Fozia Ismail's Spice, Herbs, Fruit, Heat.
Using a Somali pattern of home cooking to create an easy and delicious sticky chicken. Words by Fozia Ismail.
Welcome to Vittles Recipes! In this weekly slot, our roster of five rotating columnists share their recipes and wisdom with you. This week’s columnist is Fozia Ismail.
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Spice, Herbs, Fruit, Heat.
Using a Somali pattern of home cooking to create an easy and delicious sticky chicken. Words by Fozia Ismail. Photographs by Katie Smith.
I like cooking intuitively – from memory or practice or taste, but also from having grown up somewhere where learning to cook was much more about watching, listening, and smelling. I grew up in a musical Somali kitchen, and with a greedy and open disposition that doesn’t put much pressure on the end result. Because of this, I find the format of writing recipes down very annoying and it often interrupts the flow and presence of being in the kitchen. Really it is all in the making – and that normally doesn’t involve writing stuff as you go along.
In my day job, I’ve been working as a part of dhaqan collective, a feminist art collective of Somali women, and we have been exploring the ways we pass knowledge down through the practice of making, whether that be through craft or music. There are particular rhythms to Somali weaving songs that help you maintain a pattern while weaving; they also act as a base, a building block for everyday tasks that are essential for building Somali nomadic life, whether that be the woven walls of the home or the camel milk vessels that are so important to survival. Similarly, there are particular rhythms that form the base of Somali cuisine (or, indeed, any other cuisine). These are the essential combinations of ingredients that are so practised that putting them together seems ordinary – you do it without thinking about it. First, the xawaash or spice (cumin, coriander, cardamom, black pepper, cinnamon, clove – not always all together but a mixture of several elements, or all). Then there’s the herb, likely to be coriander, sometimes fresh dill. Then you’ve got chilli, garlic, onion, and tomato, and then the fruitiness with mango, date, tamarind, or coconut. This, for me, is the pattern of Somali cooking: a foundational base that you can layer up in interesting combinations that always leads to a beautiful dish.
When I started cooking this recipe, it was with the intention of making suqaar, a quick Somali dish that you can make during an evening when you’re busy and want to feed the family without too much fuss. It’s simple because of the base: you chop up a few onions, garlic, coriander, chillies, fresh tomatoes, green pepper, and beef or lamb cubes, and you can add some other vegetables and spicing, and fry it all up to make a quick meal. Because of this utility, it’s a ubiquitous dish in many Somali homes. However, in truth, I kind of lost my way with why I was writing down these traditional recipes, so I called my sister to help guide me and assuage my guilt. When we cook classic dishes from home, or when we have this sense of tradition, especially when you have a platform or you’re writing for a platform with or for people who aren’t Somali, you feel some burden or obligation of trying to represent something you can never possibly represent in full. My sister’s response, sanguine as ever: ‘Cook what you like.’
So what if I didn’t have tamarind or coriander? I knew that HP Sauce would do (it is, after all, made from tamarind), and I had some chives for the herbs and some Chiu Chow sauce on hand for heat. The rest of it came from a sense of playfulness that comes from not taking cooking too seriously. I remembered Simon Frith’s insights on music and identity, which can just as readily be applied to food.
‘Music made in one place for one reason can be immediately appropriated in another place for quite another reason … while music may be shaped by the people who first make and use it, as experience it has a life of its own’
With this in mind, I started out making suqaar but somehow ended up with a sticky chicken, inspired by East Asian flavours but using the kind of cooking techniques familiar to the Somali cook. It is delicious – sour and sweet with aromatic tones, surprising in the way that only a dish adapted out of necessity can be. Food can be work, leisure, a way people mark special occasions, culture, a bit of ourselves. But sometimes, it is just food. I cooked what I felt like eating that night informed by what I had in the fridge. We’re all just trying to survive and try our best, and there are some things when put together that will guarantee really lovely flavours. For me, this is the simple rhythm of the Somali kitchen.
Easy Sticky Chicken with Rice and Leeks
Serves 4
Time 1 hr