Ammu | Asma Khan
Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Asma Khan: Hi, I'm Asma Khan, and I've just published my latest cookbook, it's called Ammu, which is dedicated to my mother.
Suzy Chase: So as you just said, Ammu is a dedication to your mother. Can you talk a little bit about the book title and your special relationship?
Asma Khan: I've always had this book in me and because my mother taught me how to cook, but over the pandemic, this is when I wrote the book. I realized when the borders came down and I knew I couldn't see my mother, who lives in India, I realized that I had to write this book in her lifetime. I needed her to know how grateful I was for everything she did for me, and the book literally wrote itself. I wrote all the pros sitting up at nights and the recipes, I didn't even have to think because with the stories were linked all the recipes.
Asma Khan: There are 100 recipes in the book. It's divided to five chapters, five decades of my life, and it is probably the one thing that kept me going over the pandemic because as a restaurateur I lost everything, and I was just going spiraling into the darkness because we didn't know what was going to happen. We didn't know what this disease was. The early days were really tough and this book was my ray of light. It was that light that broke through the darkness every day, and you'll sense that in the book. It's a very emotional book, but it's a book of great gratitude and joy.
Suzy Chase: You say you wrote a storybook, not a cookbook, and I love that, and Ammu is the character throughout the cookbook.
Asma Khan: That's absolutely true. She's the main character, and I while writing the book, you can feel that as the chapters progress, I realized how much I was like her because when I sat down and started writing, I had all these memories of the things that happened in my childhood, how she was running her business, very radical at that time for someone of her kind of background, not having gone to college, when no one in my family did any business and definitely not any women, she set up a food empire and she was unapologetic about what she was doing. And I've said this before, she just shook the patriarchy very gently, but no one could take her on because she radiated this kind of calmness and respect to everybody.
Asma Khan: It was very hard to criticize Ammu because she was just so kind, it was very hard for people to criticize what she was doing, which was quite crazy for her time, just to come back at 3:00 in the morning after doing events. In my family, girls didn't even go out, they didn't go to college, and my mother was doing this at that time.
Suzy Chase: So your mother inspired your food, but did she also inspire you to amplify women's voices?
Asma Khan: I always thought that, oh, she taught me how to cook. She taught me how to live, she taught me how to be equal, and it was writing this book I realized that the way she treated my brother and my sister, always standing up for equality, and I know very well that she herself as the middle daughter of five daughters, the dark skinned one who everybody would say was unattractive, she was not her parents' favorite, yet she forgave, and she tried to make a better life for others. I know she had a very hard time, but she never talked about it, and while I was writing the book, I got that sense that how much pain she'd been through, and yet she's managed to rebuild her life and help other women, and that gave her satisfaction. And, this is exactly why I'm doing what I am doing. I'm doing this not just by lifting other women, I know I rise, but I'm helping other women, so I heal as well. This was my journey of healing.
Suzy Chase: For you, learning how to cook the food you grew up with in Eastern India set you free.
Asma Khan: Yes, I never realized how powerful food is till I left home and not knowing how to cook I moved to Cambridge to join my husband, who was an average cook, and I didn't know how to cook, and I found in this very alien land, and of course, it's 30 years ago. People always ask, if you didn't want to live abroad, why did you move? I didn't know, I thought I was going to have a great time. I thought I was going to move to England and be a character in a Brighton book or Agatha Christie, that's all I knew about England.
Asma Khan: I thought I was going to have an incredible storybook kind of great life, but I was overcome with homesickness and I realized I couldn't change anything. I was married to a person who was a stranger, was a very bad cook. The food was very important because I felt very uprooted and it was like an anchor. It kept me sane because I couldn't feel any connection to this land that I was living in, but somehow when I managed to cook, it kind of felt less alien, less cold, less distant because my entire kitchen was infused with the aromas that I associated with my mother.
Suzy Chase: So in this cookbook, it's family food, not to impress, but to heal and nourish. You are particularly excited about the fish dishes.
