IN THE FAMILY
Adelaide’s Parwana Afghan Kitchen and its other restaurants are a taste of what one family left behind.
Above: Zainab (left) and Fatema Ayubi, with their mother Farida (seated). Right, clockwise from top: chopaan – marinated lamb served with naan, salata and Parwana chutney; banjaan borani – eggplant simmered in tomato and served with garlic yoghurt and mint; narenj palaw – long-grain rice topped with candied orange peel and almonds at Parwana Afghan Kitchen.
At the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Farida Ayubi and her husband Zelmai are being questioned. It’s 1985. Kabul is no longer safe. The Soviets invaded six years ago and the country is in lockdown. No one’s allowed in or out – no one except for the Kuchis, a Pashtun tribe whose nomadic migrations are permitted even in times of political turmoil.
Zelmai has forged papers. The papers say that he, his wife and their young daughters are Kuchis travelling from Afghanistan to Pakistan for a friend’s wedding. The girls are laughing, excited – they’re happy to be dressed in the colourful outfits of the gypsy tribe, happy to be playing dress-ups. They don’t realise what’s at stake. The family is stopped by soldiers every few hours, searched, their papers checked and rechecked. At a particular checkpoint, one of the guards is someone they know. He could say something, blow their cover. But he looks at Zelmai, turns his head and waves them through.
At the border it’s mountainous and wild. There are hundreds of soldiers, dogs everywhere. Other animals as well: goats, sheep, donkeys. The girls have never seen anything like it. They laugh and squeal. Farida tries to quiet them, terrified that their excitement will give them away. Kuchi children grow up around cattle. Well-off families from Kabul do not.
The border guard looks at Zelmai’s paperwork. He asks where they’re travelling to.
A wedding, says Zelmai. In Pakistan.
Are you sure? the guard asks. Are you sure you’re going to a wedding?
Zelmai’s knees go weak. What do you mean?
The dates on your papers are all wrong. You’re out by two weeks. Your friend’s wedding is already finished.
Zelmai knows this will be their undoing, that he forgot to update the paperwork – that after coming so close, they will be turned away.
But the guard looks at him. Just go, he says. I’m going to rip up these papers. Go, and don’t look back.
The family makes it to a refugee camp in Pakistan. One month later, they’re able to move into a house in Peshawar. Eighteen months after that, a relative arranges sponsorship for Farida, along with her family, to emigrate to Australia on a skilled migrant visa.
There she will work as a chef.
Parwana Afghan Kitchen opened on an unremarkable stretch of road in Torrensville, Adelaide in 2009. Farida Ayubi makes the food, Zelmai acts as host, and on any given evening, one or more of their five daughters might work front of house. Today, the family business spans their flagship restaurant, plus a casual CBD eatery called Kutchi Deli Parwana run by the three middle Ayubi daughters
(and named for the nomadic tribe in whose name they escaped Afghanistan) and Shirni Parwana, a catering and dessert outfit run by Fatema, the eldest daughter and family pâtissière.
The menu at Parwana is brief but demonstrative. It shows (in the space of two entrées, eight or nine main courses and a handful of sides) that the history of Afghanistan’s food is the history of migration. The country is landlocked, bordered by six countries – Iran to the west, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to the north, China to the north-east, and Pakistan (including the disputed region of Kashmir) to the east and south – and each of its neighbours has left its mark on the cuisine. Curries abound, but their constitution is gentler and more aromatic than their Indian or Pakistani counterparts. As with most of Asia, rice is central to the table, but the Afghan version uses a firm, long grain which is perfumed with a mix of spices and studded with morsels of fruit (sultanas, candied orange peel) and nuts (slivered almond and pistachio).
More surprising, perhaps, to the uninitiated, is the Afghan take on dumplings: the mantu, steamed parcels of meat or vegetables that resemble a Chinese wonton; and the pierogi-like ashak, which are stuffed with chives, fried, and served under a generous spoonful of minced lamb or dhal. You can taste a hint of the Mediterranean, a little Russia. Many Australians think Afghan food begins and ends with grilled meat on a stick. Parwana demonstrates otherwise.
