Asma Khan Says Women Shouldn't Cook For Free

Serious XM podcasts. [MUSIC] I'm not one of those chefs who spend time taking pictures of food. >> I'm with you, I hate it when I take time to prepare something delicious or a matter of restaurant where I've been really looking forward to eating and

the food finally arrives and I'm really hungry and then I'm like, "Ah, I should probably take a picture of this for Instagram." Then by that, I'm like, "Ah, screw it, I'm just going to eat."

>> I'm sure that you remember as well the time when people never took photographs of food.

We didn't have mobile phones with cameras in it. >> Right. >> And maybe I'm just kind of old fashioned, but I hanker for that time of innocence, where it was you photographed in your memory. >> Yeah, why do you prefer that?

“>> I think that, at least for me, I think you should eat with all your sense.”

>> I would rather just remember how it tasted than just have this picture on my phone. >> Right. >> So, I take pictures of my cat because I love my cat. [LAUGH] [MUSIC] >> This is this pork full, it's not for foodies, it's for eaters.

I'm Dan Pashman, each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. >> Quick reminder that next week we are doing our first New York area live show in nearly two years.

March 19th at the Bauhaus in Brooklyn, my guest will be cookbook author, Kenji Lopez,

all and comedy legend Judy Gold will discuss the state of the bagel. In America today, is there a bagel of songs coming? That's the term I just made up, but you know, awareness sounds for bagels. Judy was cooking during the recent blizzard. She shared a hilarious video with her wife for things that we went off the rails.

We'll talk about that. We got a lot of the cover, it's going to be a ton of fun. Next Thursday, the 19th in Brooklyn, tickets and details at sportfull.com/live. [MUSIC] All right, let's get into it.

The London restaurant, our jeeling express, is the place to go if you want an outstanding mutton kebab.

But it's also a great place to spot celebrities.

Kira Knightley and Padma Lakshmi have died in there. Paul Rudd visited multiple times in one month. And last year, the restaurant hosted King Charles and Queen Camilla for a charity event. You've heard of them, right? But the chef behind this celebrity hotspot has no formal culinary training.

Osma Khan started her cooking career hosting secret supper clubs in her apartment when her husband was traveling for work. Now she's staffed her restaurant with women who also didn't go to culinary school, who learned to cook as housewives, nannies, and housekeepers. Today, Osma is a regular on British cooking shows and was featured in the Netflix show "Chef's Table."

In that episode, you see her walking around the dining room of a restaurant from one table to another. She's sharing stories from her life with the diners, explaining which dishes go with which and gently scolding one customer who is eating the wrong rice with his meal. It's clear that Osma is not afraid to speak her mind. So, I knew exactly how I wanted to start our conversation.

Can I give you a quick lightning round?

“Yes, this is going to be rapid fire. Quick questions, quick answers. You ready?”

Yeah. All right, here we go. Here in the US, some people like to put potato chips or crisps as you'd call them in England, in their tuna salad sandwiches. The food writer Kenji Lopez, all one's quoted a chef who suggested using Indian Pabadam's instead of chips. What's your take on that?

Oh my god, no, no, absolutely no. Why not? It's a way we end meals. I think most people are confused because you go to a restaurant, you get Pabadam served at the beginning of a meal. You're supposed to eat at the end of a meal.

It's how you mop up all the remaining gravy and the chutney is your, you know, the final end to kind of stimulating your palate so you can start digesting all this lovely food you ate. So, for me, Pabadam is pretty serious. It's the end of a meal. You'll put them in a sandwich, no. Okay, all right. Next question.

“Even after 30 years living in the UK, what's one food still makes you feel like a stranger there?”

I think anything with eel, do you care about, you know, this eel pies and eel that you have and is somehow eel looks too much like a snake for me. I find that really quite distressing, okay. That's someone must eat that. Final question of the lightning round, which is more annoying?

People saying non-bread or chy-t. No, that's not a fair question. I mean, I hate bull. I think chy-t. Why? Why is chy-t different?

