Recipe adapted from Ammu by Asma Khan (£26, Ebury).
Photographs Laura Edwards.
For many of us home cooks, our mothers are the inspiration for our own adventures in the kitchen as grown-ups. My late mum wasn’t much of a cook, but she made the best apple pie I’ve ever tasted, partly because her recipe was so good, but mainly because it evokes so many childhood memories. It was the dish that set me off on my own cooking journey. Reading Asma Khan’s new cookbook triggered that nostalgia as it’s dedicated to her own mum – her ammu – who taught her daughter how to cook ‘and live’.
Asma is well-known for employing an all-female team of South-Asian chefs in her London restaurant, Darjeeling Express. But when it was forced to close during the pandemic, she started to reminisce and, while her mum is still alive, wanted to share the stories and recipes that, she says, ‘made me and root me to home’.