Art fascinated me before I could spell it. It’s why I could look at a white, pink & orange Bonbon and think of a specific Matisse painting. There’s nothing pretentious about art itself; just the people who think they own it. It is quite the same with food as well. The food I make is deeply personal: a reflection of my memories, experiences and multi-cultural background. They merge all the cultures that have forever been changed by colonization. It is all about taking the home cooked food I grew up eating, and merging it with my love for art.
In a way, it’s decolonizing fine-dining from an exclusionary experience to your own Ratatouille moment, from a culture so reduced to curries and biryanis. My system for that is drawing creative inspiration from the works of artists that inspired me as a child.
I wanted to show the world what our oldest, biggest open market looked like. The challenge was: it is the busiest at 3 am, while the rest of the country is asleep. They toss fresh line-caught fish by hand; cauliflowers are stacked in hexagonal pyramids. By 10 am, the vendors are already taking a well-deserved slumber right next to their day's produce. Shooting in a fast-moving, expansive space, was ambitious as is. I also wanted to take inspiration from the offerings at the market. That is when the sight of 'tatka' (Bangla for fresh) loitta fish caught my eye. The pandemic has taken plenty from us, and for me, it was a home-cooked meal of Loitta Fish Fry with steamed sticky rice. The rice would be coated in a simple combination of locally sourced mustard oil & chilies from my mother's plants. I knew I had to recreate it.
The components of the dish were broken down into four: crispy Fried Fish bites; warm & nutty black sticky rice; zingy, luxurious mustard sauce, and the chili oil from my own line of products. This is the first time I'm releasing a recipe to the public. I debated how complicated it was to do the plating; it was self-expression after all. In the end, I decided to keep it simple; I decided to go with the concept of a 'lokma'.
A lokma is essentially a serving of food, molded by your hand, which includes a little bit of everything on your plate. Parents would make lokmas for their infants, so it was easier to consume. The idea was to invoke a sense of love and home. The plating was also meant to represent my love for the structured abstracts: each lokma with fish is assembled in rows of two, sitting adjacent to the next. So when you make this and plate it, I hope it imbues a sense of comfort, straight from my childhood.
Sameera Hussain Wadood
Photo Credit: Abdul Mamun & Nuhash Humayun
Sameera Wadood is a cyber-security engineer turned chef. Raised in a multi-cultural household, with food from India, Myanmar and Oman, her line of cooking is defined ‘Contemporary Bangladeshi Cuisine’. Her unique perspective on food sits at the intersection of science, art & culture. The ideology across the board is the same: to use more local ingredients & techniques to create better, more interesting food. As part of the food consultancy she founded, Sameera helps restaurants and other food establishments thrive.
Sameera hopes to discover and reinvent what a global pantry looks like while taking the world on this journey with her.
