The last meal of the last President of Afghanistan consisted of vegetable pancakes, salad and steamed broccoli. Nasrullah, the head chef at the presidential palace in Kabul, fried the pancakes and steamed the vegetables himself. He tasted everything to make sure he was good and to prove that no poison had gotten into President Ashraf Ghani’s food.
The precaution was unnecessary. The plates of food were left untouched that day, August 15, 2021, when the Afghan capital suddenly fell and the Taliban entered. Ghani had already fled.
Part of an ethnic group disadvantaged by the Taliban, Nasrullah was demoted to a vegetable scrubber at the palace. His abilities to extract sweetness from onions and carrots sautéed in sesame oil, to layer flavor with raisins and a variety of spices for another Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s favorite lamb and rice dish, are wasted today in day. His new bosses, he said, come from the country. They prefer their meat unadorned.
“All the Taliban want to eat is meat, meat, meat,” he said. “No vegetables, no spices”.
Changing tastes in the presidential palace are just one example of how Afghanistan has changed since the Taliban returned to power after more than 20 years of insurgency. From the once bustling restaurants in Kabul to the icy mountains looming over the capital, a nation is learning to survive on less.
The famine and the hardships that come with it were reasserted during a harsh winter made more desperate by a shortage of international aid.
After nearly a week in the hills and snow, Jomagul led his herd to a village for shelter. He started with 45 sheep; 30 remain. Three died the night before. A corpse lay near the road, surrounded by traps for foxes, which, like frost, steal sheep from the flock.
Often, sheep are slaughtered, salted and dried to obtain laandi, a kind of dried meat that sustains Afghans during the cold. Laandi is favored in the palace by the new Afghan officials. But with the dwindling herds, there is less laandi for the rest of the population. In just two weeks in January, 260,000 head of cattle died, reported the Ministry of Agriculture.
In Kabul, even middle-class families have cut back on meat. Wages have gone down. The Government has prevented most women from working.
Nasrullah, the chef of the palace, still offers food to the guests. In the dim glow of a bulb attached to a fuel jug, during one of many power outages, he placed a plate of bread and a pot of cardamom tea on the rug. He apologized for the limited food. They all wore their winter coats inside.
It had been a long time since he prepared his best dishes. But Nasrullah still recounts the recipe for his kabuli pulao, made Uzbek style with sesame oil. Her hands imitate slicing and stirring, positioning the cloth to steam the grains of rice with hot spices—cardamom, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and black pepper—and onions softened to the skin tone of a pear.
The pulao recipe is slightly different, although it is prepared Uzbek style, in a popular restaurant in Kabul. Recently, Hungry men waited for their food at low tables. There were places for women on the second floor.
Business is down 40 percent because most people don’t have enough income to eat out. Many restaurants in Kabul have closed. In public, men and women generally cannot dine together.
Still, there are enough customers who sigh for the pulao.
“people need to eatsaid Amanullah, the restaurant’s pulao master.
*Kiana Hayeri and Zabihullah Padshah contributed reporting to this article.
Hannah Beech
THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6657788, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-12 22:00:07
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