Traveling the Foodways with Mrs. H

by Shakira Hussein

I didn’t leave the nanny job because of the poor quality of the household cuisine, but let’s just say that the lacklustre food didn’t help. At the time, I had just arrived in London from Australia, so English food came as a shock. The family’s dietary staple were the leftover airline meals that Julia Smyth-Brown brought home from her job as a cabin attendant with British Airways. Julia worked on the Concorde flights, then regarded as the height of jet-setting glamour and sophistication. But a leftover airline meal is still a leftover airline meal, whether or not it has just crossed the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound. The remainder of the Smythe-Brown diet consisted of foodstuffs whose very existence I was horrified to learn about—Smash Instant Mashed Potato, for example, or Gerald’s favourite treat: a bowl of supermarket white bread covered with milk and sugar and zapped in the microwave for two minutes. Occasionally, I would cook one of the curries I had learned from my grandmother and aunts who lived on the other side of the river in south London, making sure to lower the level of chilli in order not to challenge the Smythe-Browns’ taste buds. Regardless, none of them could bring themselves to sample so much as a mouthful—they would not stop complaining about the smell of garlic in the kitchen for days afterwards.

The lousy food turned out to be symptomatic of deeper issues, as I discovered when I tried to keep a young child entertained for a few minutes by teaching her to write her name in Devanagari script. Her father provided us both with a life lesson in bigotry instead, decreeing that there was to be no Hindi, not in this house. According to him, there was quite enough of that sort of nonsense in schools, thank you very much.

Given the popularity of Australian nannies in London, I didn’t expect to have much trouble finding another job. Unfortunately this popularity rested on a stereotype of Australians as cheerful, sporty, and (of course) blonde. I listened as the agency phoned prospective employers. “I’ve got a lovely little girl here for you, with great childcare references and a degree. No, it doesn’t sound like an Australian name, does it? Well, born and bred, she assures me…”

Finally, the agency asked if I would consider a job as a live-in companion and household help to an elderly Jewish woman in Kensington. The main drawback of this job, I was warned, was that I would need to learn to cook ‘their type of food’. But after my experience with the Smythe-Browns, learning to cook a repertoire of Iranian Jewish recipes sounded like a bonus rather than a liability.

Mrs. H had grown up in Iraq, but spent the early years of her married life in Tehran before migrating with her family to France and then London in the 1950s. She spoke what she referred to as ‘Jewish Arabic’ with her daughter and their network of Sephardi Jewish friends. As such, she saw my paternal Pakistani background as a point of connection. “We like you because we think that you are more like us,” she told me a few weeks after I moved in. On my part, I felt that despite the disparities in our age, ethno-religious identity, political outlooks (the H family were die-hard Tories) and social class, Mrs. H was ‘more like me’ than the Smyth-Browns could ever be—not least because of the overlap in our dietary preferences. The meals that I prepared under Mrs. H’s direction were familiar enough to be comforting, and different enough to be exciting.

Mrs. H’s repertoire was summed up by the title of the one and only recipe book on her shelf: The Best of Baghdad Cooking, with treats from Tehran by Daisy Iny. She seldom needed to consult the book except when she was baking sweets for the holidays, but I liked to flip through it for insights into the food we were cooking and the world in which Mrs. H had spent her formative years. Both Daisy Iny and Mrs. H had grown up in Baghdad and then lived in Tehran before migrating to the west. As Mrs. Iny wrote in the introduction to her book, throughout her life in Baghdad, Tehran and Beirut,

I enjoyed basically the same cuisine because political boundaries do not erase cultural, especially
culinary, ties. Each area, of course, does retain certain distinctive cultural traits. Baghdad, as a world
in microcosm—where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together—was a place whose inhabitants ate much the same kind of food, though each community followed its tradition and prescribed way of
certain dishes.

Apart from the allotted one-and-a-half days off each week, all my time was at Mrs. H’s disposal; most of my waking hours were spent in her company. And it would have been a claustrophobic existence, if not for the journeys that we took along the foodways of the globe. Like Mrs. Iny’s description of Baghdad in the 1930s, London was ‘a world in a microcosm’, though as the Smythe-Browns had illustrated to me, its inhabitants did not all eat the same kind of food.

Mrs. H, on the other hand, did not allow her adherence to kosher regulations prevent her from taking full advantage of London’s culinary diversity. Although most of the everyday grocery items for her household were purchased from the nearby Safeway, cherry tomatoes were procured from Marks and Spencer. And parsley, for some reason that I was never able to fathom, had to come from the Harrods food hall. Ingredients such as spices, orange blossom water, date syrup, hunza apricots, dried limes and pistachio-studded halwa would be purchased from the Arab grocery stores in Earl’s Court. Meat and chicken were delivered by the kosher butcher (that is, until his licence was withdrawn after he left his wife for a non-Jewish woman).

