A heavily pregnant mother gets on a boat in the middle of the night, along with four children ranging in ages from 12 to five. She’s fleeing the only home she’s ever known with no other adult family member for support. Sounds like a tale right out of a bestseller, but it’s the true story of Dina’s grandmother, Bibi (‘bibi’ means grandmother in Swahili).
In January of 1964, the Zanzibar Revolution overthrew the Sultan of Zanzibar and his majority Arab government. Bibi, then 26 years old, had no choice but to leave her homeland along with her young family, making their way first to Mombasa, Kenya where they spent a year, then ultimately to England where they landed in April 1965.
The family, now reunited with Bibi’s husband, eventually settled down in Portsmouth, in a close-knit Omani community, gradually adapting to the weather, culture and lack of familiar ingredients. Grocery stores in England at that time were like an alien landscape, with none of the spices, fruits, vegetables and raw ingredients they’d been used to. “We didn’t get ginger and garlic, and even coconut milk was a rarity,” says Bibi, as she sits in a sunny corner of her kitchen, watching her daughters Kamila and Fatma bustle around getting lunch ready for us.
Crushed cardamom is essential for mandazi
Bibi is an expert at making mandazi without referring to a recipe
“When she first went to England, Bibi made fesenjoon with peanut butter, because cashew nuts weren’t available and in essence it’s the same thing and it works really well,” explains Dina as she stands over a simmering pot, preparing the same dish, a rich cashew and pomegranate chicken stew. Originating from northern Iran, where it is made with walnuts, the Omani fesenjoon uses ground cashew nuts along with fresh pomegranate juice and pomegranate molasses to give the dish its signature tartness.
“Even samosas were a treat in those days,” recalls Kamila, Dina’s mother, since filo pastry was unheard of, so Bibi made her own from scratch. When asked if her daughters took to cooking naturally, Bibi points to Fatma and says, “this one likes to clean, even when she was little, and Kamila tried to cook. I used to give them all tasks in the kitchen ‘chop this and cut that’.” Her eldest son would often cook for his younger siblings while Bibi and her husband were at work, and eventually Kamila and Fatma picked it up along the way. When asked if she ever cooks anything other than traditional food, Bibi shakes her head vehemently, “In England they put avocado in salad, I don’t eat that.” Fatma goes on to explain that in the 1960s they were one of the few families who were familiar with the stonefruit but ate it sweet, after Bibi mashed and mixed the pulp with evaporated milk, sugar and ice cubes until it took on an almost ice cream-like consistency.
Frying mandazi
Kamila always believed Dina would end up in the culinary world
Once Kamila was running her own household, she fed her family Omani-Zanzibari dishes as well as quintessential British food, including shepherd’s pie, which “would be full of chilli” says Dina, adding that her mother doesn’t eat anything “without chilli, lemon and salt”.
Dina, on the other hand, confesses that she “hated cooking and hated being in the kitchen” and preferred baking, but Kamila states, “I always knew you would get into cooking professionally.” It wasn’t until Dina was halfway through university that she began making Omani food. Her mother and grandmother would give her instructions over video calls, often arguing over whose method was better. “My mother doesn’t even know what a recipe is,” says Kamila, because all proportions are in her head and her hands are her weighing scales – which makes perfect sense to Bibi because she watched her mother cook in the same way.
On her part, Dina always follows a recipe, but she believes she could probably gauge the measurements for family favourites such as mandazi (triangular fried bread akin to a doughnut), which Fatma is frying for us so we can eat them hot and puffed along with a cup of tea as is tradition. While feeding people brings Dina great joy, her true passion lies in the anthropological aspects of food such as “understanding how a dish evolves overs time through trade and migration”.
Fesenjoon is a rich chicken stew
Ground cashews and pomegranate molasses add to the stew’s creamy texture and tart flavours
In fact, her cookbook Bahari: Recipes from an Omani Kitchen and Beyond is an ode to Omani cuisine and the various cultural influences from East Africa, Iran and India that have shaped its rich palette of flavours. Kamila and Bibi helped with her research and the three of them spent many weeks cooking together in a small kitchen. “I often wonder if we would talk as much as we do, if I hadn’t started on this journey of documenting our history,” remarks Dina. “If I sat Bibi down and asked her questions about our family history, she wouldn’t have much to say whereas the process of preparing food seems to naturally trigger memories connected to our family and community’s histories.”
Their biggest lesson from their time together in the kitchen has been to respect each other’s strengths and stay in their own lanes, and “no more than two people in a kitchen at a time,” adds Dina, as we all sit down to relish a traditional Omani meal on a sunny winter afternoon in Muscat.
