Until the U. S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Americans who thought of Afghanistan at all thought of it as a remote, mountainous and landlocked country, first a pawn in the Cold War, then oppressed by the Taliban. The country’s geographical location—north of India, east of Persia and west of China—gave it a prominent place on the Silk Road, the network of trade routes that connected China and the Mediterranean and produced a unique culture.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., currently is exhibiting hidden treasures from the National Museum in Kabul, more than 200 extraordinary archaeological objects long assumed to have been stolen or destroyed before they were recovered from a vault underneath the Presidential Palace in 2004. The exhibit will travel to San Francisco, Houston and New York in the next year.
The National Gallery worked with the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington to incorporate Afghan culture into the publicity surrounding the exhibit. From at least the time of the Soviet occupation, Afghan immigrants have settled in many U. S. cities and have contributed their own traditions to our cultural melting pot. One of the ways our lives have been enriched is by Afghan food. The Washington area is home to a large number of Afghan immigrants, as it has been to Vietnamese and Ethiopian immigrants before them. Sizeable numbers of Afghans have settled in Baltimore, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. The family of the current president of Afghanistan owns restaurants in Baltimore, San Francisco and Cambridge, Mass., all of which are called Helmand.
In connection with the exhibit at the National Gallery, a number of Washington restaurants were invited to create special menus celebrating the culinary heritage of the Silk Road. Owner Ali Amin and chef Nasrullah Malang of Bamian, an Afghan restaurant in Falls Church, Va., have been important organizers of the event. The chef served as an adviser to chef David Rogers of Restaurant Associates, which runs the restaurants in the National Gallery, in constructing a special Afghan menu for the gallery’s Garden Café.
Chef Tim Elliott of Mie N Yu, an international restaurant in the district’s Georgetown neighborhood, also contributed recipes to the Gallery Café’s menu and created for his own restaurant an “Afghan Mosaic Tasting Menu,” a $55, prix fixe menu inspired by the food of Afghanistan. Americans, already familiar with Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern cooking, need to adjust very little to appreciate Afghan cooking.
“Our location along the trade routes,” says Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States, Said T. Jawad, “created an opportunity for different cultures to mix. The cuisine shows Persian, Indian and Chinese influences, but it is different from all of them.”
Bread is the staple food. The long, oval loaves, usually cooked in a tandoor, are eaten on their own or used to sop the many stews.
Rice, which is central to the Afghan diet, also shows the Indian influence. The basic rice dish is the chalow, white rice parboiled then cooked in an oven with oil. It is served alongside qormas, stews which are often based on onions but may also include meat, fruit and vegetables.
If the rice is cooked with other ingredients, it is called a palau. Qaubili palau, rice cooked with lamb, carrots and raisins, is one of the best known versions. Chef Tim Elliott includes a lamb chop qaubili as a part of his Afghan dinner at Mie N Yu.
Vegetables are often made into burani, fried and served with a yogurt sauce. The Gallery Café incorporates a baked-eggplant version into its buffet.
Spices are similar to those used in Indian cooking, but are used in moderation.
The ambassador says Afghan practice is “to put enough spice in the food so that you can’t tell exactly what the spice is.”
The inspiration for the Afghan pasta dishes, predominately dumplings, is probably Chinese, but these, too, have become distinctly Afghan. Afghan dumplings are often served as appetizers in Afghan restaurants in the United States, but in Afghanistan, they would simply be part of the single-course, feast-like spread that defines Afghan hospitality.
Mantu are filled with onions and ground beef and topped with yogurt and mint. The ambassador says they are his favorite food. Ashak are filled with leeks and topped with garlic, mint and ground meat. Chef Elliott makes his mantu with Kobe beef and scallions, topped with garlic-mint yogurt.
Meat in Afghan restaurants is often served as kebabs. In Afghanistan, these fall into the category of restaurant cooking rather than home cooking, because of the special equipment required for their preparation. In Afghanistan, kebabs are made primarily from lamb and chicken, but at Afghan restaurants in the United States like Bamian, beef, ground beef and fish are offered. Helmand in Cambridge sells koufta challow, beef meatballs with spices, sundried tomatoes, hot peppers and green peas in a fresh tomato sauce for $11.95.
The restaurant also offers qoremay mahe, sea bass with onion, peeled tomatoes, garlic, ginger, radishes and potato for $18.95.
The Helmand Restaurant in Baltimore stews sea bass with ginger, sun-dried baby grapes, mint, tomatoes and potatoes. The fish is $17.95. There the banjan burani, pan-fried and baked baby pumpkin, $4.75, is seasoned with sugar and served on yogurt and garlic sauce.
Another pumpkin dish at Bamian, kadu chalau, includes yogurt and mint. This $10.95 dinner entrée is served with white rice. Another vegetarian platter with eggplant, spinach and pumpkin is served with naan for $12.95 at dinner.
Afghanistan is predominately an agricultural country, known for the quality of its fruit. Dried fruits and nuts figure prominently in the cuisine and are among Afghanistan’s leading exports.
Sweets are considered luxuries in Afghanistan. Meals are often ended with fresh fruit, or, more elaborately, with pastries such as baklava or the fried pastry called goshe feel, or elephant ears. Firnee, a cornstarch pudding, is served cold and topped with pistachios.
At Helmand in Cambridge a feereney, pudding topped with kiwi, mango, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries, sells for $4.95.
“The Afghan community,” Ambassador Jawad says, “is excited to associate the name of Afghanistan with art and culture again.”