Hard and Round
An essay on not-knowing, and a recipe for kala chana. Words and photographs by Noreen Masud.
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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 Noreen Masud. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.
Hard and Round
An essay on not-knowing, and a recipe for kala chana. Words and photographs by Noreen Masud.
In the house in Lahore where I grew up, my grandmother lived on her bed. Sitting or lying. Everything happened there. She directed, shouted, swore, and fed my cousin whatever meat there was by hand, because he was a boy and very special. She smelled intensely of herself, but sweetly. All of this is in the past tense, but it shouldn’t be. My grandmother is alive, still in Lahore. We don’t speak.
Sometimes you reach back and all you find to touch is not-knowing: hard and round as any memory. I don’t even know what my grandmother’s first language is. She’s from Kashmir, born pre-Partition: married at seventeen, she was living in Lahore by the mid-eighties, but I don’t know what happened in the years between. She understood perhaps a quarter of my English. I understood perhaps half of her jumbly mostly-Urdu. But she cooked kala chana for me, the third of four girls in the house, because she knew I loved them. It filled the uncomprehending gap between us, more or less.
Hard and round. Kala chana – small, black chickpeas – grow across South Asia. Overwhelmingly, only Indians and Pakistanis seem to eat them. Australia grows kala chana for export, and for stacking the shelves of South Asian shops. I think, but I’m not sure, that they’re most popular in Punjab. I never asked questions, you see; I just ate. They’re intensely savoury: full of fibre and tannins. Cooked, they’re not black but deep brown, tight and shiny as polished wood.
What do kala chana taste like? I’ve heard people say they’re meaty. I don’t remember what meat tastes like. Again the ball of not-knowing rolls in.
All I know is that I can stand over the stove in a trance and spoon kala chana into my mouth; that I find myself going back to the pot again and again ‘just to check on the flavours’; that kala chana is good when the chickpeas are small and bullet-y and darting around the spoon, or when they’re big and soft and indolently splitting to show golden insides. I know I can eat a bowl of kala chana without anything else, like dry cereal, and I have. Other pulses melt into a kind of nourishing background noise. Cooked down into dal, the outlines of masoor and mung vanish into a single flowing mass; white chickpeas blandly give way at the touch of a tooth. But kala chana resist, like tiny clenched fists.
The kala chana dish I love and remember has a very thin sauce: dark brown, with windows of orange oil sailing over the surface. You don’t have to spoon the lot straight into your mouth. You can eat them with rice or chapati, of course. That much I do remember. You can drain the sauce off the chickpeas and eat them one by one, very slowly, like I did when I was fourteen and my uncle called me fat. I remember that too. Or you can drink just the broth, like a queen, and feel fire spreading through your face and fingertips. It’s the heat of deep nourishment: your body getting exactly what it wants and needs.
I never see kala chana on a restaurant menu in the UK. But when I lived in Oxford, the curry house near me was unusual: it served Punjabi food, specifically. You could order a dhansak, but the very kind, gentle owner would give you a sad look as he wrote it down. He found out I’d grown up in Lahore and, after some probing about my favourites, I admitted I missed kala chana. After that, every time he cooked it off-menu he’d send me a message on Facebook. And I’d go, half angry-shy and half hungry. Our shared Pakistani-ness was a painful hole I couldn’t name: the things I should have known but didn’t. If I let him get too close, we’d fall into that hole together. Last time I went, five years after I moved away from Oxford, he recognised me and put his hand up as if to give me a hug. Instead we just smiled helplessly, tense shoulders, a little apart.
Now I live in Bristol and can buy 69p tins of kala chana from any of the Easton shops. I always have a tin in my cupboard, superstitiously. But I don’t cook them often. When I do, my white friends eat them with polite, horrified expressions. This, you see, is my official excuse for not using kala chana: no one likes them but me. This aloneness makes me feel hollow and special. But it’s not the only reason I leave the tin in the cupboard. Mostly I live on frozen potato waffles and fried eggs and microwaved broccoli; I only cook when I want to forget. And I only cook kala chana when I want to hate myself.
Every time I buy a tin of kala chana, I think I should try to make hummus, or shockingly brown-grey vegan meringues with their sludgy aquafaba. I should break their spell on me by mixing it up and cooking new things with the same ingredient: by taking another path. One where there’s nothing to not-know. So far, my courage has failed. I leave the tin in the cupboard till I want to cry. Then I make kala chana the Punjabi way, peering at some recipe on the internet, and eat it by myself. It tastes good. I eat it, as I say, in tablespoonfuls from the pot. It also never tastes right.
