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The
Pakistani lady was about to go back to work on a rainy
London afternoon, but before that she asked me:
Do you
think I am ok, my clothes don’t smell of curry?
I assured
her that they didn’t and she left for work. She had cooked
the previous day but she had stepped into the kitchen for a
seconds that afternoon but it was enough to be worried about
the smell of the spices getting on her clothes. This is a
major problem for desis (South Asians) in the Western
countries. They can’t cook their food without horrendous
comments from the whites about the bad smell that the spices
have.
The major
spices that the people of Indian origin use are the cause of
this, namely garam masalo, jeero (cumin) and
dhaania (coriander). These three make the dish and
clothes of the person cooking it as well as the kitchen
smell bad, not only that but the whole house along with the
carpets etc. And if a desi has cooked or eaten
SaandhaaNo (pickles), fish or methi (fenugreek)
than he or she must forget about going out of the house or
hostel before changing clothes and washing his/her hands
thoroughly.
Most people
cook food in America and Europe while shutting the doors of
all the rooms so that any cooking smell doesn’t go into the
carpets of the room other than the kitchen. This rule is
followed by even those who don’t eat South Asian spices
mentioned above but ordinary food of the Europeans. If they
order pizza, they do not keep the wrappings in the room for
long, but make a point of throwing them into the bin as soon
as possible. This is done by the goras (Whites)
themselves whose food according to them doesn’t smell bad as
the desi food or Chinese foods do. But still they
take this amount of care.
People are
not polite in the West as Sindhis or other desis in
this matter, they will tell you to your face that your food
is horrible and you must get rid of it. If a desi students
cooks in the university hostel then he/she must be very
careful as to what method she uses to cook and what spices
are being used and what form it is stored in. Any thing like
frying fish or warming up the dish in the microwave is out
of the question while you are living in a shared flat with
White students or university hostel. A female student who
was born in England kept her long shaped kebabs with typical
spice from Lahore and she was told that “your food doesn’t
look good” cover it in a non transparent container before
keeping it in the kitchen. In England at least 12 students
share a kitchen, which has 4 freezers and four fridges, an
oven and a microwave provided for the use of the students by
the universities. You must keep the oven exhaust on while
you cook or they will complain that you have made the whole
corridor smell bad. If you store food in the fridge, it must
be wrapped up in a cling film not just left open in a
container or plate because all the milk and other stuff in
the fridge will go bad.
When you
start work, the same applies to your work colleagues until
you get your own home. Even then if you are making things
that have a pungent smell like methi (fenugreek)
cooked with meat or daal (lentils) then you must use
the oven exhaust in the kitchen to the maximum capacity
while keeping all the doors of your rooms shut until you
have finished cooking and changed your clothing.
In this
regard you might be a bit safer if you use Sindhi spices
such as Dharhoon (pomegranate seeds), gidamari
(tamarind) along with the usual red chili powder and salt.
Just make sure you do not cook fish or pallo (sable
fish) or take a little bowl of pickles out to eat because
they will stink according to the international standards.
You can reduce the smell of fish and pallo a bit by rubbing
some gram flour (besan) on it thoroughly before
cooking or frying but still do not cook it in hostels and
any shared accommodation with the whites or non desis
when you are out of Pakistan.
I will
relate a few incidents that I have personally observed to
illustrate the points I have made above.
I came into
one of the cafeterias to buy some tea, it costs $.70 a cup
at the moment, which is costly from Pakistani standards, and
if you buy a muffin with it, you will pay a $2 extra so a
little light breakfast per day is going to cost you around
$3-4. Any way to cut a long story short, I saw a sign stuck
on the microwave door reading or rather shouting as follows:
‘DO NOT
WARM YOUR SMELLY FISH IN HERE; IT IS ONLY FOR MUFFINS’
A Chinese
student had brought lunch from home and he was going to eat
it in the cafeteria after warming it up in the microwave
like all the other students. He didn’t realize that his food
‘smells’ bad to the white nostrils.
They won’t
mind if he had bought a fillet of fish burger from McDonalds
but anything cooked with Chinese sauces or South Asian curry
powder is not acceptable because to them, it doesn’t smell
bad! It was not the fish they were complaining about, it was
the spices that weren’t used by whites and hence they were
offensive about it.
