Companions in Sadness, Companions in Joy
On cooking Punjabi food for new friends in Berlin. Plus a recipe for Mooli Paranthas. Words and photographs by Gurpreet Jivan.
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Cooking from Life is a strand of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world; cooking as refusal, heritage, messiness, routine.
This week’s Cooking from Life is by Gurpreet Jivan. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.
Companions in Sadness, Companions in Joy
On cooking Punjabi food for new friends in Berlin. Plus a recipe for Mooli Paranthas. Words and photographs by Gurpreet Jivan.
It was October last year, the blazing oranges of autumn receding and giving way to winter. I rattled around, looking in my bag for my keys outside the Berlin building complex where my girlfriend and I had just moved. Behind me, I heard the ringing, familiar sound of Punjabi. I turned around to meet the bright eyes of a man speaking into a headset, a Wolt food delivery bag stuffed under his arm. I smiled, comforted by the thick sounds of the language that made up my private world – the one spoken behind English front doors, or shared with my sister when we wanted to gossip on the bus. Hearing Punjabi that way soothed me – unlike German, which made me alert. I smiled and let the man in.
Back in the warmth of my apartment, I called my dad, who lives in Birmingham. I call him often – not as often as he would like, but I’ve learnt to accept that, to him, no number of calls will be enough. He spends his days driving around the city, visiting people’s houses and offering them blinds, curtains, and shutters – a vast number of options to upkeep British decorum, isolating families behind veiled windows. When we speak, he doesn’t relay funny anecdotes from his day, like clients serving him pakoras or too-sweet tea, but instead tells me of his pains, his anxieties – of poor health, money and age.
On that particular day, he asked me about Berlin. ‘Tera dil lagiyah?’, he said – Had my heart grown fond of this new place? ‘There are Punjabis here!’, I responded, not knowing how to answer his question, but recounting my earlier interaction. ‘That’s good’, he said.
Our home in Birmingham was the culmination of a journey my grandparents made from Jalandhar, Punjab to the UK in the 1960s. My nana had tried his hand as a bus driver before joining my nani in the textile factories of the city’s bustling industrial scene. He was, and still is, a restless man, and it wasn’t long before he set up his own manufacturing business. In the open yards of Handsworth, he would make anything that was fashionable: kagools, wax and bomber jackets, and, naturally, shell-suits. My nani was key to his success: she mustered an endless network of bibis and aunties, who would stitch fleeces through the night. Like many Punjabis of his time, my nana placed little value on education; this was brought about in part by a deep mistrust of British-influenced Indian upper classes, whose ideas of life were unachievable and alien to the farmers of Punjab. Instead, he believed in entrepreneurship, which granted access to the kind of capital and power that could buy freedom and respect. It offered the chance to make one’s own life.
My own move to Berlin came at the end of summer last year, which I had made to be with my girlfriend. While it was not for the same reasons as my grandparents’ journey to the UK all those years ago, my experience shared some similarities with theirs – especially with my nani, who left her home for a life in England with a new husband. I’d lived in other European cities before, on the cold streets of Munich rich with money and tall monasteries-cum-beer-halls, and in the prickly, still heat of Madrid through a summer that lasted too long. But each time I found myself achingly homesick, romanticising the UK in ways that I never do when I am there. I found myself thinking about my commute home from work in East London; my favourite rawa dosa in Tooting, the way its lace melted into my fingers. I missed how the bus would be littered with groups of schoolkids holding chicken and chips and laughing egregiously, teasing out every minute of their freedom before finally trudging on home.
In Berlin, I found that old-world European hostility dehumanises and excludes migrants from public spaces, higher education, work, and politics. While the UK is desperately trying to breed this level of discrimination within its borders, there’s a specific kind of racialising and aggression that I’ve experienced here. In Germany, there is a general consensus that a country built for white Germans should only be enjoyed by white Germans. People talk about Germany as practically socialist – but for whom, exactly? Here is a city where people are an extension of the police, where, since 7 October, pro-Palestinian protestors have been violently attacked and suppressed, where Black and brown people routinely suffer racist attacks. Racism is familiar to me – it has been pervasive in my career, my relationships, my friendships, and in my own mind’s eye. But in Berlin I am more foreign, more religiously profiled. The city unravels in its hypocrisy of liberalism, and living here feels like walking into a fresh unknown.
During my first few months in Berlin, I applied to more jobs than ever before, receiving unwavering silence in response. In January, I was finally offered a part-time gig as a pastry chef at a bakery in Charlottenburg and accepted without hesitation. On my first day, I made my way to the bakery while the day was still covered in night. When I got into the bakery, it was alive: bakers were finishing their night shifts, the yeasty, sweet smell of fresh bread clung to the ovens, and I awaited days spent in the rhythms of cooking.
