The Eid Table

The Eid table belongs to the whole Muslim world, and in the subcontinent it takes the shape of each community that keeps it, from the households of Lucknow and Hyderabad to the Gujarati Khoja families. The source for this entry is Noorbanu Nimji and Karen Anderson's A Spicy Touch, the family cookbook of a cook whose kitchen followed the Ismaili Khoja path from Gujarat to East Africa and then to Canada. Her book therefore records a festive cooking carried across three continents, with the habits of Gujarat, the coast of East Africa and the pantry of the diaspora set side by side.

Eid comes twice in the Muslim year. Eid al-Fitr ends the month of fasting and Eid al-Adha follows the pilgrimage, and the table of each is built on a different footing. The first is a table of release after the fast, and its character is sweet as well as savoury. The second centres on meat, shared out in the custom of the festival. In both, the household cooks for guests as much as for itself, and the quantity and the order of the dishes matter as much as any single recipe. A Spicy Touch shows how a Khoja family cooked for such days. The festive meal rests on rice dishes and on meat cooked with a measured spice: a biryani or a pulao, a kebab or a minced-meat preparation, and a gravy of meat or chicken with ginger, garlic, onion, tomato and ground spices. Nimji writes as a cook in a family kitchen, and her instruction is practical: the onions browned patiently, the ginger and garlic paste cooked until it loses its rawness, the meat given time. These are the points where the dish lives or dies, and the festival table rewards the cook who does not hurry them. The sweet course carries equal weight. Vermicelli cooked in milk with sugar, nuts and cardamom is the dish most closely tied to Eid al-Fitr across the subcontinent, and it is served to visitors through the day as much as at the meal itself. Where Nimji's family settled in East Africa, the pantry of the coast, with its coconut and its rice, mixed with the Gujarati inheritance, and the table that results is her own: a community cooking recorded by one of its women rather than a regional canon. Service follows the custom of hospitality. Dishes are set out together so that the guest may take rice, meat, a fresh chutney or kachumber and a bread in a single sitting, and the host presses more on the plate. The meal is eaten with the hand or with spoon and fork according to the house, and the sweet is brought out whenever someone arrives. The table is a sign of welcome first and a menu second.

The savoury side of the Eid table rests on onion browned slowly, ginger and garlic, green chilli, ground coriander and cumin, turmeric, and the warm spices of green cardamom Elettaria cardamomum, cinnamon and clove, with fresh coriander and mint to finish. Against these come the sweetness of the milk and vermicelli, the scent of cardamom in the dessert, and the sharpness of a fresh chutney or a salad of onion and tomato set beside the rice.