TASTES LIKE MORE Author Shubnum Khan remembers the comfort of her aunts’ cooking and the food legacy they have left.
Durban-based author Shubnum Khan honours the women in her family who, for decades, have expressed their love through cooking and sharing excellent food
Icome from a family of women who cook. My mother had six sisters and almost every one of them was exceptional in the kitchen. Growing up, I took being surrounded by good food for granted, but I only understood this when I started to travel on my own. I had to cook for myself or eat out, and suddenly found that what I was eating lacked the depth I had grown accustomed to.
As a child, I quickly learnt that on visits to my mother’s family in their small farm town, I should dish up quickly and hide my plate under the table before my aunts could take over. A battle would ensue as they tried to wrest the plate from my grip to serve me even more rice and meat.
They were all hard-working women. One worked long hours in a clothing factory, another sold second-hand clothes at a train station, and several sold atchar, sweetmeats and samoosas from home.
They may have not had much wealth but they shared a rich love language. Onions tenderly braised with garlic, goolab jamuns gently coaxed out of hot syrup, fish fried until it was crispy – every mouthful was an expression of their love, and they couldn’t give us enough.
The sisters eventually scattered all over – Durban, Johannesburg, Toronto and Sydney. But they called one another often and somehow the topic always turned to food: how much a leg of lamb or a bucket of ghee cost in their city, how they hoped one sister would send fresh peppercorns, how the price of ginger was going up and the quality of coconut milk was going down.
My aunty Kulsum and aunty Razia sent buckets of atchar from Mayfair to my mother in Durban, and for weeks afterwards we would be licking our fingers as we enjoyed an array of carrot, lemon, mango and kumquat atchar with our meals. Even after my mother’s eldest sister, Manoo, passed away, her daughters still sent spring rolls, samoosas and marinated legs of lamb. Chotiapa, my mother’s sister-in-law, was famous for her creamy burfi and would send great mounds of the sweetmeat for us. When we returned after the six-hour drive from my mother’s home town, we would open the car doors and food would literally spill out like an abundance of love that could not be contained.
My gorikhala, famous for popping whole chillies in her mouth, spent a month looking after us when my parents went on pilgrimage and she made us big pots of crab curry with white rice and fluffy rollgolls, a huge Swiss roll filled with jam and floating in custard. Years later, I was accepted for a writing residency in China and I visited her before I left. She was ill and had grown so weak she could barely hold up her head but she said to me,
“Make sure you take biscuits with you.”
She was afraid I would not find food to eat in a distant land. Even in her illness, she could not bear the thought that someone she loved would not be able to eat. Those would be the last words she said to me.
Many of these women have passed away now and I find myself thinking about the passion with which they fed us. My aunts came from a rigid and patriarchal generation where they didn’t get much opportunity or encouragement and they never shared many of their inner feelings or emotions. Yet, when I look at it now, they were writing such beautiful love letters to us all. Cooking was the only thing available to them and they sharpened it like a tool to open up their hearts and show us what was inside. When we ate what they cooked we were communicating with them intimately, even if we didn’t know it then.
I look back at my childhood and
I wish I hadn’t tried to hold back my plate. I wish I had held it out and said,
“Tell me more. Tell me everything”.
“We would open the car doors and food would literally spill out like an abundance of love”