Written by Tahmina Begum - a journalist and editor for British Vogue, The Guardian, Dazed, The Independent and more. Her debut narrative non-fiction, Womanhood will be released this Autumn.
Whether it’s bringing jeera to university or quickly making something for uninvited guests, a kitchen just isn’t fully realised without a dabba, says Tahmina Begum.
I am only two inches taller than my mother. Still, I know when she is to begin cooking — not because the kitchen starts to smell like onions caramelising on top of the finely chopped cloves of garlic but because before she begins cooking, she always asks me to pull down the masala dabba from the top shelf.
A large circular container of stainless steel and a glass window (that reveals seven smaller compartment bowls for the seven integral spices) is a staple of South Asian households. I can only fathom cooking with a dabba. And if it’s not the steel — or a sometimes wooden dabba — then I remember how many of us fashioned a spice compartment of our own kind at university.
We rolled plastic packets of cheap supermarket spices with a rubber band and stacked them tightly next to each other to keep the air out in our student cupboards. Needing to create your own dabba is a teenage rite of passage in realising how much spice your palette actually requires. Something just feels missing without a touch of jeera or panch phoron.
Illustrated by Arushi Kathuria
It is funny to me how what we associate with in our British Asian homes is a cumin seed throw away from the heart of how South Asians who live in South Asia cook. When visiting Bangladesh earlier this year, the village kitchens didn’t contain steel dabbas. Raw and whole spices were ground up before a chicken was basted or a tilapia was smothered in turmeric, salt and red and green chilli. There is less need for powdered spices to store because fresh spices are always readily available. Yet every now and then, you will see a village house with a dabba — someone has gifted an auntie and brought their version of South Asia back across oceans.
“We rolled plastic packets of cheap supermarket spices with a rubber band in our student cupboards. Needing to create your own dabba is a teenage rite of passage”
Dabbas have become more of a staple in the last seventy years. Post-partition the fear of forced movement meant carrying treasured spices on your back. It was introduced into South Asian households that migrated to the West as a way of always having spices nearby. They have in turn become sentimental objects. Grandmothers have been known to show the battered dabbas they received once as a new bride to their granddaughters (“Look at the quality they used to be! Not like flimsy dhabbas now!”). Now, Dabbas have become home-warming gifts without the usual pathway of marriage. Owning your own dabba is a sign of adulthood.
A dabba opened hurriedly with a clang also signifies that hurried march of ‘Quick! We have guests! Throw some garlic cloves, cumin seeds and coriander powder into a pan! Add some curry powder and chilli to create a base! Any base!’
Similarly, the fastening of a dabba meant the cooking for the day was done, a family was fed, the maternal duties were fulfilled and it could go back into its cupboard until needed again. A dabba is something most South Asian kitchens now have — there is something integrally missing without one. My mother would argue you cannot cook without one. Sometimes when I am heating a quick pasta dish or sprinkling in some pepper onto an easy-to-do salmon bake, I can hear my mother’s gold wedding bangles clink onto her steel dhabba as she dashes in the right amount of garam masala with the chicken; enough mustard seeds to create the base of a biryani and hear her snaps off the Chinese cinnamon for her black tea.
Will I one day be the type of mother when asked ‘How much spice shall I put in?”, I respond with ‘You will just know!’ as I wipe down my dabba with a kitchen tissue before setting it back onto a shelf higher than I can reach? Maybe then I’ll feel like a real grown-up.
It won’t be a mortgage, or a car on finance for me, but joining a legacy of desi women who knew owning their spices meant discovery. They were allowed a small space to have their voice heard, in their home, that was just theirs. Long live the dabba.
Written by Tahmina Begum