I looked at the roster and noticed the name ‘Maninder Kaur’. Seeing a Punjabi name on the list, I felt a feeling of safety, of community, a bit like how my dad must when he nods at every Singh he sees when we are on holiday, how he would have nodded at the Wolt driver outside my apartment in Berlin. Later, as I was weighing out 1050g of sourdough for shaping, Maninder marched up to me and pointed at my tattoo, which reads ‘Jivan’ in Gurmukhi. ‘Punjabi!’ she said, before any hellos were exchanged. ‘Hanji’, I replied, smiling. In our later conversations, her instinct was to speak to me in Punjabi, whereas mine was to default to English, and we would talk in a mixture of the two.
Maninder is from Jalandhar, like my grandparents, and she came to Berlin to study IT Management, with encouragement from her father to attain the kind of insulation that only a middle-class life can bring. Like many Punjabis in Europe, Maninder is a lone migrant – her family, including her husband, are at home in Punjab. After her studies, she was unable to find a job in IT (not for want of trying), which is how she ended up working as a kitchen porter in the bakery.
In our first week at work, we talked about our favourite foods, our families, British visas, relatives we both had in Canada. Maninder was playful and silly with everyone in the bakery, and I was goofy in the way I only find myself being when I feel safe. She showed me photos of her parents. Her dad looked just like some of my uncles in Birmingham: flat pink turban, thick grey beard hanging loose, and wide suit jacket stiffened, hanging off slim shoulders. We talked about Punjabis in Berlin: I told her about how I had once seen at least six Punjabis go by on delivery bikes in one direction, and at least five more the other way. ‘Cooking, too,’ she noted, telling me that many Punjabis worked in commercial kitchens. I started to notice them, heads popping out of hot kitchens across the city, brown hands skilfully preparing food.
For centuries, Europe has been built on the labour of immigrants, and since World War Two, and the upheaval following the newly independent and partitioned nation-states of India and Pakistan in 1947, Punjabis and other South-Asians have been spread across countries like Italy, Spain, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Finland, Poland, and the UK. While these nations boast self-sufficiency and stability, there are millions of people being exploited in their hallmarks of leisure, their stories in every sweet orange, juicy burger, coffee cup, and sushi roll.
Recently, the fabric of capitalist idealisation has been unravelling for new migrants in the West. The barriers to entry for businesses are higher than ever; independent businesses, restaurants, and corner shops are pushed out by conglomerates; and the intolerance for Black and brown faces and bodies has escalated. In April last year, I read about the rampant exploitation of Punjabi migrants on Italy’s kiwi farms, while in Germany, delivery riders – most of whom were immigrants, with many Punjabis among the workforce – went on strike against a subcontracting system at Wolt, in which their wages were withheld for months. Even as Europe continues to build itself on labour from elsewhere, it has continued to other the same people, denying them dignity, spaces for homemaking, and the soft joys promised by contemporary life.
I have now worked at the bakery for five months. In that time, Maninder and I have ventured around the city together, including to the outlets at Dong Xuan Centre to buy her new trousers – loose, so she can feel the spring breeze on her legs. Life in Berlin has been hard for her, her appetite lost in cooking and eating alone.
When we met, I had thought about cooking for Maninder, but I was nervous. She was a ‘real’ Punjabi, her language fluent, her Punjabi film, music, and TV references vivid. Meanwhile, I felt an imposter, I had rejected my Punjabi culture for so long in order to know my own desires and interests away from those cultivated within me when I was raised as woman in a Punjabi household. But when Maninder said that she missed eating in company, I shrugged off my insecurities and started bringing meals into work for both of us. I cooked bharta made from aubergines, stuffed green pepper sabzi, mac and cheese replete with green chillies, and of course, milky sweet semiyan. She joyfully ate my food, asking how I prepared my tarkas, enjoying the new tastes of soy instead of cow’s milk, which I often substitute. When we ate, I thought amusedly of how I was hesitant to cook for her before.
‘Dukh-sukh’ is a common expression across Punjab and other parts of South Asia. In my family, we use it to express a sense of company found in sadness, tiredness, or stress: a companion who is not there to fix your worries, but to share in the feeling and ultimately soothe it, making way for something pleasurable and easier to endure. When Maninder and I eat together, I thank her for making me cook more, for giving me a chance to feed us both. Having a friend to share in the joys of the distinct flavours of Punjabi home-cooked food, who understands Punjabi swear words and who knows the isolation of being a lone brown woman in a new country – has watered a part of me that was unkempt. I’ve since made more friends here, tending to different parts of me, but before meeting Maninder, I was lonely in this place, too.
One day at work, Maninder and I both craved paranthas. I missed eating them with my family and the lazy freedom of the weekend, the dish being a call to come together, to eat, and to rest. We sat at the table for two in my flat, smearing butter across the tops of steaming mooli paranthas, and she told me that her husband had started teasing her for the way she had been using English words mixed in with her Punjabi. I think about how my girlfriend has noticed my gestures changing and becoming more animated, about how it took no time at all for me and Maninder to rub off on one another. Maninder’s company already revealing itself in my lexicon, and my life in Berlin.