Farida, the chef and matriarch of the Ayubi family, was born in Qandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, in
1956. Her father encouraged her to learn how to cook, and from an early age she became known among her relatives for her beautiful rice, her okra, her fragrant curries. All the women in her family were encouraged to have careers, so she trained as a teacher and worked in Kabul. It was there, when she was newly married, that she began frequenting a small, family-run restaurant called Parwana. The name means butterfly in Farsi.
“We would meet our friends there, sit together, order food – it was like what you’d make at home, or what your grandma might make for you,” says Farida. She loved Parwana so much that she would sometimes work there, helping out in the kitchen. It was in honour of those happy memories that she named her own restaurant Parwana. She is a small, compact woman with a serious face, her features framed by the headscarf she wears. In photos, she exhibits a disinclination towards smiling; her demeanour suggests a life shaped by loss. In life, however, and especially in the company of her family, any impression of severity melts away. She speaks softly, but laughs often. Her kitchen, even when the restaurant is at its busiest, is always an oasis of calm.
Front of house, things are anything but. Farida says that from the night they first opened, there’s been a line around the block. “We have a small menu, but people have their favourites,” adds Fatema. “They’ll come the night their favourite dish is on. Every few years, we take dishes away and add some, but there’s always an outcry.
We find it hard to change the menu because people are very attached to it.”
No dish better typifies this attachment than the banjaan borani, which Farida describes as “an eggplant dish made with tomato sauce and spices, with garlic yoghurt on top”. This account is technically correct. It also completely fails to capture how extraordinary the banjaan borani really is. Soft f lanks of eggplant arrive swaddled in thick tomato sauce, and a swirl of yoghurt cuts through the oily redness. Flavoured with garlic and mint, and rounded off with smoky paprika, the dish is unctuous, zingy and addictive. Its fame is such that Farida couldn’t take it off the menu even if she wanted to. “I think it’s really nice,” is her understated assessment. “People love it – they really love that dish.”
Farida’s use of traditional Afghan spices – cardamom, cumin, turmeric, cloves – animates some of her most memorable dishes. The Kabuli palaw is redolent with cardamom and crowned with a heap of caramelised carrot. Each grain of rice is chewy and distinct. A red lentil dhal comes spiked with chilli and topped with wisps of fresh coriander, the pulses simmered into collapsing submission.
Although accompaniments are, by definition, optional extras, the sides at Parwana deserve to be ordered enthusiastically. The pickled vegetables, called torshi, are vinegary and crisp, while the fluffy naan bread lends itself perfectly to mopping up the last green flecks of spinach sabzi or the chunky dregs of a qormeh gosfand curry.
Whereas kebabs are Afghan street food, Parwana’s menu represents food that might be cooked in the home. But that’s not to suggest it’s everyday cuisine. Rather, it’s the kind of food you might cook for a special occasion: celebration food. It’s also an attempt at preservation. No recipes are written down, but Farida has taught Fatema how to make everything she learned to cook as a young woman in Kabul; Fatema in turn is teaching her own daughter, Zainab.
The younger Ayubi is 20 years old and has lived in Adelaide all her life. She’s a registered midwife and a personal trainer, and helps out at Parwana and Shirni Parwana, where she specialises in creating magnificent grazing tables. She’s visited Afghanistan once, when she was seven, and remembers being taken aback by the country’s beauty.
“The grass was so green, the sky was so blue, there were snow-capped mountains, sparkly rivers, and all these houses with colourful doors,” says Zainab. “It was stunning. I never realised there was a side of Afghanistan that looked like that.”
Nor do most people, which is perhaps understandable given that the only media coverage the country gets is in relation to its volatile politics and near-perpetual civil war. Part of Parwana’s mission is to preserve the happiness and hospitality that Farida and her family knew in Kabul.
“Our ethos is to treat each customer like they’re a guest in our home,” says Fatema. “We want them to experience Afghan hospitality and Afghan cuisine. My parents started Parwana because they wanted to share the beauty of our culture with other people — to show the side of Afghan culture that we know.”