cant cook with words