Travel
Entranced at Cuckoo’s (Handi gosht)
When my friend Katie Parla asked me about my best bite of 2011 I had to think hard. There were so many! Kaymak in Istanbul, momo’s in Kathmandu, gnocchi all’amatriciana in Rome, my mom’s hare stew in Rotterdam. But, there was only one restaurant experience that really stood out: Cuckoo’s Den in Lahore, Pakistan.
Pakistan is not your average tourist destination, I know. Unless you have a reason to visit (I went for Children of Tomorrow, the education organization I volunteer for), western governments discourage visiting the country at this point in time. That’s unfortunate, because from what I’ve seen during two visits the landscapes are unique, the people most hospitable and the food just a-ma-zing. Pakistanis are true masters of barbecue and grill entire slabs of meat to sheer perfection.
The beautiful old city Lahore is known as the food capital of Pakistan, ever since the era of the Mughals. Here, all discussions sooner or later arrive at: ‘What are we eating? And when? ‘Food is the only real entertainment we have these days’, my host told me. He and his wife took me to Cuckoo’s Den. This famous restaurant is in the red light district of old Lahore (yes, Lahore has a red light district, Heera Mandi. Read more on it here). The owner is an artist, whose mother was a prostitute. Painted portraits of local women line the walls at the entrance. As you climb up three flights of steep marble stairs, encountering more objets d’art, dark carved wood and old tiles, the smell of grilled meat intensifies.
When we reached the rooftop, it left me speechless. Dimly lit by only a few bulbs that give the wafts of smoke a mystical air, the rooftop is a museum of curiosities. Roman busts mixed with carved elephants, mixed with buddha’s and ornaments. And, from any one of the wobbly tables you have a view on the majestic Badshahi Mosque.
The funny thing is, I don’t even remember the food all that well. I know it was good, very good indeed, especially the handi gosht (mutton stew). But in this ambiance, sitting outside in the sweltering Lahore air, you could’ve served me anything. I was under Cuckoo’s spell.
Handi Gosht (Pakistani mutton stew)
Handi gosht is a spicy mutton stew named after the type of cooking vessel, a handi. I didn’t have one, but used a Dutch oven instead. This recipe is adapted from Fazia’s Pakistan.
- 3 small dried chilies (seeds removed)
- 1 teaspoon fresh ginger
- 1 teaspoon fresh garlic
- ½ teaspoon cinnamon
- ¼ teaspoon cloves (or 1 whole)
- 3 black peppercorns
- 1 big black cardamom pod
- 4 tablespoons cooking oil
- 1 onion (chopped)
- 1 kilo or 2.5 pounds mutton (big chunks)
- 100 grams plain yoghurt (preferably Greek)
- 1 tablespoon of flour mixed with 2 spoons of water
With a mortar and pestle or in a food processor, grind chilies, ginger, garlic, cinnamon, cloves, peppercorns, cardamom and a pinch of salt to a spice paste. Add a little oil to smoothen.
In a Dutch oven, heat cooking oil. Fry the onions until transparent. Add the spice mix and fry for 5-7 minutes. Add a little water if the spices stick to the pan.
Add the mutton chunks and fry for a few minutes, until meat is coated. Add yoghurt and mix well. Add a cup of water, bring to a boil, then cover and let simmer until the meat is tender (an hour or so).
Add the flour/water mixture, stir and let simmer for another 15-20 minutes.
Serve with garnishes of garlic, fresh chilies and cilantro.
Generous helpings (Chicken Keema)
Pakistanis take immense pride in welcoming guests. And welcome I felt during my visit, which was my first and hopefully not my last. I’d like to go back for the people and the food. In fact, these two are closely entwined. Hospitality is so engrained in the culture that people would rather go hungry than not offer something to a guest.
The reason for our visit was sad. We, a team of volunteers of Children of Tomorrow, went for a disaster relief effort, distributing water filters to the flood-affected areas. But even there, in a small tent village where we paused during our trip from Karachi to Thatta, we were greeted with karak chai, the omnipresent strong and sweet milk tea. The villagers insisted we have some food, and we had a hard time explaining lunch was waiting for us elsewhere.
