Why I’m learning how to make koki in my late twenties and not chapati
An exploration of domestic labour, choice and why koki trumps all
There’s a false assumption at play in wider media that food writers are all skilled cooks, or almost all of us exclusively dabble in recipe writing. I think like most assumed “truths” this is a personal question with answers rooted in upbringing, life experiences and general attitude towards food and eating. Yes, I like cooking and yes, I enjoy dabbling in the kitchen and trying recipes across a spectrum of ‘girl dinner’ and Ottolenghi-level complicated meals. And yes, despite being a digital native of my generation, I cook both foreign and Sindhi food and am not out to abandon Sindhi saee bhaji for kimchi jjigae. I’m nowhere near being skilled at chopping onions, or rather anything but I get by, and I love to feed myself and my loved ones. However, as I grow older and my repertoire of my favourite comfort foods and go-to recipes grows, I can begin to see one very specific category of meals that I don’t seem too eager to learn how to cook, until now that is. Indian flatbreads like chapati and roti are thought of as a given, a culinary skill that must innately be present in all women in this subcontinent. In my upbringing, two flatbreads dominated my diet: chapati and the Sindhi koki, and I can confidently say I don’t know how to cook either without any internalised stigma. What intrigues me more though is that finally in my late twenties, I want to learn how to make koki, but I can’t say the same for chapati.
When I was in the process of moving to London, I began learning some of my favourite recipes to be able to cook for and feed myself and even though chapati is nowhere near my favourite thing to eat, I was taught how to make it once. All I can remember is that it was oddly shaped, slightly burnt and maybe too crispy for anyone’s liking. Learning how to make chapati was unsurpassable in my culinary education at home. But the fact of the matter is I only ate chapati or roti five times in my four years in London and all five of those times was from readymade chapati packets from the Indian grocery store. Anyone who knows me knows that I can’t go a day without eating rice and those four years in my second home, I rather became a rice expert and even taught my non-Indian friends and flatmates how to cook rice the desi way. Rice slowly overtook the place of chapati while I was living in London, and it was only during visits back home that I actually ate chapati. While the desire to not make it nor eat it with gusto largely comes from personal preferences, there’s a small grain of patriarchal symbolism that I see in chapati that I cannot quite shake off.
Growing up in an Indian household, the expectations around the consumption of chapati – and phulka which is usually eaten hot off the stove – have inadvertently influenced my opinion of the role that chapati plays in my kitchen. Seeing the women in my family stand by the stove to cook phulkas for the men who are the only one’s eating is a reality that I think still exists for most Indians across different regions, class and backgrounds. As a culture we love to say how things have changed and how people have begun accepting seemingly modern notions like brides who don’t cook and hold down a 9–5 job and how the family comes together to support them. But the irony in these statements lies in the fact that they never should be thought of as “modern” but rather the norm and the way things are supposed to be. Almost all my Indian, and often South Asian female friends feel the push towards the kitchen for different reasons and in different stages of their lives but it’s a given that we’re expected to step foot in a kitchen, and most importantly that we must know how to make chapati and chai above all else. This in-built and very subtle peer pressure makes it hard for women to consider cooking as an act of relaxation when for a lot of them it connotes the opposite of relaxation. And what’s more to view cooking as an act of leisure has layers of privilege that come with it across gender, caste, class and familial backgrounds.
Roti or chapati has been viewed as marriage market currency in this country and to this day it stands true as this barometer of suitability. If Cordon Bleu teaches you the three mother sauces of French cuisine, the Indian standards of being a good wife and daughter-in-law teach you the importance of making perfectly round and fresh rotis. Let me make clear that I don’t have a problem with anyone who makes or enjoys eating roti. I just have a problem that it must be an inherent requirement for anyone identifying as a woman, even in this so-called “modern” day and age. When talking about coming face-to-face with her personal ambition to learn how to make roti all while confronting the internalised patriarchy within, lawyer and writer Shraddha Upadhyaya talks about how even the labour of roti-making is deemed as something that can be churned out in a conveyor belt-like fashion, instantly and without any difficulty, all while her female family members stand for hours to satisfy this large production demand. She writes:
“It was probably those memories, the inter-generational trauma of ungrateful roti labour, that made us look away. I shudder when I think about it, not that it is a thing of the past. I cannot accept any unsolicited humour from men about rotis. Even well-meaning romanticism around maa ke haath ki roti angers me.”
