Food writer and cookery teacher Sumayya Usmani has lived the kind of life that, on first sight, one would not necessarily assume would lead to her current profession as a cookery writer and teacher.
However, look more closely at her challenges and turning points and you will see why it was inevitable that she would end up celebrating the heritage and traditions of her home country, Pakistan, by capturing the rich and aromatic pleasure of Pakistani cooking.
Sumayya was resident food writer for the Guardian COOK in February 2016. Her recent book is “Summers under the Tamarind Tree: Recipes & Memories from Pakistan.”
She was a recent guest in season at Asia House and lives in Glasgow, having moved to the UK with her daughter 10 years ago.
Background
Sumayya Usmani was born in Karachi, Pakistan. “My parents were among many Muslim Indians who migrated to the new Dominion of Pakistan in 1947, following the partition of India. They still remember the two countries being one.”
Unusual childhood unlocks the key to cooking.
Little Sumayya had a very different infanthood to many of her peers. “For my first six years I lived on a cargo ship, which my father captained.”
Sumayya and her mother went with him on his many journeys around the globe. It may have been fun and strange at times, but what was it like, with no other children to play with, no formal kindergarten? Sumayya said, “it was far from an ideal life for a child. There wasn’t much to distract me from the endless sea that stretched out in every direction. However, it was in being away from home that I began to develop a passion for the cuisine of my homeland.”
The captain had a small galley in his quarters and Sumayya’s mother was so bored on the ship that she spent her time creating new dishes. Usmani would creep into the vessel’s walk-in freezers, “where you’d always find the carcass of a goat hanging from a hook,” or watch her mother unpack exotic ingredients bought on shore leave.
She added, “In these moments I unconsciously started picking up andaza, the art of sensory cooking and estimation, which is the backbone of Pakistani cooking and will always remain my kitchen philosophy.”
The family moved to Karachi where Sumayya’s father decided to become a shipping lawyer.
Karachi is a city where the cuisines of indigenous Sindhis, Hindus, Indian Muslim migrants, Arabs, Persians and other little ethnic communities who settled there centuries ago all come together. So Pakistani food is influenced by some of the world’s greatest cuisines. With an interesting coastline, it enjoys spiced seafood and fish dishes. Its borders with Iran, Afghanistan, India and China mean there are strong Arabic, Persian and varied Asian flavours.
Grown up, Sumayya became a solicitor. But she says she was never as excited about Law as she is about writing on food, which she blogs on too. She gave up a full time career as a lawyer to concentrate full time on cuisine.
Challenges in writing
It is the recipes of her mother, five aunts, and grandmother that she has carefully preserved and written down in her book. But nailing her female relations down to be more specific in their andaza was one of the challenges of writing.
Usmani is happy that her native ingredients are easy to find in Glasgow. She will solicit a local south-Asian shop to order in her favourite phalsa berries.
She described their taste as “like a cross between a raspberry and pomegranate, sweet-sour and tangy.”
Entertainingly, she mixes the berries with Scottish ingredients: game and root vegetables, mutton and hogget (meat from lamb that is over a year old).
One flavour Sumayya always clings to is tamarind, the fruit that she would suck under her nani’s tree as a child, even though she said it tasted so sour that “it makes you scream.” Consequently, she finds that “I’ve always had a taste for sour over sweet, and would even eat the leaves.” So tamarind is the motif of her book , that is a present for her daughter. She said, “if she learns how to cook and she knows the flavours of her heritage, she’ll always have this sense of identity, no matter where she lives in the world.”
