Awakening the senses

Breakfast

Appears in
top 1000Summers Under the Tamarind Tree: Recipes and memories from Pakistan
Summers Under the Tamarind Tree

By Sumayya Usmani

Published 2016

  • About
Waking up to hot, humid conditions and knowing you have to go out into the bustling, sweaty streets of a Pakistani city is enough of a reason to roll over and go back to sleep. Often it was purely the anticipation of a breakfast feast of sweet and savoury flavours that inspired me to rise and face the day.

When it comes to a traditional Pakistani breakfast (known as a ‘halva puri’), you are spoilt for choice. There’s light and fluffy khagina (scrambled eggs with tomatoes, coriander and green chillies), cholay ka salan (chickpea curry) and the tasty potato dish aloo ki bhujia – all mopped up with steaming, deep-fried puri breads. This breakfast scene is only complete with sweet cardamom-laced semolina halva and a hot cardamom chai to ease the heat.