03 Magazine: April 05, 2024

60 Magazine | Food
Spice up your life
Between cooking feasts for her family and friends and her ‘day job’ as a nurse,
fabulous foodie Ashia Ismail-Singer has somehow found time to cook up a delicious
new book of recipes drawing on her time in Africa, the UK and New Zealand.
WORDS & RECIPES ASHIA ISMAIL-SINGER | PHOTOS LOTTIE HEDLEY
Mine is an immigrant’s cuisine, of sorts, merging old
traditions with new ones, creating food that spans
generations, geography and ethnicities. Food evokes a
passion in me that I cherish, one that has grown from my
early childhood days in Malawi, Africa, to my teenage years
in England, and the last twenty-plus years in my beautiful,
adopted home country of New Zealand.
Being of Indian heritage, my love of cooking first started
at an early age, and some of my favourite recipes are ones
that have been passed down through my family, adapted
by each generation to suit the ingredients available. As
someone who wears many hats, I cook and create recipes,
source props and style. As well as this, I have a ‘day job’ as
a nurse and I have just retrained to start a career in real
estate, with the hope of making real estate and food writing
my full-time gigs.
My grandparents were Memon Muslims who came from
Gujarat, on the western coast of India. Sometime in the late
1930s to early 1940s, they emigrated to Malawi, Africa. My
dad was born in India, in Jamnagar, in the southwestern part
of Gujarat. He was only one year old when his family left for
Malawi, known as the ‘warm heart of Africa’. My mother’s
family was already in Malawi, and she was born there.
My sisters and I were all also born in Malawi. Because of
political instability, we left as a family in 1987 to immigrate
to the UK. We all had British passports, as Malawi is part of
the Commonwealth, and my father had lived and studied in
the UK during the 1960s. It was a chance for a better life
for us all.
Regardless of where we lived, cooking was always a
big part of our upbringing. My parents loved to entertain,
and my mum had no qualms about cooking a biryani, a
layered meat and rice dish, for a hundred guests on special
occasions. Together, my mum and dad always planned
what dishes were to be served at family gatherings. We
celebrated every festival and special family occasion with an
abundance of food. My parents loved having parties for our
birthdays, especially since my sister and I are twins. There
weren’t very many twins in our social circle, so we were a
bit of a novelty!
I loved being in the kitchen with my mum, and with my
aunts who would visit. Families always had an open-door
policy, so you never needed an invite. Our cook, Medson,
prepared the ingredients, and then mum would come in
and finish things off. He would make excellent rotis; my
mum taught him, too. I remember the fragrant smells of
spices cooking, beautifully aromatic, heady, a mixture of hot,
salty, sweet and sour, perfectly balanced.
Recipes were never written down but remembered by
taking part, helping and learning as you went, developing
your tastebuds, which became more attuned with age and
experience. And this led to cooking by instinct, which is
how I cook now.
In Malawi when I was growing up, fruit, vegetables and
meat did not come packaged. We grew our produce or
slaughtered the animals ourselves. We had a chicken coop,
which also housed goats. I have fond memories of going
to the dairy farm with my sisters, my cousin, my mum
and aunt to collect our milk, which we would carry home,
sloshing about in a big aluminium milk pail.
The ingredients we used were always fresh, and the
dishes were predominantly Indian. But Mum was making
‘fusion food’ long before fusion was fashionable. A confident
cook, she effortlessly adapted Western recipes – Sunday
roasts, casseroles and shepherd’s pie – to incorporate
Indian flavours.
Moving to the UK from Malawi was an eye-opening
journey. Although my father had lived in the UK in the
1960s, things had changed a lot when we immigrated
there as a family in 1987. I navigated this new life with
apprehension. But what brought me comfort and joy was
being part of a close-knit family and coming home from
college and cooking dinner. Both my parents worked, and
my sister and I, being the eldest of four girls, would come
home and start cooking the family meal. I was studying
fashion and design at art school, and I loved getting
creative in the kitchen, too. It was here that my love of
cooking blossomed.
There was a large population of South Asians in the
UK, and we could go to the Indian grocery stores and get
spices and vegetables that we were used to. But we also
started using ingredients that we hadn’t been able to get
in Malawi and so the melding of food cultures continued,
creating recipes which built bridges between all the
countries I have called home.
Moving countries on my own in 1997 was probably the
most exciting – and also the hardest – thing I ever did.
Always outspoken, adventurous and passionate, I followed
my wanderlust. I eventually arrived in New Zealand,
falling in love not just with the country but with one Kiwi
in particular, who I ended up marrying and having two
amazing children with. Now, having spent more of my life
in New Zealand than anywhere else, I truly call it home.
But that doesn’t stop me from being an immigrant and
missing ‘home’, which is ultimately wherever the rest of
my family is.