Tea and Pomegranates: A Memoir of Food, Family and Kashmir

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Nazneen Sheikh was born in Kashmir, a province of imperial India. When
India became independent, Sheikh’s Mughal family was forced to abandon
their home and flee north to live with relatives in the newly created
Muslim state of Pakistan. This book—part memoir, part Mughal/Kashmir
history, part cookbook—begins with a quick overview of who the Mughal
people are.

Streaming in from the north, the Mughals combined elements of the
Persian, Turkish, Mongol, and Afghani people. They conquered and ruled
India for centuries before the British arrived and their complex ethnic
fusion found expression in Mughal architecture, literature, music, and
food. With the stage thus set, Sheikh takes the reader into the
day-to-day routine in Karachi, where life revolved around family meals.
Each of the 10 chapters opens with a quote from the Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam and concludes with a single recipe representative of the central
theme of the chapter. Between those two points, the prose gently sweeps
the reader back and forth from the author’s home in Toronto to the
kitchens of her ancestors. Food is never simply food in these pages.
Simple lotus shoots simultaneously become a link to the glory days of
the Mughal Empire, an emotional connection to the abandoned home in
Kashmir, and a tasty vegetarian dish that the reader can try at home. In
another chapter, Sheikh humorously describes some of her childhood likes
and dislikes, such as her irresistible attraction to gajrela (a creamy
carrot almond saffron dessert) and her intense dislike of sarda melon,
which, rather than eat, she would have preferred to kick about the front
lawn like a rugby ball. Fortunately, the recipe for this chapter is the
carrot dessert and not the rugby melon.

Tea and Pomegranates reads like a novel. Sheikh’s prose wafts over
each page like the aroma of exotic spices slowly roasting over an open
fire, intoxicating the reader with its complex blend of history,
folklore, family stories, and culinary technique.