Asma Khan: My ethos and my philosophy in life that you cook to heal and nourish. You're not cooking to impress and definitely you're not consuming food. It's not something that is a commodity.
Suzy Chase: So, biryani was a dish that originated in India and it captures the heritage of a lot of Indian cuisine, and it's the classic Calcutta biryani that you are renowned for. Talk about the importance of the contribution of other cultures in cuisine. I've heard you reference the samosa.
Asma Khan: Yes, the things that I... Unfortunately, people's perception of what is Indian food in India and abroad, both are inaccurate. In India, everyone thinks this is our native food and it doesn't help right now because it becomes very political. People don't want to acknowledge the contribution of the foreigners, the outsiders, as they see them, and it's very important. You may not like them, you may not have wanted them on your land, but to not acknowledge their contribution from samosa, to Aloo Gobi Matar, to kebabs, to biryani, all of this was outside influence of people who came in. Some made India their home, the Mughals who came in lived for generations in India and ended up marrying women from India and their contribution was huge to the cuisine, Mughali cuisine is a very significant part of Indian food, but today there's a lot of divide and rule and food is used as a weapon to divide people.
Asma Khan: And even things like... Most people didn't know that cauliflower and potatoes were both bought to Bengal and Calcutta by the British, the most favorite of all. There's the recipes in my book, Aloo Gobi Matar, which is cauliflower with potatoes and peas. Literally, the British got all of that in. So, I don't think you should actually only look at recipes in isolation. It's very important to know the stories. Why was this here? Even chickpeas came from Afghanistan and we call it the chana of Kabul, Kabuli chana. People know the names, but yet they don't make the association, but they're always willing to hate unto other people, but they left a huge mark on our cuisine.
Suzy Chase: In your book you have chapati, an unleavened flatbread, where you talk about how futile your food is. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Asma Khan: Yes, it's an uncomfortable fact that our food is deeply futile, and part of it is to do with India being an agrarian society historically. You will find this also in other agrarian societies like Mexico. Women eat last, girls eat least, the men turn up and they serve the food, but unlike a lot of other cuisines where there is a loaf of bread on the table or there's bread that everybody will share, our bread is particularly futile. It has to be made hot, it has to be made one at a time. Who is making that bread? It's always the women, the women are making hot chapatis to serve to the men, and often girls got the cold, burnt ones with their meals because after the men had eaten, no one is going to bother to make fresh, warm, soft chapatis for other girls. In my book, I suggest a way in which you can make chapatis and keep them warm.
Asma Khan: I encourage people to eat with their whole family. It is important to talk about these things because there's a lot in our culture which I'm proud about, but there are things that I'm very uncomfortable about when it comes to the food tradition, and I want to challenge that perception of why women, literally every home in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, you will find a woman cooking or a woman in charge of the food in every restaurant that is middle level, high end level. In our part of the world, in South Asia, or in the West, they're only men. Women are not seen as professional or good enough to be working in a professional kitchen, yet for centuries, our food has been cooked by women. Women are the custodians of recipes. It's a very painful fact, and I'm trying to highlight this by even celebrating the women like Ammu in my book, celebrating women who cook, yet I want to highlight how unfair it is that we are seen somehow as inferior, not professional.
Suzy Chase: The last chapter is you as Ammu, the food you cook for your two children. How is it different from the food your mother cooked for you?
Asma Khan: It is very different. My children are very different than you are a first generation immigrant and your children are born in a country different from yours. Apart from the fact the first time you discover that they have an accent that is different from you, their food tastes tend to be different. So, they do eat a lot of Indian food, but my son is an amateur boxer. He's always worried about eating carbs and the base of our food is the rice, the proteins, that's the kind of most important thing. So you'll find in that chapter, it's not that I've actually tweaked or made it fusion, I've just had recipes in there that you can just eat on their own, so things with spinach and almonds, beans, salads, a spiced chicken burger, kebabs, so because he wants to eat more veg and protein and less carbs, I've had to kind of cook things for him that we don't normally have every day at home when I was growing up in India, so that's the big difference.
