MY MOTHER tells me that as a child I would wait outside the kitchen counting the whistles of the pressure cooker if meat was on the menu and immediately ask her to take my share out because I loved the chewiness of underdone meat. Many iconic dishes in Sindhi food feature goat and seafood. Professor Om Prakash, author of Economy and Food in Ancient India, notes that in Vedic times Sindhis were known for their high meat consumption.
Pre-Partition era, irrespective of faith, Sindhis had pretty much a similar diet. There were of course a small group of Hindus who were so-called ‘pure vegetarians’ (even no eggs), for instance, the Thattai Bhatias who eschewed even garlic and onions. But most Sindhis fall into the category of not eating meat on certain religious and festive days. Wrote James M’Murdo in An Account of the Country of Sindh: ‘The food of the greatest portion of natives in Sindh is fish and rice, although there are some particular sects whose customs do not admit of fish as an article of food. These are, however, very few, and confined to a very small number of Brahmans and Bhattias, the generality of both of whom do not scruple to eat fish.’
Voyager and explorer Alexander Hamilton also noted a high quality of fish and meat during his travels in the region between the late 17th to early 18th century. He observed that the food markets of Thatta were abound with black cattle (presumably the same as today for milk and ghee), large, plenty and excellent quality of mutton, besides, of course, some of the largest carp he had ever seen.
Paneer or Indian cottage cheese, and legumes such as kidney beans were never eaten, and understandably so, considering animal protein was so popular. Those ingredients have only now become more common, to supplant animal protein as more and more Sindhis converted to vegetarianism, post-Partition. Despite the growing number of people opting to be vegetarian, for our family, paneer is still a foreign taste.
After the Partition, the Hindu Sindhi refugees not only found themselves displaced, but also in a completely foreign land, having to learn new languages and even reorient their diets to match the beliefs and customs of their new brethren. The oft-heard refrain was, ‘They eat meat, wear weird clothes, speak a different language, and exclaim “Allah” at everything; they are surely Muslims in disguise.’
A similar dilemma was faced by the Muslim Sindhis in Pakistan, a group whose Islamic ideals were immediately put under scrutiny due to their belief in mendicants, attire, and eating habits that were similar to the Hindus, which included avoiding beef. Including beef in their diet was their way of demonstrating allegiance to the ethos of the new company they found themselves in.
Red meat
Goat is called bakro in Sindhi, and its meat is gosht or teevan, and at times even mutton. What is known as mutton in the UK (commonly, the meat of old sheep) is not the same as mutton in the subcontinent. Goat meat is also favoured in Ayurveda as it’s believed to be neither ‘hot’ nor ‘cold’, and lean and light. In the West, lamb is more common, so I cook mostly with lamb nowadays. It took me a while to get used to it, though. When I first cooked with lamb from the regular supermarket, the kitchen had a stink for days because of the way it was cut, with the fat not being trimmed. I decided never to cook with it again until I found a South Asian butcher.
Tips for buying meat
- Meat is always cooked on the bone, chopped into even pieces and trimmed of all fat. Before cooking, it’s always advisable to rinse the meat thoroughly.
- The preferred parts of the animal for stews and braises are: shank (sudhi), shank tendon (moushk), shoulder (kandho), waist (kamar), and chest (seen).
- When cooking offal, buy the freshest possible and cook immediately.
- Only minced meat is cooked with a bit of fat that comes specifically from the chest area and is termed kodhi, because the goat is quite a lean animal. In the West, if using lamb mince for stews, try to limit the fat content in the mince to under 10 percent. Only if it’s for seekh kebabs or patties/burgers use minced meat with at least 20 percent fat.
- We eat nose to tail, and don’t waste anything. As Thomas Postans wrote in his Personal Observations on Sindh: ‘The entrails of animals and disgusting offal are choice morceaux.’ I can confirm that nothing much has changed for us meat-loving Sindhis.
How to prep for goat/lamb brains
- Buy the freshest available, and never frozen.
- For 10 brains, bring a litre of water to a medium boil, mix one teaspoon salt and squeeze lime/lemon. Remove from the hob and leave the brains in for 30 minutes.
- Thereafter, turn the side over of each brain, pull the sac around the middle gently by the edge using your thumb and index finger, taking care not to disintegrate the main body. Brains are a lot like eggs in texture, and need a bit of gentle handling. Rinse under running tap water.
- Bring 800ml of water in a pan to a boil, and add a teaspoon of oil, one teaspoon salt, half teaspoon turmeric, and tip the brains in.
- Wait for the water to come to one good boil again, and then switch off. Immediately drain the water and transfer the brains to another dish to cool down. Taste the seasoning to decide if more will be needed when the brains are finally stir-fried.
- Store in the fridge, and cook over the course of a week. When stir-frying, first bring to room temperature.
