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Noshe Djan : Afghan Food and Cookery
ISBN 0 907325 947 £12.00
Review of Noshe Djan by Bee Wilson in the New Statesman In war-torn Afghanistan, even using a large amount of cooking oil is seen as aspirational. Food that we might consider greasy (and hence poor) is seen by Afghans as a sign of affluence. This insight comes from Noshe Djan: Afghan food and cookery by Helen Saberi, a fascinating work which has just been reissued. Despite its modern poverty, Afghanistan has rich and sometimes surprising culinary traditions. The "basic diet of all Afghans" is composed of "nan, bread, and chai, tea". Nan can be flavoured with nigella, poppy or sesame seeds, and is baked either in the family's own tandoor or by a nanwaee at a local tandoor bakery. If the baker is a woman, grooves are made in the bread, if a man, then cuts are made. The finished bread might be served, means permitting, with a partridge stew, or aubergines cooked in yogurt, or maybe with kebabs, a radish salad and some coriander chutney. Not all Afghan dishes are quite so approachable. Saberi, who lived in Afghanistan for ten years and married into an Afghan family, describes its peculiarities with affection and even hunger - such as the taste for lamb's fat, especially from the tail, or the use of rhubarb in savoury dishes (with spinach, for example, or lamb). Afghans are also partial to quroot, a kind of dried yogurt resembling "white pebbles", which is reconstituted in water and sometimes eaten with garlic, salt, pepper and dried mint. The strangest-sounding dish in Saberi's book is a sweet "silk" egg kebab, which is made by drawing threads of beaten egg across a hot pan until they go "silken", a fabric which is then rolled up and sprinkled with sugar syrup and ground pistachios. |