They're both redundant. I understand, but why is chy-t more annoyingly redundant? Because the thing is that it is this kind of also the idea that chy-t is what you get in Starbucks, loaded with cinnamon.

it's not at all like chy.

“So, it's always that, you know, kind of the cringe factor because you know that they've had something”

with the power that's facing it and it hasn't have any of that layering that chy-t should have. But I love that question. I would imagine that you're the kind of person who like when you're walking around your restaurant and if somebody were to order chy-t or non-bread, you would not be shy about correcting them.

So, I'm not shy because I always think that this is, I'm doing, this public service.

So, that you don't, you don't actually cause grief to someone else who may over here though. All right, I say it with as much humor and love as I can, but this year I tell them, don't say it. Azma's written a number of cookbooks, including last year's Mom's Soon and her 2022 book, Amu. Throughout her career, she celebrated the food of her childhood and also opened up about the

“trauma she faced growing up in India. She was born in Kolkata in 1969. Her older sister was”

already in the picture, so Azma was the second daughter. In a culture where boys are prized, have one daughter is considered bad enough, too. The greater family and the rest of society made sure you knew that this was a traumatic time for your family because you were not the blessed one, you were not the boy. You do pick it up very, very early. This was not the best moment for your family and that you are definitely not

someone they were hoping for. When you put the lights on and you light the whole house up and it's a point. The houses end up this when a girl is born. There is no fireworks and there's no celebration. You kept your lights off because you didn't want to tell all your neighbors that we have got a girl. As Azma grew up, her community provided constant reminders of the difference between girls and boys, especially once her younger brother was born. The disparity was especially visible

at the dinner table. Food is always about power who eats who eats what, who serve what. Men

were served first, the boys were served first. Women eat always ate last and girls ate least.

And you share stories from girls are talking about the burnt roti. This is a very emotional, you can't even comprehend and say it that I always got the burnt roti. It was the rejects that were given to girls. The ones that didn't turn out perfect. It was given to them.

“And I was I think I was 45. When I broke an egg frying an egg and I told my son,”

I'll eat this. I'm going to make another one for you. And I broke down crying because suddenly I remembered the number of times that I was served the broken egg. I am still damaged by the childhood where I was made to feel not welcome. But there's another layering which is not just that I was a second daughter. I was dark. I was fat. I didn't fall into the the norms of what was attractive and pretty in my culture. My grandfather would tell me, I still love playing cricket. She said,

"I don't go out and play cricket. You're already so dark and ugly. You know, no one's going to marry you." My older sister was fair and slim. Down thing, she looks pretty 20 years younger than me. She's beautiful. She's beautiful. She looks like an actress. She's just stunning. Ironically, she's far smarter than me. Everyone thought she was stupid because she was pretty. But does anyone in the family talk about her? No, they just talk about how beautiful she is

and how pretty her salary is. They never talk about the work she does because she doesn't count.

It's her looks that is all that people look at. This was the kind of treatment Asma Gottmer extended family and her larger community. If a grandmother or auntie or neighbor was cooking, Asma Gott the burnt roti. But at home, in her immediate family, she did have some protection. Thanks to her mother. My mother, that way, was so unusual. She just kind of, you know, so this is I'm talking about, you know, being served a broken egg in large family gatherings.

But if my mother wasn't charged, I would get the best of everything. My sister and me, and equally, my brother, she never discriminated and she would make sure that we got the same of everything. Asma's mother was pretty radical. They had servants at home and once a month the family took the servants after dinner and restaurant. This was unheard of. Asma says they got so many looks when they walked in the door. And the more Asma understood about her own mother's experiences,

the more she understood why her mother cared so much about treating her kids equally. She's one of five daughters. She is also the dark skin one, the middle daughter. And I shouldn't, I can say it. She wasn't loved by her parents. So she made it a point to love

When relatives called Asma fat or ugly, her older sister would be there. She would come in and hold my hand from the back and tell whispering to my ear, you are going to be the warrior princess

“and the world will know your name. I remember this feeling that how it made me feel.”