Roti or chapati-making is clearly steeped in a gendered division of labour. I reiterate again that there is nothing wrong in eating or preparing roti, but the conversations around it within the Indian household often gear towards complaints about the lack of freshness, or how thick or misshapen it is, or even that it’s not to someone’s liking. As much as this trad wife resurgence on TikTok would like us all to believe that all feminists want to suppress their desire to be homemakers, that couldn’t be farther from the tenet of feminism, of creating an environment of choice and agency. Therefore, to prepare rotis or eat them, is thoroughly a personal choice that I don’t really wish to exercise just yet. Unlike learning how to make koki.
If you were to visit any Sindhi food blog, content creators page or even speak to a Sindhi person, we are invariably bound to name drop koki multiple times in that one conversation. Koki is the bedrock of memories around food, commensality, travelling and migration for Sindhis everywhere. It’s our breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s stuffed into tiffin boxes with crispy friend bhindi and potatoes. It’s what I would eat after flying back to London after every home visit in the mornings before work, swallowing the lump in my throat and the wave of home sickness that comes with eating koki away from home. It’s what my mother, grandmother and aunt have always sent me off with whenever travelling, almost like a talisman to tide me over until my journey ends. Maybe koki has acted like this migratory guardian for Sindhis of yore, a comforting reminder that this journey will lead to something fruitful.
In all the Sindhi culture circles I’m a part of we keep moaning about how we are more than just koki and Sindhi curry. And while that is true, and I will always talk about cuisines outside of the monoliths set for them by mainstream media, koki is still something that is special to us. Maybe because outside of how people from the Sindhi community write and talk about it on social media, we don’t feel it adequately represented for what it is.
To start with, it cannot be compared to thepla because unlike thepla, koki is meant to be thicker and crispier. We usually score koki before putting it on the tawa to ease the release of steam while cooking it. Its flavours rely on two very key Sindhi pantry staples – onions and black pepper – wherein the dough with onion in it has these bite-sized onion pieces that almost taste sweet when you bite into them while the black pepper dough has freshly-cracked pepper in it making it perfect to devour on chilly winter mornings. Koki is almost always accompanied with dahi or better yet dahi boondi, and if you’re extra lucky then fried bhindi aloo. That’s how we do it from Larkana. Any of my friends who eat koki for the first time always find it to be unlike any other flatbread they’ve ever had. You could say that koki may be a touch more laborious to make what with all the extra additions to its dough and how thick it needs to be rolled out. And yet, I don’t feel good about not knowing how to make it.
This newsletter came about to be over the span of a weekend in May 2023 in London. I didn’t ever actively write about food beyond one attempt at documenting recipes on Instagram in my early twenties which was like pulling teeth for me because I’m a chaotic and forgetful cook. I didn’t even know that this was how I wanted to connect with my culture let alone its cuisine. But that first story on the Sindhi affinity towards dried fruits and nuts was always in the back of my mind and just looking for an outlet, and I soon realised that was the case for all my musings and thoughts on different Sindhi dishes I had cooked or enjoyed eating. A big part then of embracing my heritage beyond the written word is to learn more recipes from my family members that I’ve otherwise never tried to make.
I don’t want to romanticise koki as this metaphor for healing my suppressed notions on foods that earlier made me want to stay out of the kitchen because of their toil. I just don’t want it to be something I don’t know how to make for myself – something that I never to attempted to cook for myself in London. I want to start out by making misshapen kokis that may be too crispy or slightly undercooked (my first Sindhi curry gave me indigestion), but at least I’ll start somewhere and reject the interconnectedness between femininity, cooking and perfection.1 This is labour I choose to undertake, labour I want to undertake.
There’s no one way for women to express themselves correctly in the kitchen. Despite the dissemination of content that aims to de-gender the kitchen, there is still much work to be done. I’m not talking about changing societal opinions at large, I am not a masochist. What I am talking about is creating an open dialogue for women within our immediate circles to voice what aspects of domesticity in the kitchen they want to pick and choose. That for the future generations, cooking is not a given for any gender though it is an important survival tool for all but only to be engaged in up to your choosing and liking. That chasing the ideal of round and hot rotis is not inherently bad but if done solely for the validation of male family members is something worth questioning. That we need to de-stigmatise the shame around buying ready-to-eat rotis or using roti making machines on the regular. That it’s okay to learn how to make koki and not rotis in your late twenties.
Food and Femininity, Kate Cairns & Josée Johnston, 24 September 2015, Bloomsbury Publishing
Koki is best had with tea!
It's always chai-koki, dudh-dhodo, dal-pakwan as the breakfast combos here - maybe the chai-koki is a sahiti thing?