Pakistani food wasn’t new to me, I had lots of it in New York, but the experience is always so different in its original setting. At any restaurant you’ll find barbecue chefs, true masters, sweating at charcoal grills tending huge kebab skewers, ribs and other chunks of juicy meat. Other chefs operate the tandoor, a cylindrical clay oven, from which soft naans and succulent chicken tikka emerge. As a rule there is more food on the table than everyone can possibly consume. Just when you’re priding yourself on the quantities you’ve managed to put away, new dishes arrive at the table. They’re always just too good to turn down (not to mention it’d be impolite), so you just stretch yourself.
I’ve tried amazing fish curry, neehari (a beef stew), brain curry (that was a first!), liver curry and naan bread with minced meat. They tasted best when washed down with a refreshing, fresh pomegranate juice with a pinch of Himalayan salt. Finally, sweet desserts like kulfi made me forget how full I actually was.
In my experience, Pakistan is a kind of ‘Italy plus’, in the way the concept of time is a bit more elastic, traffic is a bit more chaotic, family ties are a bit tighter and food and hospitality are a bit more important. And trust me, family and food are steady pillars of Italian culture, so go figure the preeminence of both in Pakistan.
Not only am I addicted to the strong milk tea now, I also got fanatical about recreating dishes I tasted in my Rome kitchen. The best dish I had was at Gymkhana Club in Karachi, a refreshing minced chicken curry with cilantro and spring onions. My version turned out nice, but it didn’t come close to the version I had in Pakistan.
I guess I have to back and try it again. I’m already looking forward to seconds.
Chicken Keema (ground chicken curry)
For the garlic-ginger paste: ½ cup cilantro, 4 garlic cloves, 2 cm fresh ginger, 2 tablespoons vegetable oil. Finely chop the ingredients and blend them to a fine paste.
- 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
- 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
- 1 bay leaf
- 1-2 cardamom pods
- 2 cloves
- 2 teaspoons garlic-ginger paste
- 1 yellow onion, chopped
- 3 spring onions, sliced (including the green part, but put this aside)
- 3 roma tomatoes, peeled, chopped into tiny cubes
- 1 large carrot, chopped into tiny cubes
- 1 cup green peas
- 1 teaspoon red chili powder
- 1 teaspoon turmeric powder
- 1 teaspoon garam masala powder
- 1 pound finely ground chicken
- salt to taste
To garnish:
Chopped cilantro
Lemon wedge
Heat the oil and add the cumin seeds, bay leaf, cardamom pods and cloves and sauté for one minute. Add the ginger-garlic paste and sauté for another minute. Add the onions and sauté for 3 minutes or until golden. Add tomatoes, carrots and green peas and fry until oil separates. Add chili, turmeric and garam masala powder and cook for a few minutes until you add the ground chicken. Mix thoroughly, so chicken pieces don’t stick. Add salt to taste and simmer for another 10 minutes or until meat is done. Add the green parts of the spring onion during the last 3 minutes and take out the bay leaf, cardamom pods and cloves. Garnish with cilantro and a lemon wedge.
Vendanges a Fleurie (Coq au vin)
The vendanges in Beaujolais are in full swing. Two years ago I worked the fields during this grape harvest, one of the best times I ever had. It’s such a kind gesture of time that you forget all the pain. I still feel a warm glow spreading through me when I think back. Sort of like a good wine buzz.
Before my rite of initiation into Frenchness, I could have never imagined I would ever need, truly need, a drink at 9.30 in the morning. But only a cup of cool red wine picked me up and kept me going until lunch. Dirt-caked clothes, hands full of cuts and blisters, I had given up to rub off the black soot. My back was whining like a recalcitrant adolescent, making it pretty clear to me that it wouldn’t obey me much longer.
I must have some twisted idea of fun. Where’s the fun in standing hunched over for eight hours a day, balancing like a mountain goat on slippery slopes, doing your very best to get all the bunches off the vines under the ever-watchful eye of le patron?
Our team consisted of about thirty young people from all over the world, and we were hosted at a family-owned winehouse in Fleurie, a cute town in the middle of a hilly patchwork blanket of vineyards. The vine grower and his wife shared the work with his brother-in-law, the winemaker, and his wife. The equation was simple: one couple made sure there were enough good grapes and the other made sure the grapes turned into good wine. The 22-year old son was a starting wine farmer himself.
Every day was pretty much the same. At six thirty, you rubbed the sleep out of your eyes, quickly downed some coffee and baguettes, until we heard the dreaded ‘au boulot!’ (to work!). We went on our way, buckets and cutting shears in hand. The patron assigned you to a row and off you went. Every time you finally finished a row with a sigh of relief, there would always be another row. And another one. Minor injuries occurred frequently, those shears make mean cuts. Sweet mother of Jesus! (pardon my French…) I kept busy observing the different shapes and sizes of the vines and grapes while hammering away. The knobbly vines, some of them more than fifty years old, reminded me of gnarled old men.
