DIY Dinners: Darjeeling Express
Today is Mother’s Day – or at least it was when I wrote this.
It’s also the final day in an excruciatingly testing week for women across the country. It started with an International Women’s Day that was initially dominated by frustration at the regression of gender equality over the course of the pandemic. Later that evening, attention turned to the racially charged media and workplace harassment of one woman, who felt suicidal as a consequence.
The week ended with the confirmation that the worst thing, the thing that every woman dreads during every after-dark journey, had happened to another woman in south west London.
In short, we’ve all needed a hug. I am lucky today in that I can be with my mum – we have lived together for almost a year now – but many people can’t. I hugged her extra tight today, knowing that this week had been difficult for us both personally and collectively. I’m very glad that I could do that.
I think I may have missed hugs even more than I missed visiting restaurants this year. I remember one particularly wonderful night, where both of these much-craved habits collided.
A few years ago now, I took my mum to Darjeeling Express. It was my first visit to the restaurant, in its original spot atop Kingly Court. I had interviewed Asma a couple of weeks beforehand for an International Women’s Day article for the Standard, and become hopelessly enthralled and enthused by her – her fierceness and her vulnerability, her warmth and her hardness, her principles and her relentless efforts to share what she believed in.
That night, my mother and I became just as enamoured with her food: an absorbing goat kosha mangsho, heat-riddled Tangra prawns, magical balloon-like puris and and a pot of masala chai so lovingly spiced, so care-dispelling as get my mum utterly hooked on (my pale imitation of) the stuff.
Bad photo, good food: dishes from Darjeeling Express’s ‘With Love…’ menu, available via Big Night
Asma was there, of course. I gave her a wave and gestured that it was me, the girl from down the phone, and she hurried over to chat – I needn’t have waved, it seems, as she spoke to every single table that night. We spoke about many things but mainly how she was so pleased to see me there with my mum, and how she loved nothing more than feeding people’s mums because she could not feed her own, who lived 5,000 miles away in Kolkata.
As viewers of her Chef’s Table episode will know, Asma’s love for cooking was born out of missing her Kolkata home while living in London. Taught to cook by the women of her family, she went on to remedy her homesickness by cooking with other immigrant women living in the capital – many of whom still work with her in the all-female kitchen at Darjeeling Express today.
Asma and her team made that diminutive dining room feel like a home. The night had a buzz akin to a wedding, with Asma’s mingling managing to sprinkle a connective and collective warmth between the groups of people who didn’t know one another, but were all there for the same joyous reason. At the end of our meal, Asma gave both me and my mum the squeeziest of hugs. It is not only great food that comes out of that kitchen, but love.
Even lockdown hasn’t stopped this. A week or two ago, I received delivery of Darjeeling Express’s “With Love, From Me To You” menu, sent along via Big Night – a new restaurant delivery company that ensures a better deal for independent restaurateurs than other comparable set-ups.
It’s a seven course tasting menu intended as a generous feast for two people – but as we’ve got four in the house (including my very pleased mother), it was inevitably served up family-style to an eager clan.
We began with street-style snacks of dainty puchkas – filled with spiced potatoes and chickpeas and drizzled with tamarind water – and channa chaat bedazzled with green chillies, red onion, crunchy sev and fresh coriander.
Next up was an indulgent array of curried dishes: lamb tamatar gosht, slow-cooked until superbly soft and absorbent of every fragrant flavour in its tomato sauce; badami baingan, which saw aubergine’s earthy sweetness enveloped in nutty moreishness from almonds, peanuts and coconut; and finally the chicken chaap – in my opinion, the star of the show.
I’m not usually a korma kinda girl, but this was something else: a near impossibly creamy sauce clung to those chicken legs, brightened with saffron and enriched with mace and nutmeg until heavenly, served with absurdly buttery parathas “square, just like our grandmothers would shape them”. A dish inspired by royal Mughal feasts, Asma says – I’m sure the Mughals would have loved to see me drink the sauce out of the bowl while “doing the washing up”.
While this was probably plenty for four people who only wanted to loosen one belt notch as opposed to five, I have a perennial fear of not feeding people enough. Earlier in the day I also dove into my copy of Asma’s Indian Kitchen – Khan’s cookbook of much-loved, home-style recipes – and dug out instructions for her Anglo-Indian meatball curry for good measure.
On a roll: Anglo-Indian meatball curry, cooked by me, from Asma’s Indian Kitchen
A pleasantly straightforward recipe, the most English bit comes in the form of peppery parsley in the meatballs – and possibly my cooking. My lackadaisical use of coconut milk instead of the full-frontal coconut cream that Asma ushers you towards, meant it wasn’t quite as thick as I’m sure it’s supposed to be, but the innate notion of comfort was still there. Poached in the gravy, the meatballs soak up flavours of ginger and coriander, while also imparting heat from their green chillies into the curry.
Asma has just announced a new cookbook – named “Ammu”, for her mother. In it, she says she’ll include many of Ammu’s recipes, recall how she taught her to cook and make food that “nourishes the soul”.
Even though I hadn’t spent my most recent Darjeeling Express meal in that small room in Kingly Court, or in the grander surroundings of Asma’s new Covent Garden restaurant, every one of the dishes I enjoyed gave me the uncanny sense of being cared for, as if your mum had just dropped round some food because she heard you were having a bad week.
In a week where many women felt their souls being drained, acts of love and care from one woman to another is just the kind of nourishment we all need.
This DIY kit was supplied as a complimentary press sample.
For more information, visit darjeeling-express.com and bignight.app.
