Refugees remember food from their homelands in a cookbook

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For Afghani refugee Zohra, a meal of kabuli pulao, her country’s national dish, offers more than just a taste of home. It has the ability to transport her back to her childhood, to a time before the Taliban, when life was good and women were given a free rein over their lives.

Zohra – who was born and raised in Kabul and has since fled the war-torn city to live in Kuala Lumpur with her husband – would come home from school to watch her mother prepare her the dish, a wondrous tableau of slow-cooked lamb luxuriating in fluffy gold rice jazzed up with sultanas and sweetened carrots.