Poultry
Chicken was not common in pre-Partition Sindh, hence the limited number of unique chicken dishes in the book. Even as a child, I hardly have any recollections of chicken being cooked at home. And on the rare occasion, it was usually refashioning meat dishes as chicken. More often than not we preferred to eat chicken at restaurants cooked in the tandoor. The renowned Indus scholar Iravatham Mahadevan wrote in one of his research papers that the chicken was probably domesticated in the IVC from where it made its way around the world. Many seals found at Mohenjo-daro carry the figure of cockerels, which according to Mahadevan implied the bird’s importance to the region. He concluded that the ancient name of Mohenjo-daro was probably Kukkutarma or ‘city of cockerels’. The word 'kukkut' has a Dravidian root, and made its way into Aryan texts where the word kukkut/kukkad was incorporated into Sanskrit. The word for chicken in Sindhi is also kukkad. However, the cockerels probably had ritualistic significance or were used for sports such as cockfighting, rather than as a source of food. It sort of solves the mystery as to why chicken made it into Sindhi cuisine only after Partition.
The only fowl that were consumed were wild or country chicken, duck or waterfowl like teal and mallard, and quail and partridge. Fowl were slaughtered for special occasions only, such as weddings, celebrations, or to honour a guest. The style of cooking involved smoking them over coals and seasoning them with just salt and pepper. This style of cooking is called saji from the Kohistani region (the hilly regions of Sindh), and came with the Balochi influence on Sindhi cuisine. Most chickens were probably raised for eggs, though consumption was limited and not as commonplace as today. My aunts told me that it took them a while to get used to the taste and texture of chicken, and it’s still not the preferred meat in our family. Partridge and quail is our choice. When we used to visit family in Rajasthan during vacations, my uncle would often treat us to roast partridge and quail caught in the villages where he was often posted as an engineer with the local electricity board. However, given the change in diets, including those who eschew red meat for health purposes, chicken has grown in popularity. Another contributor to this could also be the time required to cook, price and availability. All the meat recipes, even if not explicitly stated, can be cooked with poultry.
Tips for buying and cooking poultry
- Chicken is always cooked on the bone, without its skin.
- For stewing or braising, use bone-in drumsticks or chicken thighs. Or if you have a local butcher, buy a whole chicken and get it chopped evenly.
Fruits of the Sea
Fish is the most common and recurring symbol in the Indus Valley seals, which were used for trade purposes. Many of these seals have also been found at other contemporaneous sites in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Iran. The occurrence of fish on these seals is probably because dried fish was one of their chief export items. These exports, including shark fin and maw to China, continued until the time of the British. We call the bounty of the Indus, as ‘fruits of the sea’ or samdh ja mewa since the Indus is referred to as the sea, not a river.
Through the ages, almost every traveller or historian has made a reference to the abundance of fish in Sindh’s markets, especially the pallah (hilsa/shad in English, and is related to the herring) has an exalted status in Sindhi cuisine – it’s not just a fish or meat, it’s a pallah or a unique being. It’s the mount of our patron saint Uderolal or Jhulelal, and the God of water, Varuna, whose temple and shrine are both adjacent to each other, and can be found in the village of Uderolal near Nasarpur, Sindh. The pallah is treated as meat in Sindhi cooking, because of its oily texture, and so is never cooked with garlic or much oil. It can be substituted with salmon or sea trout, or shad – if you live in the USA.
Besides pallah, our other favourite fish is also a gift of the Indus, which is referred to as rohita in the Charaka Samhita and recommended because of its ease of digestion and high nutritive value. In Sindhi, we call it Sindhi macchi (fish of Sindh) or by its other name, dumbro. It’s from the same family as carp, and its generic name in northwest India is rohu. My friend Munir’s mum (who was my host in Sindh) told me that her husband is always amused with this description of the fish, and asks if the fish agreed to be branded as ‘Sindhi’.
Sindh is also blessed with a wide coastline along the Arabian Sea, so there has always been an abundance of sea fish in our diet. The favoured sea fish are pomfrets (paplet in Sindhi), surmai or kingfish/seer fish, rawas or Indian salmon, kurari or Indian mackerel, besides local prawns and crabs. If you are in the UK, the best fish to substitute in all the recipes is sea or rainbow trout, sea bass, and sea bream, which are all-rounders for stews, for stuffing, and frying.
Tips for buying and cooking fish
- All fish is cooked on the bone. The only fish I would recommend eating filletted is the pallah, due to its zillions of bones.
- Of course, you can also choose to eat filleted fish, but remember to make a rich fish stock. If you live in the West, you can buy salmon/other fish heads, usually available at a throwaway price. A 500g fish head costs about £1-2 generally, and it makes for a perfect base to make fish stock. Alternatively, use ready-made fish stock or cube for making the sauce. Fry the fillets and add to the sauce just before serving. Check the recipe for fried fish for tips on frying.
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The above text has been excerpted from Sapna Ajwani's latest book 'Sindh: Sindhi Recipes and Stories from a Forgotten Land' and is reproduced here with due permission of the publisher HarperCollins India.