So powerful that the world looked up to this person. My sister so beautiful, so graceful. But she told me, I was going to rule the world one day. Asma was the first person in her family to go to college. And after graduating, her mother arranged a marriage for her. She was 22. Her husband, Mushtalk, got a job as a fellow in economics the University of Cambridge in England. They moved there in 1991, leaving her family and friends

behind. Asma was very lonely there. The weather was so cold. She had never seen bear trees.

And she wasn't able to conjure a taste of home because she had never learned to cook. She didn't even know how to boil an egg. Her husband said he'd cook for them but Asma says he was awful at it. To make matters worse, the Indian food in the UK was completely far into her.

“You know, shocking. I couldn't recognize anything of the dishes. I mean, it's like saying,”

you know, I'm going to go and have American food. What is American food? Indian food is so regional. So this was what amazed me first that it didn't seem to have any regional roots of anything. Because in India, you have rice growing areas, wheat growing areas. Won't you eat with rice? Because we eat with our hands. It's got a lot of gravy in it. What you eat with bread is by dry. And here everything was just mixed up. And then all the dishes came with so much

cream and butter. And I told my husband when he came home that I put so much butter and cream in

my shoe. It would taste nice. During that first year in Cambridge, Asma was very homesick.

But she didn't realize the extent of it until one day she was riding her bike in a different part of town. She caught the smell of someone cooking parathas. I still can smell that aroma of the ghee hitting the wheat that roasted bit of the paratha. That aroma suddenly I was transformed back to home standing in my kitchen. I mean, I cried so much. I wanted to even ring the bell, but I was so ashamed of the tears. I didn't think I could speak that I could even ask this person that

did give the paratha to me. Asma realized she needed to learn to cook. She didn't even know how to make the paratha that she craved so much. So she went back to India for a month and asked her mother and asked to teach her everything. Her aunts were not used to sharing their recipes. In fact, there was a rivalry among them, but the fact that she had come back to India or eat them. They were afraid she'd leave her husband, so they put their rivalry aside. Asma kept going back

for these one month since every year. She said she grew closer to her mom during this time, cooking together. Her mother ran a successful catering business in Kolkata and was the first female entrepreneur in the family. She taught Asma to cook by field, adding a pinch to this or touch more of that. Some of it was simple dishes like Jira Alu, which are cumin potatoes, but she also learned old family recipes like Naurangi Korma, a Korma with oranges and it that came from her father's

great uncle. Over several years, Asma became a more confident cook, exploring her family's roots through food. Where she still saw another part of her family's roots as her true call it, social advocacy. Her father and grandfather were both union organizers in India. She worked at Cambridge Women's Aid, supported women escaping domestic violence. When Asma's husband got a job at the University of London in 1996, her activist bent led her to law school in London and then a PhD

in British constitutional law. It always interested me to find out how the rights are enshrined.

“Deep down, I know that you need to have protection. Equality needs to be enshrined and low.”

You need the codes to step in if you are being discriminated against. So, this is what fascinated me. How do you protect someone who feels emotionalized? It's it's all the same thing. My PhD, the work I do, they're all interconnected. I'm so tired of answering to me. The same ones who told me, I was fat and ugly, that you know, whatever way it's divided you study, all you're doing now is cooking. And I think like, where do I start trying to explain to them? The skills of advocacy

of understanding justice came from reading Kayslow and understanding what drives justice. In 2012, Asma graduated from King's College. She had a law degree and a PhD, which she got while raising two kids. And the things she wanted to do more than anything else was cook. There was no way I'd imagine that I could go into a restaurant. Right. The restaurants

The British were the so absolutely diabolical nightmarish. I couldn't go on the street and sell food,

“because it suddenly rained all the times. Then my neighbor told me about a supper club he went to.”

So, it's kind of sounded really cool. I just thought, great, this is illegal, you know, you have people in your house and it's, you know, underground and you know, as I don't find what I'll do it. You start hosting supper clubs, but only at certain times, only when your husband's out of town. Yes. So, this was happening in secret. Not secret. I mean, I just didn't tell him. That's it. But he doesn't need to know. My husband is very different from me.