Asma Khan: He does eat differently. My younger one doesn't like Indian food. He finds it spicy, so I've had to adapt, and I think it's great because that chapter allows people to introduce Indian food to children, to people who've not had a lot of Indian food. These are things that have got very little gravy in them, so the spices are kind of more muted, but there's great flavor with garlic and onions and lots of herbs, so very familiar things for many people, some unfamiliar herbs and spices as well, but it's a great way to bring kids to love a new cuisine.
Suzy Chase: I'd love for you to chat about the book cover. It's like a beautiful embroidery in turquoise and red with flowers and fish. I'm probably not describing it accurately, it's gorgeous though. Is this your take on your recipe notebook?
Asma Khan: Yes, it is. It is absolutely inspired by the motives on the recipe cookbook I took with me when I left India, writing random notes. I just thought maybe I should write down some observations watching my mother, and they were really random notes because they didn't make sense, but I took that book with me as a 30 year old book. The stitching that you described and I think you've described it really well, they're little motives, they're running stitches. It is a beautiful story. This is Nakshi Kantha, which is from Bengal. This is what women do, two very frayed fabrics are stitched together and held together by these running stitch motives, and I think so many of us are doing this every day. We just hold it together. We put out this beautiful front that we are coping and we are managing.
Asma Khan: And the fact that we are holding together, hiding the stains and the scars and the tears in a fabric using these little motives, this is what so many women are doing in every culture every day. We forget to heal ourselves, and I hope that this book does inspire people to look into their own souls and see what is it that I need in my life because this kind of stitching is always used to make little blankets for children, for your neighbor's children, and they're made like little gifts, but it's reusing the abandoned, the uncelebrated kind of reminds me how probably my mother was treated and the reaction to my birth as a second daughter, the unwanted, the unloved, and we managed to bring light and joy and color to other people's lives, and it's very symbolic, and this is why I'm so happy. I love the cover. I love the fact that they got the textures in. It's that textures of that stitches, it kind of makes you feel that you will heal, you will be fine, you will recover, and you will be victorious.
Suzy Chase: I made some dishes from your weeknight supper menu, Keema Mattar, is that how you pronounce it?
Asma Khan: Yes.
Suzy Chase: Ground Beef with Peas on page 256. You would eat this at least twice a week when you were a child. Can you describe this?
Asma Khan: We tend to eat a lot of keema because it is economical because if you buy a chicken and you joint it, there may not be enough food for everybody in the family and keema, because it's minced meat, even if you ended up getting one tablespoon of keema, everybody got to eat a bit of meat. This is a pragmatic reason why every South Asian, Indian, Pakistani families would have keema at home. You don't find them in restaurants because it's considered to be the food women cook. It's not considered glamorous and exotic and expensive, and it will not impress.
Asma Khan: But I can tell you one thing, if you make that it will heal you. It has got so much aroma, it's something so comforting, eating keema. You have this with rice, with roti, I've even suggested leftover keema being made into patty, put it in a puff pastry and bake it. It's such an integral part of all our childhoods. It's what everybody in South Asia would eat, but you rarely see this discussed anywhere. It has to do with the fact that people on stage talking about our food, I'm in, and they have these very expensive cuts of meat. They show off meat in a very grand way. This is not food for impressing.
Suzy Chase: I also made along with that Baghare Aloo, is that how you pronounce it?
Asma Khan: Yes.
Suzy Chase: Potatoes with Dried Red Chilies on page 104, and this was also a staple at your family table when you were a child.
Asma Khan: Potatoes are inexpensive and potatoes are one of the few things that you would get the whole year round. In India because of the heat, vegetables are very, very seasonal, but what I love about the baghar aloo is that it would go great with steak, roast chicken, with any kind of meat, even fish. It is spiced, but it's a great accompaniment to almost any kind of meat or vegetables or salad, and it's the kind of versatility of a dish like this, which is why I put that in the book because we ended up having it even for breakfast sometimes when there wasn't enough bread for everybody. Potato would turn up and we'd have it with egg, so I love that.