While you’re alone with your thoughts, grape picking is actually teamwork. People help you finish your row, and you need to pay attention when the porteur, a strong fellow carrying a gigantic bucket on his back, comes by to let you empty your bucket into his. They made you hang in there when you were about to give up, just by yelling something utterly ridiculous.
After two hours: a break. A straw basket with hunks of baguette appeared miraculously, along with a bag of salami slices and another with chocolate. Fat, carbs and sugar: the casse croute, a second breakfast on the land had all you need to keep you going until lunch. And a little wine of course, ‘un peu de courage’ as we called it.
When lunchtime finally arrived, we ecstatically attacked the food laid out on the table. A typical lunch would consist of crisp lettuce with lardoons soaked in a tangy Dijon-mustard dressing or home-made pâtés, followed by rich meat stews you could lavishly sop up with baguette, followed by bouncy cheeses and chocolate éclairs, all washed down with plenty of vin rouge. We just ate and ate and ate the hearty homemade food until reality hit us that we had to get back to work and we were too full. Thankfully we could look forward to the exact same repetition of this eat-drink-be merry-ritual in the evening. And at night it got even better.
For at night, after dinner, we were invited to visit ‘la cave’ by our boss, who got little sparks in his eyes just by saying the word. It turned out to be some sort of sanctity where we got to taste the real deal, not the watered-down plonk we knocked back all day. Here we drank the friendly, flowery, sensual wine of Fleurie, the one that turned everyone in our group into an even more beautiful person. Our boss transformed into a kind, funny and thoroughly satisfied-looking man, having put his harvest worries on hold for the night. We talked and laughed and bullshitted until our eyelids simply dropped, and we dragged ourselves to bed, knowing there would be another demanding day ahead of us.
I loved the moment when we walked to the vineyards in the early morning and looked out over the hills, where wafts of fog hung in the air like long strands of granny’s hair and the sun spread a pinkish glow over the village further down. The grapes were covered with perfect dew tears. The landscape looked so serene and unreal that I wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow if a little dwarf had sprung out from the vines. I would have joined his little happy dance.
Unsurprisingly, the other moment of ultimate bliss in the day arrived at the very end. The last hour lasted a lifetime, but when you looked around and saw the fatigued faces illuminated by the setting sun you simply pulled through. You saw true happiness breaking through the weary expressions when the boss said: c’est bon, c’est fini. I often walked back to our chateau giddy with exhaustion, feeling every fiber in my body. Eight hours of grape picking! And I am still alive! Several times I reached a grape-picker’s high: feeling so tired and happy I could only goofily smile.
It’s amazing how quickly a group of strangers turns into family when you’re spending all your time together. We shared everything: laughs, food, wine, pain killers, three toilets, the deafening snoring during the night. After we were done picking, our celebration bacchanal lasted for almost two days. We joined in a water fight, sung French drinking songs, played pétanque (French bocce balls) and just hung out some more. “I hope I wasn’t too hard on you”, our boss said to me and some German girls during our goodbyes. “You did very well. Really, if you have finished the vendanges, you can take every hurdle in life.” The compliment gave our tired selves a huge boost.
Back home, I wasn’t just going through a slight alcohol withdrawal. I suffered from an overall hangover I recognized as post-summer camp nostalgia. I hadspent a lot of time with my new friends Exuberance, Self-indulgence, and Invincible, after I had told my longtime wiseass friend Self-restraint to take a hike. I had felt so free and alive, and I wanted to hang on to this feeling.
When I pour myself a glass of Fleurie in remembrance, I smell the wine long and hard. I sense tones of hard work, togetherness and friendship. Its bouquet is balanced, with equal notes of pain and pleasure.
This is the recipe for a traditional, rich coq au vin, that we had on our last night. I used a light Italian wine, because it’s really really hard to find French wine here! I recommend you use a decent wine, because if you use some plonk you’ll taste it.
