Stuffed whole chicken.
At the Soomar residence, eating a stuffed bird is a monthly as opposed to an annual affair. The Bandra West-residing Kutchi Memon family’s fowl of choice is chicken. They stuff it with boiled eggs and mutton kheema, truss the bird, cook it and heap it with a garnish of birista (crisped onions) as the final flourish before serving. When we asked them whether it’s a celebratory dish, Faiziya Soomar, who helms the kitchen, told us that in matters of food, “every day is an occasion in the Soomar household”.
Faiziya and her husband Arshad Soomar started The Cutchi Memon Table (they spell Kutchi with a C) in August 2015. It’s not a home dining experience like it sounds, but a takeaway service focused on the traditional meat-rich cooking of their community. Memons, who hail from Kutch, are a migrant Muslim community whose nose for business brought them to Mumbai. Arshad Soomar’s ancestors settled in the city in the early 1900s while Faiziya moved here from Bangalore after they got married in 1992.
Faiziya Soomar learned how to cook from her mother and an aunt, who ran Kutchi Memon cooking classes in Bangalore. To prepare her delivery menu, she uses the same recipes handed down to her by these women, and adjusts the amount of oil according to her customers’ preferences.
We were invited to have lunch with the Soomars’ last week. The meal began with mutton harissa (Rs1,500 for a kilo), a haleem-like stew of mushy cracked wheat ribboned with strands of mutton and garnished with mint leaves and birista. Because it’s comforting, filling and nourishing, the Soomars consume harissa by the pail during Ramzan. Next we feasted on kheema samosas (Rs360 for a dozen) and shammi kebabs (Rs360 for a dozen). Unlike Bohri samosas, which are stuffed with dry, smoked mince, Soomar’s were juicier, not smoked and heavily flavoured with mint. The tender and moist mince paired well with the crisp samosa casing. The first-rate shammi kebabs had a similar textural contrast of melting soft mutton mince and a crisp shell of shallow-fried breadcrumbs.
Like Parsis, Kutchi Memons stock birista (fried onions) by the kilos and serve it with practically everything. Saffron is just as integral to their cooking along with garam masala, the proportions of which vary from home to home. While Soomar is cautious with masala, she uses mint liberally as “it adds flavour and aids with digestion”. The food is rich enough thanks to the amount of meat. Vegetarian fare is rarely ever cooked at the Soomar residence.
The principal dish of our meal was the stuffed chicken (Rs550), which was marinated in yoghurt, lime, garlic and ginger for 48 hours and then stuffed and cooked in a kadhai, unlike Thanksgiving turkey that’s typically roasted in an oven. The chicken was succulent and slid off the bone. They served us bread to mop up the delicious mint-scented spiced kheema stuffing. Soomar’s mildly spiced and minty mutton biryani (Rs1,650 for a kilo) had an equal mutton to long-grained rice ratio and commendably little oil. Like the rest of the meat dishes, the mutton was slow-cooked to perfection.
From her repertoire of desserts that includes sheer khurma (Rs500 for a litre) and shahi tukda (Rs65), we tasted the khubani ka meetha (Rs70), a preparation of stewed apricots blanketed with an invigorating layer of chilled and moderately sweetened fresh cream. Each of the dishes that made up our meal is available on Soomar’s takeaway menu. To justify the word ‘table’ in their catering service, the couple is looking for venues at which they can host pop-ups meals in the near future.
See The Cutchi Memon Table’s takeaway-only menu here. Orders have to be placed a day in advance. Call 98203 98922.