Diaspora
Dinners

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Repaired Shepherd’s Pie

In Proust’s À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, he writes: “When nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer, but more enduring, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste remain for a long time, like souls remembering, hoping, waiting upon the ruins of all the rest.”

Food awakens the past for most humans, but for us diasporic peoples, it’s a lifeline – a way, sometimes the only way, of dealing with inner and outer turbulence.

I cook my mum Jena’s inventive coconut dhal – in her acrylic cooking cardi, which I have never washed – when I miss her desperately, and fried mogo (cassava) sprinkled with chilli powder when I get too sad about my sister Zarina’s severe mental illness and Covid death. I used to take some to the care home she lived in. Though it was cold and soggy, she would scoff all the chips.

The dishes also take me back to my old homeland, Uganda, green and endlessly bountiful. Nobody starved there. And though we were racially and economically divided – whites at the top, browns in the middle, and blacks in the pits – food crossed the hard borders between us.

In 1972, all Asians were expelled from the country. But Ugandan street food still includes samosas and ‘rolex’, spicy omelettes rolled in chapatis. And Ugandan Asians make dishes, like the two mentioned above, which include East African styles and ingredients.

Food is part of our ever-evolving histories and selves. It is the first gift we offer the country we show up in, and the first (sometimes only) gift gracefully accepted, and too many times arrogated. We can take that as a compliment. Or not.

Right-wingers contemptuously describe wandering migrants as ‘citizens of nowhere’. Amen to that. To be one of those is hard, yet also liberating and invigorating. We take from other cuisines and lifestyles and, often, impertinently, change them.

Modern British Asians tuck into their own Full English, with beef bacon and sausages and chilli baked beans. Pizzas in mixed ethnicity neighbourhoods have become symbols of diversity: you can choose toppings like fava beans and Za’atar, paneer and pea, chick pea chaat, or goats cheese, coriander, and chilli.

We know white colonials had their palates awakened by spicy food, but subjects also learned to cook (and alter) traditional British fare. You should try my cardamom Victoria sponge. And saffron and almond rice pudding.

Jena believed the food our British overlords ate made them superheroic masters of the world. But it was tasteless, often unpalatable. So she would make ‘English’ dishes every week, and ‘repair’ them by adding various un-English ingredients.

This is one of those. She always made it the night before I sat my key exams.