Mrs. H was outraged. But her ire over this transgression was directed less at the butcher’s faithlessness than at the inconvenience the upheaval in his personal life caused to his customers, since his replacement did not prepare the meat in the way that Mrs. H preferred. Once a week, Mrs. H would take a long bus trip to the Jewish heartland of Golders Green to buy challah for the Shabbat meal. And as soon as we got home, the flat had to be prepared for the social events that she hosted there—afternoon teas and bridge games with other elderly Sephardi women like herself, as well as the lavish feasts for her family and friends on Friday nights and other holidays. The snow-white linen tablecloth and napkins had to be washed and ironed, the silverware polished, the crystal wine glasses carefully cleaned.

Learning the basic principles for keeping a kosher kitchen was not particularly difficult, given that Mrs. H was always on hand to explain them to me. Pork, of course, never entered the premises, while meat and dairy were not to be consumed in the same meal and had to be stored and handled separately. There were separate sets of crockery and utensils for milk products and meat. All the week’s chores had to be completed and the meal ready to be served before sunset on Friday, when Mrs. H would light the candles to mark the beginning of the Shabbat.

The food that I prepared under Mrs. H’s direction was the furthest thing from Instant Smashed Potato as possible. I’d thought that I already knew how to make chicken soup, but that was before Mrs. H taught me to plunge the bird’s feet into boiling water, peel the skin away like a glove, and simmer them with the rest of the bones, elevating it into a more intense, pungent broth than any I had ever tasted. And while I’d always liked grilled aubergine, I learned to brush it with olive oil and date syrup, which turned it into a passionate love affair. The fresh tang of the vivid green tabouli almost justified the Harrods price tag, except I was pretty confident that it would have tasted just as good if we’d used the parsley from Safeway. Dessert was usually a chocolate mousse served with strawberries and flavoured with rum—or at least, it was flavoured with rum until one of Mrs. H’s grandsons realised that this was preventing me from eating it, and bought a bottle of alcohol-free rum flavouring so I didn’t have to miss out.

Dishes from the Ashkenazi diaspora would make occasional appearances at Mrs. H’s table: goulash, bagels, the gefilte fish that she was occasionally gifted by friends. However, her core culinary disposition remained Sephardi, which sometimes caused raised eyebrows among Ashkenazi guests. Mrs. H’s son-in-law Cyril—who had grown up in the East End of London when it was still a Jewish rather than a Bangladeshi (and now a hipster) heartland— would talk about how shocked ‘we’ Ashkenazi Jews were when ‘you lot’ first arrived, bringing with them the more relaxed Sephardi kosher regulations—in particular, their willingness to eat rice during Passover. But he also seemed to have acquired a taste for the sweet and sour flavours of his mother-in-law’s cooking over the years, and would make jokes at the expense of those who refused to consume it.

Predictably, the holidays required more elaborate preparations. Passover required a full household overhaul, with the usual crockery and cutlery to be packed away and replaced with special Passover sets, with the pantry completely replenished with kosher-for-Passover ingredients. The flat would have to be thoroughly cleaned, as to ensure that not a single breadcrumb lurked in any hidden corner. In the midst of this prep, Mrs. H would spend hours seated at the living room table, watching Australian soap operas (mostly for the wedding scenes) while stuffing mountains of kibbeh and assembling trayloads of tiny cheese pastries and dainty rosewater and almond sweets. I would be instructed to dismantle the elaborate chandeliers and clean each of their crystals until they gleamed. And while I didn’t think I managed to reassemble them in their correct order, Mrs. H didn’t seem to notice anything off-kilter so long as they cast a glittering light over the Seder meal.

The table was set out with the symbolic Seder foods: the bitter herbs of exile; the shank bone representing sacrifice; the haroset of date syrup and ground walnuts for the mortar that the Jews were forbidden to use in Egypt; eggs slow-baked on a bed of onion skins so that their whites were mottled deep brown and flavoured with smoke to symbolise new life (“The Christians stole Easter eggs from us!” Mrs. H’s son-in-law declared); the extra glass of wine in case the prophet Elijah should decide to make an appearance (“Don’t worry, he’s not coming,” Mrs H explained to me after I tried to tidy it away).

The centrepiece of the Passover meal was the chicken, which had been delivered with its innards intact so that they could be removed, prepared with spices, and stuffed back into the orifice from which they had emerged, with the half-formed eggs in their shiny membrane considered a particular delicacy. The reassembled chicken would then be slow-baked in that ever-contentious nest of rice, the crust from the bottom of the pot scattered over the top of the dish as a treat to be scrupulously allotted to each guest.

“Sometimes I think Jews talk too much about food,” one of Mrs. H’s bridge partners commented during a long conversation on baklava recipes. But I could have listened to these women all day, women who had grown up at various locations along the Silk Road and who spoke with unselfconscious cosmopolitanism about the lives they had lived and the food they had encountered in locations like Calcutta, Samarkand, Paris, Lahore and of course, Jerusalem. They seldom spoke of the events that had caused them to relocate to London except to note that “things are not the same there anymore.” Daisy Iny’s granddaughter has described how the Iny family had lived in Baghdad (or Babylon) since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Nebuchannezzer II in 586 BC until 1941, when they fled to Iran just before the Farhud, a Nazi-inspired pogrom in which at least 180 Jews were slaughtered. After this abrupt dispersal of their ancient communities, Iny and her readers forged a connection with the past by learning to prepare dishes “in the same way they were when the tale of Aladdin and his magic lamp were first told”.