People stare at him and say, my God, he's still married. He's very serious. He's very, now I know the word for it. He's really into social distance. You know, like people? He's, um, he's very introverted. But as my husband comes to teaching, Mujtak is like a whole other person. My husband is so different when it comes to students. He's very engaged, you know, he's wants to teach. He's

interested in knowing what their problems are. He's a phenomenal lecturer. I want sat for a

two-hour lecture where he's lectured without notes. He's incredible. I'm just thinking, you know,

“am I right to this guy? You know, who doesn't speak to me? Who has no conversation with me?”

But on stage he's on fire. You know, he's talking about things that he believes in. But doesn't like people. So, why stress the man out? You know, he's a way, he doesn't need to know. And he's been in the house, you know, with very well. So you come back and say, oh, the house looks very clean. Yes, it looks very clean. And you were cooking all the foods that you grew up with, the foods you had learned from your mom. Yes, and I also, it allowed me to serve food in the sequence

in which I love. So I had full freedom to present to them the food and tell them eat this with this, have that that there's put a touch of this because we don't have this idea of courses. It's a very European idea of, you know, first course, the second course. In India, all the food is eaten together. You stimulate the palate, you know, sweet sour, stringent, chillies. All of this

“are meant to work together. So that you have a complete experience. Our food is not complimentary.”

The spices don't work complimentary. They're contradictory. As my says in the early days of her supper club, the crowd was parents from her kid's school. Mostly women at first, although men started coming later. As word of mouth spread, the events grew from about 12 people to more like 45. She says very few of the more white British people. It was people of South Asian descent and also transplants from other parts of Europe.

Everyone was born outside England. They understood that this was about identity, that I was, I was communicating about myself through food. Despite the success of the supper club, Osmo shut it down after five years. It was her kids' request. They were 15 in 10 at the time and they were tired of having a hide in their rooms when 45 people showed up to dinner. Coming up, Osmo turns her efforts to opening

a restaurant and she tells us something about that process that she's never told anyone before. Stick around.

Time to cook up some advertisements. Welcome back to this pork full. I'm Dan Pashman. Last week on the show I talk with Melissa Silva from Elberito Mercado in St. Paul, Minnesota. The store's been around for nearly 50 years. But over the last few months, things have really changed. Thousands of federal immigration agents swarmed the Twin Cities, detaining hundreds of people and killing at least two American citizens.

Elberito Mercado found itself in the middle of all the chaos and they stepped up with food deliveries to people too scared to leave their homes. It's all been so intense that Melissa is still processing it. I mean, I was born and raised here and never, ever what I've ever thought that you would be talking about Minnesota like this. And to hear this happening and as I was talking, I'm thinking about like, God, that's just what made the news. What about all the stories

of the people I know like that? My staff and their families and friends, customers like the

story is going on and on. This is a really powerful conversation and I hope you'll check it out

it's up now. All right, back to my conversation with Osma Khan. After Osma stopped hosting her supper clubs, she was introduced to the manager of pub. He loved Indian food and offered to let her run a pop-up at the pub. Osma doesn't drink, so she hadn't spent much time in pubs. But I was desperate. I really wanted to cook. It was really the thing that I'm loving to lose. Osma started cooking in the pub and soon got a glowing review in the evening standard.

entered Bengali prawn malai curry. She also wrote that the cooks Osma hired for the pop-up were not classically trained, but were Indian housewives who, after the shift of the pub, would go back home and cook for their own families. As the pop-up became more popular, Osma saw her opportunities growing. At the time she was in her late 40s, she was offered a space in West London to open her own restaurant. She thought she was ready,

and she got support from an unlikely source. Her husband. He's very much into equality, fighting for justice politically but the same. He does it through economics. I do it through different ways.

After years of telling me that I was wrong to leave law, that I could never make a difference to

anyone's life. I understood at that point that food had become my way of advocacy. Now, despite you saying that your husband is so different from you and kind of doesn't really

“like people, he was eventually on board with the restaurant. Is that right?”