I once went
to see a flat in the US to rent it because I thought it was
more convenient since it was close to my university. The
white land lady told me frankly:
“You can’t
cook in the kitchen”
“I don’t
know how to cook”. I tried to avoid an unnecessary argument
because I knew why she had said that and she had a sigh of
relief. And then I asked her:
“Can I make
an omelet?”
“Yes” she
said
She knew
that an omelet only uses salt and may be black pepper and
even if I used the red chili powder it doesn’t ‘smell’!
I saw all
the other girls were allowed to cook, some Japanese girls
even made curry but instead of using the Indian spices they
used a curry cube bought from a Japanese store which made
the dish look and taste like a curry but there was no
pungent smell of the typical Indian curry in the kitchen.
The curry powder that is used by the white people is made
especially in a way that it makes the food non smelly to
them. I personally think that the spices are chemically
treated to take the offending odor away.
Some whites
simply refuse to give the room for rent to desis
because of the food smell or if they do they are told not to
cook their food. I was asked by a white lady in England:
“You don’t
cook curry do you?”
Before I
could answer, my friend said; “of course we do it is part of
our diet”.
She said “I
don’t have anything against Asians, my boss is Asian but I
cannot stand the smell of curry”! So we thanked her and left
without renting the room.
A Sindhi or
other desis will his or her own problems while
studying or staying with foreigners. They cook pork, at
breakfast on Sundays the smell of bacon (pork meat) is
noxious. And alcohol used in the house also is cause for
alarm. Beer smells ugly when opened. All these products will
be stored in the same fridge as your food! And you will
share the microwave in which pork has been warmed. Not to
mention that to buy halal chicken and lamb you will have to
go to special shops, not all supermarkets in England or
America have halal meat. It is advisable to buy lamb
because England is a cold country and goat meat will take
days to cook since goats are not found there, it is too
cold.
There are
special areas in which Muslims live and you might find some
Muslim butcher. In city of London, the desis have houses in
places such as Southall, Wembley etc. Southall has some
halal shops by Lahori butchers, but the area is a
residential place for the Sikh community which is not
friendly to Muslims. Sikhs have two underground gangs which
pick fights with Muslim youth time and again. Wembley is a
residential area for mainly Gujrati speaking Hindus and
Muslims from Kenya (they were taken from India to Kenya by
the British around 200 years ago and now some have migrated
to England). So Wembley is mainly a Gujrati area.
Then if you
go out of London, you will find that city of Bradford is
full of people from Azad Kashmir’s Kotli and Mirpur
districts. Kashmiris speak Pahari (a dialect of
Punjabi) and they were sent there by Bhutto Saheb. This has
brought prosperity to the region of Azad Kashmir. In New
York the desi areas include Jackson Heights and Queens.
Jackson heights is not very clean mind you. In both southall
and Wembley you can actually buy desi clothes,
fabrics and gold jewelry and same goes for New York’s
Jackson Heights and Queens.
The best
way is to find out how to find halal shops and other
necessary items is to go to the mosque and ask people there
to help you when you first move to a Western country. You
can find the phone numbers of local mosques on the web and
the telephone directory. In London you can call the talking
pages and they will give you all the information you need
including the timings of the next show of a movie in the
local cinema.
In America
the Muslim food scientists have written a book and it can be
ordered form the web, it lists all the supermarkets in
America and their halal products including soaps and
shampoos which do not use haram products. It must be
consulted because it is updated annually since products
change in the market. In America if you are stuck and
haven’t cooked you can always get a tub of hummus and buy
ready made naan from any ordinary supermarket. Hummus
is a paste made from mashing the chick peas (channa)
and adding some olive oil (zaitoon jot el) and you
can even add some Tahini sauce (tiran jo paste) to
make it more tasty. If you haven’t been able to buy meat
then just use ready made fish fingers in England (they are
called fish sticks in the US), fry them in the frying pan
and eat them with a fork. There is website called
www.desicookbook.com it uses the Indian recipes using
the Indian spices but with a manner that doesn’t make the
food smelly. So even a novice cook; can use it and not
having to worry about the complaints. Until someone writes a
Sindhi cook book you can use, you can actually make desi
food from desicookbook.com and take it to the mosque in the
US and no Arab or Turk will point to you and say:
“Hey don’t
bring your smelly food in here”!
April
26th, 2008 www.mehranmag.com |
