Raisins, hing & more: India's link with Afghan food | Economic Times

For a few weeks every year, the fruit sellers at Mumbai’s Crawford Market got fresh apricots from Afghanistan.They were golden-red, velvety-textured and had a complex sweetness, with subtle acid and caramel side notes. It was a reminder of another side of a land now seen as a hellhole of dust, death and desperation.Did some of the thousands scrambling to flee grab handfuls of Afghanistan’s famous dried fruits for sustenance?I once ate Afghani red raisins so large, fleshy and toffee sweet that they made all other raisins since seem inadequate. Helen Saberi’s 'Afghan Food and Cookery' describes raisins being made in double-storied rooms with slotted walls: “Called sayagi-khana, these rooms contain a network of long poles from floor to ceiling which are festooned with bunches of fresh grapes.” Fresh dry air circulating through the walls dehydrates the grapes, perhaps more gently than direct exposure to the harsh sun. How many of these rooms, or the vineyards for grapes, have survived these decades of war?Many Indians must have a soft spot for Afghans from early exposure to Rabindranath Tagore’s Kabuliwala. The gentle Afghan man of the story, who missed his daughter, had come to India, like many other such Kabuliwalas, to sell dried fruits. He would also have also sold asafoetida, though mentioning smelly hing presumably didn’t fit Tagore’s bittersweet story.Asafoetida has been grown in Afghanistan for centuries, though is hardly used in its cooking, other than a dried meat preparation called goshte-qagh. It was nearly all meant to be sold in India. Charles Yate, the British officer at the Panjdeh incident (1885), the closest Russia and Britain came to war within Afghanistan, wrote of encountering “hundreds of powindahs, the camel-carriers of Afghanistan, encamped outside the Kandahar gate of Herat, all engaged, they told us, in the transport of asafoetida to India for sale”. 85529933Fruit and asafoetida apart, Afghanistan was historically more a place through which products from other places travelled across the Silk Road.They left their mark on Afghan food, which features lentils and spices from India, Persian pilaus and soups and Central Asian dumplings and kebabs. It is a cuisine that the world will become more familiar with now as displaced Afghans cook their foods to make a living and to remember what they have lost.Afghan refugee clusters, like Lajpat Nagar in Delhi, already offer this and eating there is a complicated feeling. One can savour the food, but how to handle the suffering that led to it being there? In Durkhanai Ayubi’s 'Parwana', a cookbook that tells how her family fled to Australia in 1985, she suggests their food has a purpose beyond taste and nostalgia: “In a world increasingly trapped in a dominant narrative of nationalism and division, it was also about challenging, rejecting, and offering alternatives to the schisms and destruction such simplistic narratives unleashed.”Afghan food can be a reminder of a past that was diverse, peaceful and bountiful, and a hope that the country could someday be that way again.