Yes. In the best kind of way, he gave me his money. Because I think, honestly, between the choice of my partner telling me I'm great and I'm the best and him giving me money. I'd rather take his money. And what Meshav did was to give me his entire life savings, so I could open a restaurant. I was so unexpected. I had no list of clothes. Because still I saw the money hitting my account. I was so terrified it changed as mine.

I did an entire laundry that night. Because I didn't know that the money doesn't show up till the next morning. So he told me I transferred the money, but I couldn't see it on my account. Then he was laughing. Once I finished doing his laundry, don't listen. At 6 o'clock in the morning, wake up and see your thing. The money is going to be there. I felt like an idiot for having done all his laundry. So what did that mean to you after having been skeptical for

“so long? Well, I mean, I think all of us, my feeling was of relief that I got the money,”

because I was struggling to find to erase the money. But I also realized one thing that I didn't have to go and preen and tell let him know that I understood that he believes in me. And this is why he refused to be on Netflix. They begged him. They were sitting in the study saying, "Will you say a few words?" He said, "I know what you're going to ask me. The first thing you're asked me is, why did I give up the money?" And I will not answer that question. I was smart enough

to keep my mouth shut and literally took his money and I ran. I didn't talk to him about it. I was, of course, in deep inside, he extremely thrilled and I understand and thank God,

I know he's not going to listen to this because he never listens to anything that I talk about.

He doesn't watch any films, he doesn't read my cookbooks, he's like completely disconnected from what I'm doing. So I can see anything I want about him. That's one village. And because God helped me that he actually listens to a conversation like this. I do believe in shit. I mean, such shit, but I don't know. He doesn't have time for all of this nonsense. You know, when people on the street stop is, "Hey, you're smart, he told me, "Wow, they know your name.

I'm on television every other day." I was never normal. But I have never till now bloated on it or made a point of it. I literally never talk about it. It's this kind of crazy thing that he gave me 185,000 pounds and he would think that at some point he would raise it or I

would talk about it. He never talks about it. I never talk about it. And he just pretend that

it didn't happen. What are you afraid would happen if you talked about it? That the magic would go, you know, I have no idea why he gave it to me. I never asked him for it. And I never understand what his thinking was. I won't do imagine and dream that it was because he realized that I was going to make a difference. So I don't want to my dream to be shattered. I now said this to anyone

“before, but yeah, that's why I don't talk about it. Because I don't want to know some other”

reason that he may have had. With the money from our husband and a glowing review, asthma opened Darjeeling Express. And in keeping with so much of her philosophy, the menu itself was very democratic. Street food, right next to fancy food. If anyone's traveling India, you know the rich and the very poor, live cheap to jowl. You know, there are slums in the middle of the city. Next to high-rise buildings, you will find, you know,

destitute families on the street. And we live with this. But now that I left and now that I go back, I just find it difficult to understand how, you know, even I am ashamed to admit, never saw the naked hunger destitute children. Somehow you get, I don't know, some kind of way of switching

First time he saw street child, suddenly I saw all these destitute children. And I wanted the restaurant

“to reflect the reality on the ground. And what it is to be Indian. When the restaurant opened,”

a lot of people took note the fact that all the folks cooking in the kitchen were women. Asma says she didn't plan it this way. But women were the only ones who cooked the way she wanted. The men who applied for the job all had the same resume. They learned to cook in culinary school,

they were trained in Indian five-star hotels. They never learned from their mother. No one would

have their boy in the kitchen. So for them they learned with weights and measures, with timings, with free serve. And so it's an all kinds of gizmos. They have chef's knives. We have nothing in our kitchen. We have a tomato knife. Everybody uses a tomato knife, a small, simple knife. Because I tried to get them a Japanese knife. We had to take two of them to hospital that day, because they're not used to using sharp knives. You know, we're just how home-cooked they're

housewives. And there was no way I was going to survive two minutes in a kitchen with a man who was going to measure and weigh everything. And cook without soul. I heard you in one interview you said, "Women cooked differently from men in my culture because we were in the kitchen. We served the

