Sumayya Usmani’s approach to cooking has been shaped by the strong women in her life, who inspired her to trust her instincts in the kitchen rather than following a written recipe. In her new book, the challenge has been to capture that wisdom on pages that tell the story of a meld of influences, cultures and experiences, and the result is an acutely personal food memoir, with recipes that go way beyond mere lists of ingredients and instructions
Recipes from the heart.
When I imagine my mother, I see her in the kitchen, preparing a meal and measuring spices with her fingers. My grandmothers and mother all cooked without recipes, recollecting and re-creating meals using their senses.
‘Why don’t you use any of the books or measure anything, Mummy?’ I’d ask.
‘You can’t cook with words,’ she’d say. ‘You need to trust your senses – nobody can cook well otherwise. You’ll never need to weigh and measure if you let your senses guide you. I just buy books for ideas.’
I grew up around this way of cooking, called ‘andaza’, which translates as ‘estimation’ but really encompasses what I like to think of as the art of sensory cooking. Even as a young child I was fascinated by the idea that a recipe could turn out differently when it was cooked by someone else, that we all had a different ‘flavour in our hands’ that made a dish unique to us.
There was always life in the kitchen – it was almost a sacred space, the female domain, willingly occupied not from a sense of duty but rather a sense of ownership and togetherness.
Growing up, I felt a little displaced. I was born in Karachi and lived there until I was a year old, but then led a wandering life aboard merchant ships as a child (my father was a captain in Pakistan’s merchant navy), interspersed with spells in Karachi and short bursts in England between voyages, before spending my adolescence and early adulthood back in Karachi.
I struggled with conformity, convention and what it meant to not have had a ‘normal’ childhood. My teenage years in Pakistan took place during a turbulent time of martial law and restrictions, followed by political strife. The kitchen was the one place I felt secure – there was something about its dependability in my life that made it feel like home. There was such familiarity and security in knowing that the same aromas, flavours and textures my mother made on the ships could be re-created in another place, at another time. For me, home was never just a place; it was a sensory experience that began in the kitchen.
Cooking offered me strength in times of