Coq au vin
Serves 4
- 600 ml light red wine (preferably a Burgundy)
- 150 ml chicken stock (preferably home-made)
- 2 bay leaves
- 200 grams mushrooms, quartered
- 2 large chicken thighs/legs
- 1 tablespoon butter
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 125 gram pancetta, cubed (unsmoked bacon)
- 1 large golden onion, finely chopped
- 4 garlic cloves, crushed
- 250 gr carrots
- 1 sprig fresh thyme
- 1 tablespoon of flour, 1 tablespoon of butter, mixed to a paste
- 1 big handful of fresh parsley, chopped
Bring wine with broth and bay leaves to a boil, turn down the heat and reduce until you have about half the amount left. Add the mushrooms during the last five minutes and strain the sauce, set the mushrooms aside.
Cut the chicken in smaller pieces if you want. I used two big thigs/legs. Melt the butter with the oil in a frying pan, and fry the chicken pieces on both sides until they’re golden. Move the chicken to a casserole that is large enough for the meat to be covered with liquid later.
Fry the pancetta in the same frying pan, transfer them to the casserole, then gently fry the onion, crushed garlic cloves and carrots for 5-10 minutes (you won’t need to add extra oil). Add everything to the casserole.
Now pour the wine mix over the chicken, add freshly ground black pepper, a little salt and a sprig of thyme. Put a lid on the casserole and let the chicken simmer for about 40 minutes. Add the mushrooms during the last 10 minutes.
Transfer the chicken, bacon, onions, carrots and mushrooms to a serving dish and keep warm. Get rid of the bay leaves and thyme. Bring the liquid to a boil and reduce it further, until you have about 2/3 thirds left. Add the butter-flour paste and whisk it in until the sauce has thickened. Pour the sauce over the chicken and, if you want, heat it up in a hot oven for another 10-15 minutes to let the flavors marry.
Before you serve the dish, sprinkle some chopped parsley over it. Serve with fresh baguettes and a salad.
Thumbs up for Corsica (Italian-style Fiadone)
One piece of advice if you ever want to visit Corsica (and trust me, you want to): never go without your own wheels. Local buses are an absolute nightmare. They run infrequently, if they run at all.
When L. and I visited this wonderful island a few weeks ago, we got stuck more than once. The nearest beach from our first camping was an 8k walk. Having lugged all our stuff there, we just didn’t have the energy. Another camping was right next to a paradisal white-sand-crystal-water-type beach, but after lazing there for a day we felt languid. We tried hiking to the nearest town, but turned halfway because we didn’t want to end up as road kill.
What to do? L. stuck her thumb out. Just like that. I had never hitchhiked before and felt a strange resistance to do so. But it was broad daylight and we weren’t at some ghastly highway exit. Two minutes later, a lady stopped and gave us a ride up. She had lived in Cervione her whole life and was proud to show us around. In the town we met more warm folks: a vendor of local products who let us taste the entire store, a harmless drunk who asked us if we didn’t find the Corsican men the most beautiful in the world (not really), the staff at the family restaurant. After a simple but copious meal there, another lady offered to drive us back.
Sometimes, being at a disadvantage works in your favor. Through our autostop adventures we learned a lot about the island, the customs and the food. Corsicans are proud people in general, but especially smug about their food. In the mountainous areas they have lived an isolated and rugged outdoor life for centuries. The cuisine of medieval days still exists: lots of hearty stews and soups to keep warm. Wild boar, salamis and other charcuterie, and dried cheeses to pull through winter. And of course, chestnuts and hazelnuts in abundance. These nuts were and are used in fritters, souffles, beer and well, in mostly everything you can think of. I bought this little jar of salinu, a mixture of hazelnuts (90%) and salt (10%), which is like sprinkling fairydust over veggies, cheese and omelets.
Brocciu is also ubiquitous. It’s a whey cheese, like ricotta but coarser, and tastier. The Corsicans use it in dishes both sweet and savory. Fiadone is a sweet dessert, often doused with liquor. I created an Italian version with ricotta and used a bit of limoncello to sweeten it up.
Italian-style Fiadone
Serves 4
- 4 eggs
- 125 gr sugar (about ½ cup)
- 500 gr brocciu (or ricotta) (about 2.5 cup)
- grated rind of 1 lemon
- 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
- 2 tablespoons limoncello (lemon liquor)
Preheat the oven to 220 degrees Celsius. Beat the eggs with the sugar to a fluffy, pale yellow mass. Beat the ricotta in, together with the lemon zest, lemon juice and limoncello. Pour the mixture into four buttered ramekins or 1 large buttered baking dish. Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes, or when a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. Placer under a broiler for the last 2 minutes (keep a close eye on it!) to brown the top layer a bit.
