IT’S NEVER TOO LATE
Chef finally found her calling
She could be the subject of a master class on the beauty of being a late beginner.
Asma Khan earned a law degree and a PhD in constitutional law before embarking on a culinary career. At 43, Khan parlayed a newfound passion for cooking into a private supper club, followed by a pop-up and finally a restaurant — Darjeeling Express, near Carnaby Street in London, U.K. — with a kitchen staffed entirely by women who had never before cooked professionally.
“In my kitchen, the average age of people cooking is 50. I also became 50 this year. This is, in our tradition, in our culture, the autumn of our lives. I tell all of these women, ‘In the autumn of our lives, we found the spring,’” says Khan.
Having left her hometown of Kolkata, India, in the early 1990s to join her husband in the U.K., Khan felt homesickness, which motivated her to learn how to cook.
On a forlorn bike ride along the frozen River Cam in Cambridge, she was struck by the temptation to knock on a stranger’s door for a taste of the parathas she could smell from the roadside. (She didn’t and ended up shedding lonely tears on the sidewalk instead.)
Feeling isolated in an unfamiliar place, Khan went back to Kolkata where her mother, sensing her unhappiness, taught her how to make time-honoured dishes.
When she returned to the U.K. with new skills and a wealth of family recipes, she reached out to other immigrant women and began cooking for them. Chasing familiar flavours and fostering a sense of community, she found her calling.
Khan’s magnetic style caught the attention of David Gelb’s docuseries Chef’s Table. When she was featured in an episode earlier this year, Khan became the first British chef to appear on the Netflix series.
Khan saw the opportunity for advocacy. “I was going to be the face of a movement for women. For women who cook. For women who never got honoured. For women for whom food was a tool of oppression,” she says. “I felt it was a chance that I could make a mark, that I could actually tell a story about women who look like me, who are like me, who struggled.”
Her star turn on the show coincided with the release of her debut cookbook, Asma’s Indian Kitchen (Interlink Books, 2019), in North America.
“You cannot be what you cannot see. And I think what has happened — Netflix, the cookbook, the restaurant — is very significant because sadly, in our culture — and I mean South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh — there are no all-female kitchens. You don’t see them anywhere,” says Khan. “And this for us is great; we got noticed and that’s really important.”
Recipes from Asma’s Indian
Kitchen, by Asma Khan, published by Interlink Books.