For this column, though, I decided to have one big go at getting it right. I tested three recipes that I found at random online, making changes based on my instincts. One tasted of nothing but heat: I wasn’t sure if it was me or the chana that was numb. The second tasted of the vinegar I sloshed in at the end, in a panic, and of a workaday masala base: the standard tomato-cumin-coriander that I put in red lentil dal. It was strange, like a celebrity spotted wearing a McDonald’s uniform.
It was the third recipe that worked, sort of. It’s still not right, but the black cardamom and star anise open up a deep door at the back of the flavour. The door goes all the way down, to the place where memory should be.
Kala chana
This recipe is an adapted version of one from Hebbars Kitchen (all credit to them). And if you’re ever in Oxford, go to Currydor on the Botley Road, and order something good.
Ingredients like kala chana, amchur, and black cardamom are available in larger South Asian stories across the UK.
Serves 2
Time 1 hr
Ingredients
1 tin cooked kala chana
3 tbsp vegetable, or any neutral oil
kala namak (black salt) or regular salt, to taste
1 bay leaf
½ cinnamon stick
1 black cardamom pod (these can be hard to find, but I really recommend them)
2 cardamom pods (or 3 if they’re old, like mine)
1 star anise
4 cloves
1 tsp cumin seeds
2 onions or one very large onion, finely chopped (if in doubt, go with more rather than less)
2.5cm ginger, finely chopped (or a big spoonful of ginger paste)
6 garlic cloves, finely chopped (or a big spoonful of garlic paste)
½ tsp ground turmeric
1 tbsp chilli powder
1 tsp ground coriander
½ tsp ground cumin
½ tsp garam masala
1 tsp amchur
a pinch of hing (asafoetida), or one sharp shake of the plastic tub with a hole pierced in it
half a tin of peeled plum tomatoes, puréed
a big squeeze of tomato purée (around 1 tbsp)
¾ tsp salt, or to taste
3 tbsp fresh coriander, leaves and stems chopped
2 green finger chillies
1 tsp ghee, or extra if you’d like
1 tbsp kasuri methi (dried fenugreek leaves)
fresh ginger, to garnish
lemon juice, to taste
Method
1 Drain and wash the chickpeas. Keep the aquafaba, if you’re braver than me, and use it for something interesting.
2 Heat the oil in your biggest pot over a low heat. Fry the bay leaf, cinnamon, black and regular cardamom, star anise, cloves, and cumin seeds for a few minutes until you start to smell the cumin.
3 Add the onions and cook, low and slow, until they are soft, golden, and almost brown (around 10 mins). Then add the ginger and garlic, and cook for another 1–2 mins until the raw smell goes.
4 Add the turmeric, chilli powder, ground coriander, ground cumin, garam masala, amchur (if using), and the hing, and continue frying until you start to smell the spices (perhaps a minute), then add the tinned tomatoes, the tomato purée, and kala namak or salt to taste. Continue to cook for a few minutes, until the mixture is dryer and browner, and the oil starts to leave an orange greasy smear behind on the pan when you stir. At this point, I think it might be good to blend the whole base to make the sauce thinner, but I didn’t bother.
5 Stir in the chickpeas and around 1 cup of water. Cover the pot with a lid, bring to a boil, and simmer for 10 mins or more. It gets better and better with time, but at some point you’ll get hungry.
6 Right before serving, stir through the fresh coriander, whole chillies, ghee, kasuri methi, and some fresh ginger and lemon juice to taste if it needs brightness.
Notes
Eat the kala chana with chapati, boiled potatoes, rice, or salad, or by itself. Pick out the aromatics as you go, to stop your teeth freezing.
Kala chana keeps well in the fridge, but I recommend removing the aromatics after the first couple of days, or they start to dominate. Add more water as you need when reheating. Freeze some for when you’re sad.
Credits
Noreen Masud is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her academic monograph, Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language (2022) won the MSA First Book Award 2023 and the University English Prize in 2024. Her memoir-travelogue, A Flat Place (2023), was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction; The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year; the Jhalak Prize; and the RSL Ondaatje Prize.
This recipe was tested by Maryam Jillani. The full Vittles masthead can be found here.
Stunning writing.
Beautifully evocative; thank you 😢