Pashtun food and the table of hospitality

Food and honour

Among Pashtuns, as among their neighbours, food is central to hospitality. In her survey of cooking in Afghanistan for the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Nancy Hatch Dupree writes that cooking traditions are an integral part of the Afghan institution of hospitality, and that a family's honour and standing in the community are judged in good part by the generosity of its kitchen. Events from birth to death, as well as the turn of the seasons, are marked with feasts. [1]

Dupree also stresses that festive tables are the exception. Everyday meals for most people are simple, and regional dishes reflect the variety of the country and its links to the cooking of Central Asia, Iran and Pakistan. [1]

Bread and tea

The basic meal is bread with plenty of sweetened tea, black or green, with or without cardamom. Bread (nan) comes leavened or unleavened, in many shapes, from wheat, barley, maize or other grains. It is baked against the walls of a clay oven (tandur), or on a convex iron griddle over an open fire, the method many nomadic households prefer. Bread is so central that the word nan is used for food in general. [1]

Green tea often follows a meal. In Peshawar, diners at the restaurants of Namak Mandi are described lingering over cups of green tea after eating, and the green tea of the old Qissa Khwani Bazaar is part of the city's food culture. [2] [3]

Rice and palaw

On festive occasions the main dish is usually a mounded platter of rice. Palaw, rice cooked with large pieces of lamb or chicken, is especially popular, served alongside plain rice, stews and side dishes. Dupree mentions a lightly sweetened palaw flavoured with orange peel, almonds and pistachios. [1]

Kabuli palaw, also written qabili palaw, is described in AramcoWorld as Afghanistan's national dish: rice crowned with carrots, raisins and nuts. Because it once took a great deal of work to prepare, it was reserved mainly for ceremonial occasions. In Peshawar, a local version known as Peshawari pulao is among the dishes people seek out on holidays. [5] [3]

Kababs and the cooking of Namak Mandi

Kabab is a general name for several kinds of lamb dish served with bread. When grilled over charcoal on skewers (sikh), kababs may be cubes of lamb marinated in yogurt and garlic and threaded between pieces of fat, larger chunks on the bone, or minced meat shaped around the skewer. Others are fried in a pan or baked in heavy iron pots. [1]

Peshawar's Namak Mandi ("salt market") has become famous for this kind of meat cooking. An AFP report describes its cuisine as coming from generations-old recipes from the Pashtun tribal lands along the border with Afghanistan, and notes how plain it is compared with the spicier cooking of Pakistan's plains: tikka of salted meat skewered between cubes of fat and slow-cooked over wood, karahi of mutton cooked in rump fat with a little chilli and tomato, and chapli kabab (چپلي کباب), patties of minced beef and spices fried in fat. Lamb chops, paye (trotters) and dampukht also appear on the street's menus, and one shop owner traces his family's chapli kabab business back seventy-three years to a single frying pan. [2] [3]

Landi: meat for the winter

Landi, also called persanda, is mutton or goat meat dried for the winter. Writing in Dawn about the Zhob valley of Balochistan, Rafiullah Mandokhail describes it as a tradition kept up in rural and urban Pakhtun areas alike. Animals are slaughtered in December and January. The meat is cut into pieces, salted, rubbed with asafoetida and hung to dry in a shady yard; in cold enough weather it dries in about two weeks. The custom grew up because heavy snow could cut remote villages off from the towns. [4]

Landi is never eaten raw. It is boiled to wash off the salt and asafoetida, then cooked again, often in a pressure cooker, and served as a curry with rice or as a soup with bread. It is eaten on cold nights and offered to family members and guests. [4]

Dairy, fat and the rest of the table

Dairy fills out the table. Dupree lists yogurt (mast), buttermilk (dugh), drained yogurt (chaka), dried yogurt balls (qurut) and a rich clotted cream (qaymaq) eaten with bread at breakfast. Clarified butter and fat rendered from the tails of fat-tailed sheep were the traditional cooking fats until lighter vegetable oils spread from the 1960s. Spices such as cumin, coriander and cinnamon are common, but chillies are used sparingly. [1]

Food is also shared beyond the household. Dupree describes the distribution of food, especially sweets, as an act of thanksgiving in domestic religious ritual, and pilgrims at shrines giving out large quantities of palaw to the needy. [1]