“food. We never got served." Yes. I think it makes a big difference. Because I think the reason why”

anyone should cook is service. If this is below you then don't cook. And this is why I think that men in this kind of crazy drive for glory and seeing themselves as chefs. And you know, not taking a potshot at men. Maybe I am. But too many chefs take themselves to seriously. I hear what you're saying. And there's this and you feel that so much of what women are bringing to your kitchen is this tradition of service. But also the reason why women have traditionally been

put in that position and have acquired those skills is in part because they haven't been given any other option. Yes. So through this oppression they have acquired this ability that is now useful and wonderful in making great food in your restaurant. But it's still tied to something that's not so wonderful. This is our problem that we have allowed the chains. You know, this is your duty to chain us down and not seeing this as my professional skill that I can monetize that I can

go into business. I can sell my rotis. They are perfect every time. This is what happened to all my women who have worked for me. Today they are on a huge amount of money and all the men in their family take them very seriously. They are more than all their men put together than the family. This is the new women's movement, entrepreneurship, business. I'm not going to cook because this is what you expect from me. Let us make money. On the strength of her cooking and her convictions,

asthma has become one of London's best known restaurant tours and celebrity chefs. But despite this success, being a woman in her field remains a struggle. Just as it was when she was growing up in India, I was so shocked because after I was featured in Netflix and chef's table, I tried to move

out of my first restaurant which is very very small and we were struggling. We were just fooled

for two years, booked up. Not a single line, not sure any site. This is pre-COVID. When COVID hit in a lot of restaurants closed, asthma was finally able to move into a better location. I have to wait for a global pandemic. I have to wait for mail chefs to fail for me to get the site I did. The second location was bigger, but she didn't like that the kitchen was in the basement. We're no one could see the cooks. She wanted a new space with an open kitchen, so the cooks could

really be the stars of the show. But in the process of finding the restaurants current spot, asthma felt sideline once again. Now that the world has opened up again, I'm seeing all the big big boys. Again, they're asking me who must suitable boys. A suitable boy was a husband and the suit with the money bags. Now again, they're asking me but I haven't taken up the funny but I have a business advisor, but I have someone else on shares in my company. Why are you not willing to accept

“the fact that I own this entire company on my own? That I personally have the money and I think”

the misunderstanding that people think that in the West, women are treated equal, it's not. It's very

hidden in the West, especially if you're a female founder, I am never going to be on par with these

big boys who come in, who are well networked, you know, better safe school time, play football,

That's Os McCon, chef and owner of Darkgealing Express in London. Her latest cookbook is

“Mansoon, delicious Indian recipes for every day in season. And by the way, the restaurant will be”

moving again, hopefully this spring or summer, the new location will still have an open kitchen.

Next week on the show, I head to the home of ifra Ahmed, author of the new book Somalia,

ifra one of this book to document Somali cuisine, but she's also not afraid of her own spin on it

“like with her ungero breakfast burritos. We talk about that and we cook up sambus for a Ramadan”

iftar dinner. That's next week. In the meantime, check out last week's show about a grocery and

restaurant in St. Paul that's had to pivot with the recent ice presence there. That one's up now. And hey, did you know you can listen to the sportful and serious XM app? Yes, the serious XM app

“has all your favorite podcasts plus over 200 ad free music channels curated by genre and era.”

Plus live sports coverage is your podcasting app have that and there's interviews with a little stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. Right now, sportful listeners can get three months free of the serious XM app by going to serious XM dot com slash sportful. This episode was produced by me along with Manage and Producer, Emma Morgan Stern and Senior Producer, Andreys O'Hara and Producer, Johanna Mayer. It was edited by

Tracy Samielson, the show is mixed by Marcus Homb and Jared O'Connell, music help from lacklabel music. The sportful is a production of serious XM podcast, our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Paschman. And I'm Christina from London, England, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.