Twist of Goodness in Pakistan:
Chicken with tomatoes,
turmeric, and fresh ginger.
By Lindsay Sterling
A fifteen-year-old young woman from
Pakistan recently taught me how to cook her favorite dish from home. The town
of Gilgit, where she is from in the Himalayas, is in her words, “a 4-hour drive
to China. There are mountain peaks covered with snow throughout the year. And
K2 is nearby.” It’s about a 24-hour drive from there to the Arabian Sea, but
she’s never been. “This [living in Maine] is my first time with the ocean. I love it. My host mom
loves the ocean, too. On Saturday or Sunday, when we’re wondering what to do,
we just drive to the ocean.”
The day
Savita Nooreen and I spent cooking together was March 21st, a
holiday called Novruz in her part of
the world. On this day Azerbaijanis, Indians, Pakistanis, Turks, Uzbeks, and
others celebrate spring, as well as peace, neighborliness, and reconciliation. Savita
began to teach me how to make jalfrezi, a
dish her family at home would be eating together on that day.
First you sauté onions, turmeric, and
bite-sized pieces of chicken breast in oil. Then once the chicken is cooked on
the outside and the onions are soft, you add tomato, chili powder, cumin, and a
little water. You put the lid on and let that cook for fifteen minutes until
the onions melt into an orange-brown sauce. In a mortar and pestle, you mash fresh ginger
into a paste. At the end of the cooking process, you mix it into the chicken along
with chopped cilantro leaves and cardamom powder.
As we cooked, we talked. “Someone on the
school bus asked me if we have houses or we live in caves,” she said in
disbelief. “It [Pakistan] is the same as here,” she asserted. “It is a developing country,” she clarified, “Fifty
to sixty years ago there was no connection with the rest of the world. The
northern part had no schools. But now it’s just like Freeport [Maine]. We have
schools, colleges, universities…”
As uncomfortable as it made me, I
had to bring up the t-word. After
all, most Americans associate Pakistan with the workings of Osama bin Laden. My
question, embarrassingly, came out this way. “Have you ever seen a terrorist?” She
responded, “My place is peaceful. I haven’t seen a terrorist (or at least I
haven’t known it) or any sort of distraction or any sort of tension.” She
indicated that a small percentage of the people in Pakistan are causing the
trouble. It reminded me of a conversation I once had with an Afghani woman who
said something along these lines: there are bad people everywhere. Let’s not
let them ruin what the rest of us think of each other.
Savita then shared a concern from her
community at home with me. “Some worried that I might get spoiled [here]. There
is the stereotype that all American kids party a lot, bad kind of activities. She’s
been Facebooking with her friends from home, sharing the news. “It’s just the
same [here as home]. Parents keep an eye on you and your friends. We go to
school. We study.”
Jalfrezi
tasted a lot like Indian food: bites of meat in a zippy sauce, served with rice.
I’m actually not sure whether to call it Indian or Pakistani because my Indian
friend also knows jalfrezi as her
native food, and it was voted the most popular Indian dish in the UK. Certain things
are just beyond borders, like Novrus, chicken jalfrezi, and – now I think about it – peace.
Copyright 2014 Lindsay Sterling
