"This Kashmiri dish is a very famous traditional dish. My friend's kashmiri wife cooked this for us in the 70s and the taste still lingers. We are going to cook this dish this week and thought of sharing it with you all. If u dont have garam masala use your own garam masala. Zafrani garam masala is not available in Doha but i am getting it fm Kochi this week. But always manage with substitutes."
I do have garam masala. Perhaps not Zafrani, but Bali.
The best spices come from The Spice Islands,. These are the dozens of tiny rain-soaked forests, luxuriant, verdoyant, volcanic islands on the equator pretty much, that make up the Indonesian archipelago of the Moluccas, aka the Maluku Islands if you prefer.
Today, you can buy these spices in Dewata and Bintang supermarkets and the very best brand is Nox.
Until the 1700s, all the world's cloves, nutmeg, and mace (which is the powdered skin of the meg nut) came from here, though noone knew this as the Arab traders had kept this secret since the 4th century.
Then came Vasco da Gama on his famous voyage in 1497, round the Cape to India. The Portuguese proceeded to figure out where these Arab spices were coming from.
It is said that local people planted a clove tree each time a child was born, thus through the generations, through practise and custom, man (which includes women) and his destiny were wedded to the forest.
But the Dutch, who eventually took over the Moluccas in the seventeenth century, in order to limit supply and raise wholesale prices, tore down the forests except on Amboina and a few other islands, making cloves worth more than their weight in gold! ... But also making mad the native Polynesians.
Slowly slowly, the spice was cultivated in other parts of the world - Brazil, the West Indies, Zanzibar ... and today you can buy cloves for your Sunday pork roast with crackling, and your apple pie & custard, in Sainsburys and Tesco.
The British when they colonised converted the people to Christianity, taught them English, introduced them to the latest hot playwright, left behind the rule of law and strict accounting principles. The Dutch by contrast left the people as ignorant as they were when they found them. You have only to compare Singapore or Malaysia with Indonesia....but the latter are fast catching up!
More than that, the Portuguese took great risks in order to discover the Spice Islands and along the way going round the Cape they got lost and found the new world, full of red Indians - Christopher Columbus sailed West across the Atlantic, in fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue; and Magellan did the world's first luxury cruise round the entire globe, returning East across the Pacific.
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