I fretted that the enjoyment I derived from these domestic chores made me a bad feminist, and that my willingness to overlook Mrs. H’s Tory politics made me a class traitor, but I never once feared that my fondness for her was in contradiction to my Muslim faith. Faith was the thing that bound us: once, Mrs. H put one of her dinner guests in his place after he made a snide remark about how he expected that I would use my holidays to travel to Mecca. “Shakira is not so religious, but even if she were, so what? God promised Abraham that Ishmael’s children would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and it was true. Look at how many Muslims there are today.”

Looking up this story now, I find that the story narrated by Mrs. H is slightly different to the Biblical account, in which the ‘stars in the sky’ promise was made in regard to Abraham himself, without specifying the line of descent. However, God later said that though God’s covenant was with Isaac’s children, Ismael too would be the father of a great nation. And the core message that Mrs. H inferred from this was the brotherhood of Isaac and Ishmael—in response to the contemporary conflicts between these warring cousins, she would say: “Isaac and Ishmael—both sons of Abraham. A brother fights with a brother. It happens all the time. So what?” A few years later at an Islamist rally in Pakistan in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I remembered Mrs. H when I saw an elderly man holding a sign that read “Jews are the paracites [sic] of the world”. I tried to argue the ‘sons of Abraham’ line to him, but his response was dismissive: “Just because a father is good does not mean that the son is also good.”

Living within a religiously observant family—even when the religion was not my own—helped me appreciate the meaning of what outsiders often refer to as ‘empty ritual’. What possible purpose could it serve God to have humans observe kosher or halal dietary rules, to observe Sabbath or have special prayers on Friday, to fast during Ramadan or Yom Kippur? These seemingly irrational observances are perceived as arising from mindless faith, but this thinking gets the process the wrong way around. Rituals are undertaken in order to strengthen faith, not because one’s faith has overpowered one’s reason. Moreover, such rituals carry particular meaning when you are living as a religious minority in your land of residence; adhering to these observances maintains religious identity amid fears that this identity may dissolve into the mainstream. But as both Jewish and Muslim feminists have not hesitated to point out, these household rituals also require a large amount of gendered labour. I had assumed that Mrs. H only employed young women like me to assist her due to her advanced age, but Daisy Iny notes that households like hers (and Mrs. H’s) had routinely employed cooks and other domestic workers prior to their migration to the west. In New York, Mrs. Iny learned to recreate the dishes that had been prepared by her household staff in Baghdad and Tehran; her book was gratefully seized upon by Iraqi Jewish migrants around the world, nostalgic for the flavours that they had left behind.

Gradually, my own taste buds acquired kosher sensibilities, so much so that I found myself wrinkling my nose in distaste at the idea of a cheeseburger, and refraining from adding a dollop of yoghurt-based raita to my lamb curry. The mindset dissipated after my return to Australia, but the inclination still lingers: whenever conversations turn to the topic of Jewish food, I find myself declaiming as passionately as any of the guests at Mrs. H’s bridge parties before remembering that I’m not actually Jewish. “Vegan meals aren’t automatically kosher! The kitchen utensils could have been contaminated with God knows what.” “You call that bread roll with a hole in the middle a bagel? Puh-leese!” And don’t ever get me started on the topic of whether or not it’s kosher to eat rice during Passover.

My friend Sol (himself an amazing cook with a comprehensive knowledge of both Jewish and Palestinian food cultures) once described me as ‘the most complete example of conversion by osmosis that I have ever encountered’, but it would be more accurate to describe me as a convert by cuisine. I continue to prepare the recipes that I learned in Mrs. H’s kitchen not only for myself and my family, but also for those Jewish friends whose observation of kosher is relaxed enough for them to consume food prepared in a Muslim kitchen. My (or rather, Mrs. H’s) date syrup and walnut haroset is as popular at Seders in Melbourne as it was in London and before that, I assume, in Tehran and Baghdad. This isn’t to say that I’m Jewish because I just love Jewish food, any more than the annoying white hipster next door is Thai just because he loves tom yum and spent his gap year in Koh Samui. But it is to say that the flavours of particular recipes have the Proustian capacity to transport me back to a Jewish household where I felt a sense of belonging and safety in an often hostile, though always entrancing, city.

Works cited

Iny, Daisy. The Best of Baghdad Cooking, With Treats from Teheran, 1976.
“The Iny Family”, by Leigh Lindenbaum in Remembering Baghdad: Between the Tigris and the Hudson

Shakira Hussein is a writer and researcher based at the University of Melbourne and the author of From Victims to Suspects: Muslim women since 9/11. @shakirahussein