Mooli Paranthas for Maninder
Stuffed paranthas have a special ability to stretch an ingredient into a meal: unused potatoes; cauliflower left over from sabzi; daal caught just before it’s on its way to the bin. But Maninder’s favourite are mooli or radish, so that’s what we’ll make.
Don’t be precious about the fillings. If you use daal, drain any water before you mix it in with the rest of the spices. If you use paneer, cut it into small chunks first. Whatever you use, I’d suggest including at least one boiled potato, roughly chopped or smashed up: it’s the best way to ensure the filling is soft and substantial.
You will start to become aware of when the dough is ready by the way it feels in your hands, something you can only experience once you’ve committed to making paranthas a few times over. My mum’s tip for kneading is, ‘Don’t stop until your knuckles are red.’
Serves 2
Time 1 hr 30 minutes
Ingredients
oil or melted butter, for frying
for the filling
1 medium potato
½ large mooli (daikon), coarsely grated
2 tsp salt
30g fresh coriander, finely chopped
1 tsp coriander seeds
1 tsp garam masala
1 tsp red chilli powder
1 Thai green chilli, finely chopped
¼ white onion, finely diced
for the dough
225g atta, or a mix of 100g wholemeal flour and 125g strong white bread flour, plus extra for dusting
110 ml water
1 tsp salt
to serve
butter
pickles
plain yoghurt
brown sugar
Method
Put the potato into a pot, and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil over a medium heat, then reduce the heat, cover, and cook for 10–15 mins until you can slice a knife clean through it. Run the cooked potato under cold water – the skin should come right off. Leave to cool a little, then roughly smash or chop the potato.
Put the grated mooli in a bowl, add 1 tsp salt, then set aside for 5–7 mins to draw out some of the water. Transfer to a sieve or colander to drain, scrunching the mooli into small balls to squeeze out as much water as possible.
Add the mooli and the potato to a mixing bowl, then add in the rest of the filling ingredients (including the other 1 tsp salt) and mix to combine evenly. Set aside.
To make the dough, pour three-quarters of the water into the atta or flour mix, add 1 tsp salt, and leave to sit for 10 mins. After 10 mins, use the tips of your fingers to mix in the water and start to form a dough. Slowly add the rest of the water, using your palm to combine the dough – don’t be put off by the stickiness – and then knead for 5 mins. The dough should feel soft, light, and supple, and shouldn’t stick to the bowl. If it is sticking to the sides of the bowl, add a little flour. If it feels tough, add a drop of water.
Now it’s time to assemble the paranthas. Divide the dough into four roughly equal balls. Dust the counter top with some flour. Transfer a ball of dough onto the counter, and start rolling it out into a circle. Rolling out roti dough is like painting: you can’t apply pressure all at once. Roll gently while rotating the dough – if you keep rotating, it will be less likely to stick to the surface and you won’t need to add too much extra flour, which would make the dough heavier. (An example of this method can be seen here.) Aim for a circle around 8cm in diameter. Repeat with the remaining dough balls.
Put a heaped tablespoon of the filling mixture into the centre of each dough circle. Gather up the corners of the dough around the filling and bring together to form parcels. Pinch the edges together tightly and twist off any excess dough, before flattening each parcel into a disc. Dust with flour and gently roll out into a circle again. Keep moving and turning, adding flour as necessary, until your dough is around 10cm in diameter.
Pace a flat plan over a medium-high heat. Shake as much flour as you can from the paranthas. Once you can feel heat coming off the pan, you’re ready to start frying. Cook the paranthas one by one. Flip the paratha after around 2 mins – by this point, the dough should be starting to look dry, more taupe than the pale of uncooked dough. Pour 1 tsp of oil or melted butter onto the brown spots on the dough, then after 3 mins flip again and pour another 1 tsp of oil or butter onto the other side. After 90 seconds, flip again and cook for a final 90 seconds – the oil should crisp the dough on each side, and it should look shiny, slightly hardened, and laminated.
Serve the paranthas with cold butter, pickles, and yoghurt. A friend suggested putting a teaspoon of brown sugar into the yoghurt with this dish, and I haven’t been able to eat it without since.
Credits
Gurpreet Jivan is a writer, playwright, and chef based in Birmingham and Berlin. She is currently working independently at the intersections of theatre, audio, and food. Her works often concern cultural and social identity in Europe and South Asia. Her first play, Rituals, was performed in Birmingham as part of Kali Theatre Writer’s Discovery Programme in March 2024, and was recently shortlisted for Bold Elephant Playwrights. You can find her on Twitter (@jivangurpreet) and Instagram (@jivan.gurpreet).
This recipe was tested by Luke Churchill.
Loved the article, and how it wonderfully describes finding companionship and comfort in food.
Wow Gurpreet, I loved reading that, welcome to Berlin! I am always around for food, coffee or theatre :) x