A traditional Kashmiri Wazwaan is a challenge, requiring stamina, an elastic waistband, and a tolerance for food with a certain amount of bounce. This meal is an unabashed ode to meat, and is usually prepared for weddings and important occasions by specialist chefs known as wazas. But we are tourists, not wedding guests, and we’re at a family home, though in this case family seems in short supply with a father and adult son presiding. We fold ourselves onto the floor – considerably easier for me with years of yoga, not so much for Scott. The conversation centres on traditional culture and customs, (which it seems don’t extend to including women at a dinner with male strangers). Meanwhile the dishes arrive in quick succession.
It’s just as well Scott misses the description of the first dish, meethi, lamb’s intestines cooked in fenugreek. Bouncy tripe is not my thing, but I give it the old college try, and the sauce is tasty. The next day on our walk in the old town we see the raw materials. In the pic the hanging decorations in the are lamb lungs. Don’t even ask.
Rogan josh, is more familiar, and probably the most well known Kashmiri dish – nothing to see here. The grilled chicken and the Seekh kebab are also perfectly pleasant. The two lamb meatball dishes Rista, with a deep red, spicy gravy, and Gushtaba, where the balls are cooked in a creamy yoghurt-based sauce with cardamom and fennel, have delish sauces but the meatballs have the weird bouncy texture of meat that has been processed rather too enthusiastically.
While not everything is to our taste, Wazwaan is not just food, but an important part of Kashmiri culture, hospitality and tradition. Our hosts are wonderfully warm and welcoming and it’s an enlightening and thoroughly enjoyable experience – then Scott finds out the son is not only an expert on diesel engines, but also has a motorbike, which we are duly invited to see. So we eventually leave our hosts with throaty roar of a 500 Royal Enfield ringing in our ears.
Kashmiri cuisine often uses fennel, fenugreek, dried ginger, cardamom and saffron rather than relying on the familiar garam masala flavours of other Indian regions. Traditionally Wazwaan is eaten with your hand, so it takes a few days for the saffron to fade from my fingers after our meal. So time to go to the source of this famous spice.
We experience more Kashmiri hospitality on our trip to the saffron fields. Pampore, a town about an hour out of Srinagar, is the centre of saffron farming, and we’re here just as the harvest begins. I expect a sea of purple crocus, but the flowers are harvested daily as they bloom, so it’s not as Instagram worthy as I hope. But first we go to a local house where the family are generational saffron farmers. They lead us up rickety stairs to a wide open room, about 10×10 metres, with sheets covering the carpets. This is the drying room, as the threads have to be kept out of the sunlight. Our hosts serve us kawha, a fragrant green tea flavoured with saffron, cardamom and almonds. Tastes delicious but I’m entranced by the gorgeous delicate tea set. The tea comes with a traditional flaky pastry served in the morning. Flaky is perhaps kind, as it has the moisture content of building material. Even Scott, who is generally not one to abandon anything described as a pastry, fails to finish his.
The men explain what goes in to creating that tiny packet of red gold in your pantry. Land – it takes a hectare to produce three and a half kgs of saffron. Also bear in mind that it takes 150,000 flowers to produce one kg of saffron, and it will take four people six hours to pick that kilogram. All of the sorting of the premium red threads from the lesser orangey ones is done by hand. This is an extraordinarily labour-intensive business from planting to sale. It wholesales for about $NZ8,000 per kg. Suddenly, the price of a little jar seems rather more reasonable. And if the marketing of the health benefits is any indicator, it should cost the dowry of an Indian princess.
