SWEET MEMORIES
Orange creamsicle treat returns as chewy cookie for same poolside enjoyment.
Memorable meals are made in heaven. Food alone can make a meal good, even great, but for a meal to sink into the psyche that you can savor forever, it needs something else — the juxtaposition of many imponderables that only heaven’s hands can marshal at a particular point in time.
Such a moment has been burned into my memories, of a meal many decades ago when I was a young lad in Dacca, the second largest city of the British Indian province of Bengal. The food was murgh pulao (chicken pilaf ) of the most exquisite taste that only my mom could make. It was the signature dish — along with the Kashmiri chai — of her parental family, the Dacca Nawab family, originally from Kashmir.
But food was just a part of the mix. The occasion was the Ramadan Eid, following the monthlong fasting, the most happy and festive occasion of the year for Muslims worldwide. On most such occasions my mom made her inimitable pilaf, and with it her halvas and occasionally even the Kashmiri chai. All the tangibles were there in good measure.
But what branded the meal on that day into my psyche was something more imponderable: LOVE. Love for each other within our large but closely knit family that our grandparents and parents inculcated into us from the very beginning. That is a gift from God.
My father had three brothers; two of them lived in Calcutta, Bengal’s largest city and its capital, the original foothold of the British in India, part of which they built to replicate areas of London. My father and his youngest brother lived in Dacca with my grandfather in a large rambling house with many courtyards.
On that Eid day, all four brothers, as well as my grandpa (my grandma had died when I was just a kid) were together in Dacca. The elders all sat for that meal at a large table that sat 12. We youngsters had a side table. Their interaction and joy in the company of each other, the serene scene was a lesson in kind that made all the didactic lessons a 3-D reality.
That is a lesson that, I firmly believe, would lead me, or any of my 14 brothers and sisters, to gladly give our lives for the sake of each other. A lesson of love I wish some of our leaders had learned at home. Back on earth out of the stratosphere, here is the recipe for the pilaf. Add the intangibles, if you desire, or can muster!
The cooking of our family’s murgh pulao is really the cooking of a shahi qorma (imperial sweet curry), to which washed and soaked basmati rice is added and cooked until the rice is done. So cook the qorma first.