Shahnaz Ahsan shares a recipe that embraces the fragrance of onions and spices. Photographs by Sanskriti bist.
Feb 11, 2026
∙ Paid
Good morning, and welcome to Vittles. Some exciting news: Vittles is at GALF (Goa Art and Literature Festival) this week! The festival runs from 12th-14th February; Jonathan will be in conversation with writer, editor and GALF majordomo Vivek Menezes on the 13th. If you are in Goa, or nearby, please come by and say hello!
Today’s recipe is by Shahnaz Ahsan, who writes about reclaiming her favourite food-smells along with a recipe for an easy, delicious, biryani-like chicken and rice.
Issue 2 of our print magazine is also still available to purchase. Buy your copy here.
Every once in a while, something happens to make me realise how much prejudice I have internalised over the course of my life. The most recent occasion was on a weekend morning, when my husband and I were leaving to take our kids to gymnastics.We were already late, and I had the engine running. ‘Your shirt stinks of curry!’ I shrieked, as he got into the car.
I leaned in to sniff his sleeve – it smelled of onions and cumin. He looked at me puzzled, unsure as to how this counted as a crime, and I realised that, to him, it didn’t.
Since then, I’ve been reflecting on the embarrassment that I carry about the possibility of ever smelling of the food that I cook and eat. The perpetual fear I had growing up of being ‘smelly’ was rooted in casually racist comments from other people, like when a white girl yelled ‘SMELLS LIKE JAL-FREHHHH-ZEH!’ when a new student from Bangladesh got on the school bus.
The fear was also pervasive at home, but I hadn’t fully realised at the time. My mother would cook with a towel wrapped around her head so that her hair wouldn’t absorb any cooking aromas. My father insisted that all the internal doors of the house were shut before we commenced any frying of onions, then after dinner we would fling open our front and back doors, willing the cold Yorkshire air to blow through the house and carry the telltale cooking scent away.
And yet, there was nothing more inviting to me than the layered scents of the countless dinners – mackerel bhorta, garlic-tempered dal, bottle gourd with jackfruit seeds – that we had consumed as a family. I relished being able to smell food from other households in our neighbourhood too; there was something poetic about how everyone’s kitchens came alive at the same time every evening, each family engaged in the same rituals of cooking and feeding, our back-to-back terraced streets filling with the aromas of sizzling onions, deep cumin, savoury eggy bread and lard-cooked chips.
Capitalism tells us that there is a ‘correct’ way to smell of spices – after all, many expensive perfumes contain notes of cinnamon, black pepper and ginger. But I am more interested in the ‘wrong’ way, in undoing the decades’ worth of shame that I have carried about the smell of the food I love to cook and eat. This recipe is the embodiment of that resolution. When I make this dish, I deliberately leave all the interior doors in our house open. Afterwards, I enjoy sinking into sheets that carry the scent of ginger and lemongrass and fennel and ghee.
Partly inspired by Hainanese chicken, yakhni pulao and chicken rendang, this one-pot chicken and rice dish is warming and hearty while not being too heavy. It’s a perfect comfort dish for the whole family but would also work for a midweek dinner with friends. Best of all, it creates the most beautiful aroma in your home. If I could bottle it, I would wear it with pride.
