Transporting herself home
Chef Asma Khan on her new cookbook, dedicated to her mother
Most chefs have at least a few stories about cooking as a child – food is a passion, and for many, this starts young. While Asma Khan has plenty of food-related stories from her youth though, she didn’t actually learn how to cook until she got married.
In fact, Khan had no desire to cook at all growing up – “I just wanted to eat,” she says with a laugh – and didn’t see a need to learn. “I didn’t imagine I would leave home and leave India.
The presumption was, I would have an arranged marriage into another family similar to mine, where people would have cooks and other people – grown-ups – who would cook,” she recalls. “I thought I was a child, people are
going to feed me – I’m never going to grow up in my life.”
Khan did have an arranged marriage, but found herself somewhere quite different: the UK. “I was suddenly in a foreign land with a stranger,” she says – and she swiftly realised the best way to connect herself back to her family and the country she left was through cooking.
“Food became my way of going home, but it also became my language of love,” she explains. “I was cooking not because I enjoyed cooking – I was cooking to heal, and feed and nourish others. I realised Ammu [her mother] did that her whole life too.”
Luckily, Khan’s first adventures in the kitchen were relatively successful. She started with easy dishes, like parathas and koftas (“I didn’t want to pick things I thought I may not be able to do”), and the recipes came easily because she was already so familiar with them.
“I knew how to cook, but I didn’t know how to cook,” she says. Reflecting on her childhood in the kitchen, she explains: “The food that was being cooked, even though I didn’t know how it was being made, I knew the aromas, I knew the sounds – the sizzle of the cumin, the popping of the mustard seeds, the smokiness of the dried chillies… I knew how to recreate these dishes very quickly, because you just have to watch it done once from beginning to end.”
That’s why Khan spends so much time in her new cookbook, Ammu, describing the sensory experiences of cooking – how dishes should taste and smell, rather than focusing purely on things like cooking times. ‘Ammu’ is the affectionate term for ‘mother’ for Bengali Muslims – and it was important for Khan to write it in her mother Faizana’s lifetime. It’s full of family recipes, stories from both Khan and her mother’s childhoods, and plenty of pictures – something Faizana was shocked Khan managed to collect.
When Faizana saw the book for the first time, Khan says she was “very emotional” – and also gave surprisingly little feedback. “My mother is not someone who pussyfoots around on these things. She would’ve told me, ‘Whydidn’tyouputinthisrecipe?’ – but she loved every recipe I put in, and she thought it was great, because there were things she had forgotten herself as well.”
lAmmu: Indian HomeCooking To Nourish Your Soul by Asma Khan is priced £26.