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This mouth-watering dish
can be made with chicken breasts as well as legs attached to the
thighs,
The chance acquaintance who shared it with us was a German young man fluent in Dari, Pashtu and Urdu and was employed, so he said, for a while to interpret the testimony of non-English speaking terrorists in various holding camps before they were dispatched to dungeons in Cuba where all who entered abandoned hope. Stranger are the ways of men who continue to pine for familiar favourite foods even in punitive solitary confinement or biding time in death row. The small talk in between business sessions our source told us were peppered with nostalgic references to chooza Afghani — a dish very different from what is encountered in the mouth-watering menus in eateries in Basti Nizamuddin and elsewhere in the old city in the Capital. (Also in the food streets in Lahore, Pindi and Peshawar). This earthy robust dish, which can be made with chicken breasts as well as legs attached to the thighs, is not a pretentious aromatic delicacy. It makes do with whatever is at hand and reminds us of more than anything else the jungli maans in Maharaja Sailana’s fabled cookbook. We were strongly tempted to introduce it as jungli murgi but were cautioned by beloved son Indrajit that this could be confusing. There are broilers, croilers, desi chicken and hardly seen now game birds — the real jungli murgi. Discretion being the better part of valour, we have settled for Teekha Sika Afghani Chooza. The undercover linguist was an accomplished reconnoiter given to embellishing the tales of his travels. We never found out whether he had got the information his masters desired by tickling the palates of Afghan prisoners and softening their resistance but what is undeniable is that this no frills idiot-proof recipe is stunning.
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Strange