Then I followed the five instructions on the box as closely as I could. I took out my largest stockpot, measured half a cup of oil, sautéed a kilo of meat along with the nihari masala, added eighteen cups of water and two kilos of marrow bones.
The sheer proportions unsettled me—eighteen cups of water? Surely that couldn’t be right. But I had to trust the box, since it was my only guide. I waited six hours, after which I was meant to add one cup of flour, dissolved in two cups of water, and bring everything to a boil for fifteen minutes.
I waited until the last minute to do this, until her train had nearly arrived. My stockpot was already full almost to brimming, so I used far less water to make the slurry. I had a feeling this would cause problems, but I didn’t know what difference it might make, exactly. I drove off to pick her up as the pot simmered, told her what I’d made, warned her it was going awry. I cooked for gatherings often; I went against what I already knew in cooking a new dish for a guest, rather than one I was confident in.
“You made me nihari?” she asked, her face softening. “But it takes so long to cook.”
I returned to find clots of what looked like fat rising to the surface. I skimmed these clots off, before realizing that the flour was puffing itself into dumpling bits, rather than thickening the stock into gravy, as it was meant to.
“I don’t know if it’ll taste like nihari,” I warned her. “It may not turn out at all.”
“It smells like nihari,” she said, despite having seen me battle the floating flour clots. The smells were right, but the textures of the dish were all wrong. The gravy never thickened, and so instead the dish became a soup of sorts, with a thinner, watery consistency.
The last step was to fry a whole sliced onion in more oil in a separate pan until golden, and then top the stockpot. This at least I did successfully. Nearly everything else was wrong with my execution of the dish. The tendons in the beef shank become gelatinous, lending the meat a soft quality. The cut I’d gotten was drier, firmer. I served the meat with brown rice, when it’s typically eaten with naan.
She said kindly, “The flavors are there.
“It’s nihari,” she said happily, as she ate. “You made me nihari.”
* * *
Certain areas of culture are so primal to one’s place of birth: language, food. When she speaks in Urdu with family and friends, when she translates for me, I’m reminded of how inaccessible certain fundamental parts of ourselves are to those who don’t share places of origin.
Language is harder to learn—I doubt I’ll ever learn fluency in languages I’d like to speak, even ones I’ve studied for decades, like Spanish. Food is a different story. Food is easily shared.
* * *
I’m glad for the effort of having made the dish, and I’m also glad to no longer make it. Now I happily join her in eating the nihari that someone else has more capably made. As she tried to warn me, it’s a dish well suited to families or restaurants—the proportions too large, the cooking time too long, the ingredients too difficult to buy. We eat often at her favorite Pakistani restaurant, where the surroundings are bare-bones, but the food announces itself. The men working there nearly always slide extra food onto her tray before beckoning her over.
We tear off pieces of freshly made naan from rounds bigger than a plate, pinch bits of beef shank with the bread, drag the same bread through the dark gra
vy. The dish comes topped with slivers of ginger, with a red oil slick, with a side of raw onions and chopped carrots and jalapeños. These aren’t flavors for the timid. Nihari reminds me of Vietnamese beef stew, though with different spices—ones with which I’m not familiar and can’t identify, even after having cooked it. I see why she craves this dish—it’s fiery, hearty, substantial.
* * *
Since then the ways I taste food have changed. As I’ve embraced the complexity of Pakistani flavors, which once tasted overpowering, other foods often taste bland to me, too.
“Most people I know who like to cook, like to cook for other people,” she told me once, and this resonated with my experience of cooking as an act of caretaking, of love. She echoes the sentiment now that she herself has begun cooking.
“I never liked cooking before you,” she told me. I’ve never asked her to, definitely don’t expect it—there’s nothing like expectation to kill one’s desire to cook—but she makes her favorite recipes from childhood, and we share them together.
“It has something to do with home, doesn’t it?” I ask, and she agrees. If she doesn’t make these dishes, the ones that she can’t find in restaurants, she has only the memory of those flavors. Certain dishes can transport us back to a place of childlike innocence.
“It’s not just that,” she says. “I’ve never cooked for anyone else before. I like taking care of you.”
There’s freedom in cooking with someone who has her own lexicon of food. As with most aspects, we’re stronger because of the separate narratives we share.
It’s become joint discovery, as we introduce each other to ingredients or dishes or techniques. It’s flavor I crave, regardless of where it originates. We make odd fusions, adding freshly made pasta to keema (ground beef seasoned with ginger, cilantro, and peas). We substitute rice wine vinegar for tamarind in the quick okra sauté that she loves, talk about bhindi masala’s similarity to a South Sudanese okra recipe discussed in the Times.
We buy fresh chickpeas and shell them, sauté them in spices, collaborating and taking turns as we cook. Certain things I’ve learned over time—how to layer flavors, and which flavors I love. I’ve introduced her to kaffir lime leaf, something I add in thin strips to pancakes, or use to season fish or shrimp or soup.
She cooks with ginger-garlic paste, an ingredient I’ve never used for its negative associations. For a bit my mother kept large plastic jars of minced garlic on hand; she never learned to cook the rawness out of it, used it only as a shortcut for dishes she didn’t want to cook and didn’t derive joy from—which translated to largely raw or burnt, inedible food. Now I learn to appreciate those ingredients anew.
I’m learning how little I know of spices and blends. I knew before to begin cooking by tempering spices in warmed oil—this technique is common in Italian and South Asian cuisine. I’ve learned from her to finish dishes by pouring over tarka—the oil slick in which aromatics like garlic, ginger, and red chili have been sautéed. I’ve urged her to salt every addition to a pan as she goes, to coax more flavor from what we do agree to use.
Garam masala has always intimidated me—I still don’t know what, exactly, is in it. Pot roast was a totally foreign concept when I first started cooking it. Now I update the all-American pot roast I used to make with my midwestern ex-boyfriend, as we cook together out of a slow cooker in a summer basement rental in Chicago. This new version of pot roast, in which garam masala and dried chilis replace oregano and rosemary, cinnamon-y from the masala and sweet from cubed sweet potatoes, tastes like the dish I’ve wanted all along, without knowing it.
I take a chance on nostalgia one day. For her, mangos are something she rarely buys here, because they fall so short of Pakistani mangos. I understand. So often when I palm mangos in grocery stores here, whether hard or puckered, they smell of nothing. After watching other customers buy cans of mango pulp at Patel Brothers, I purchase the same, despite her skepticism. I open the can, sniff the sweet, fruity ripeness, and know I’ve won.