Suzy Chase: So for women dealing with the still prevalent misogynistic world, what advice would you give them?
Asma Khan: I think our time has come. There are enough of us in positions of power and strength, and I think instead of just focusing on building our own careers, unfortunately you do still have a lot of women who throw away the ladder when they reach wherever they want to be at the top, we really need to clear the pathways for the generation coming after us. It goes beyond what we are doing right now. I think everybody should look at the legacy you can leave, and also that we need to be on the right side of history. When we keep silent and we are not supportive to the victims, when you don't show empathy with people who are having a hard time because of their sexuality, because of their gender, ethnicity, the fact that they've had to flee their countries, that they're refugees, there's a lot of people willing to tell you how to hate.
Asma Khan: I think for women, we need to first fight misogyny because that is immediate, that is soul destroying, that undermines your ability to move on and create good and be good and do positive things for others, and I think we need men as well to be on our side. We cannot fight misogyny just on our own. We need a sea change in attitude of young boys, young men, we need to educate them as well.
Suzy Chase: One last thing, on your Wikipedia page, it says your husband isn't a fan of your food. How can that be?
Asma Khan: He isn't, and the thing is that a lot of people misunderstand this as his resentment or jealousy or whatever of what's happened in my life. Not at all, his childhood, he grew up in a war zone and had to flee the country. They ended up losing all their possessions, there were huge insecurity, and for him, food time, meal times was always quite traumatic.
Asma Khan: They had to make do with things. So for him, food has never been something that he enjoyed as a child. He likes very, very simple food. He didn't eat the kind of food that I cook. We come from very different regions and never enjoys it, and that's probably fine. The good thing is I'm relieved because he eats his own kind of very basic food, and because I'm never home for mealtimes, so I never have to worry about what he's eating because I don't know if I was home he wouldn't expect me to cook for him. So, he just eats boiled vegetables, steamed fish, and lots of salad, stuff that I don't normally eat. Yes, so he doesn't really appreciate my food.
Suzy Chase: So now to my segment called dream dinner party, where I ask you who you most want to invite to your dream dinner party and why, and for this segment, it can only be one person.
Asma Khan: Although it's not a food thing, I would love to have invited Nelson Mandela. I think he's so impressive, being incarcerated for so long. I can understand this whole thing that he dreamt that there would be a change and he kept on, kept hope up, and came out as so changed, and I would like to talk to him about how I could learn from him because my passion is to see women in positions of power and hospitality, women being honored in my culture for who they are, that we are seen good enough to be in restaurants and powerful, and given the kind of respect that we don't get for being the healers and the feeders in families. I would like to talk to him about that, and I think I would love to have had a meal with him, and I would love to have fed him and listened to his stories.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web, social media, and your restaurant, the Darjeeling Express?
Asma Khan: I run my own social media at Darjeeling Limited. I'm also Asma Khan London, on Instagram, and I will reply to all your messages. I spend an hour every day replying to every message, and mostly they're women who write me from around the world, and I give advice on if you want to open a business. You'll never hesitate, you'd be surprised how many people are always willing to give advice because we want to see people succeed because we've done it the hard way. I don't want you to make the mistakes I made.
Suzy Chase: So, what is your website?
Asma Khan: Darjeeling-express.com, and from that, you'll get all the links to all my social media.
Suzy Chase: And, where's your restaurant located in London?
Asma Khan: Well, we are located in Covent Garden in a beautiful building. Unfortunately, not for too long because we need to leave this place, and we are in the process of actually trying to find a new site. Hopefully, we'll be up and going very, very soon, but at the moment we are in Covent Garden.
Suzy Chase: To purchase Ammu, head over to cookerybythebook.com, and thanks so much, Asma, for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.
Asma Khan: Thank you very much.
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