Pakistani Heirlooms: Family History in My Mother's Degchis

Hina Husain dives into the history of the Pakistani kitchen’s true underdogs: the pots, pans, and degchis that have been used in South Asian homes for centuries, to feed families and loved ones. In this love letter to the Pakistani kitchen, she maps the generations of women who have come before her, who pass on the traditions of their culture through food. 

“Let me know what you want for your house so I can pack it for you.”

My mother is standing in her kitchen, laying out the details of her upcoming planned retirement. She’s nearing 60 and wants her children to have first dibs on her things before she gives things away or sells them. 

So far, she’s decided to give me some Persian rugs that we brought with us from Pakistan when we immigrated to Canada 20 years ago. I’ve also managed to secure the two-meter high painting by iconic Pakistani artist Sadequain, which is one of the most valuable pieces of art my family owns. I’m seated at the kitchen island holding my four-month-old newborn, and my mind is fixed on one question: What is she going to do with all her cookware?

My mother has now moved on to how she wants to distribute her furniture and other household knick knacks between her three children. I run out of patience. “I want your degchis!” I blurt out. “All three of them.”

She looks up at me, silent for a few seconds. “You want them? You can have them.”

The author’s mother was given an entire kitchen’s worth of cookware and cutlery as jahez hen she married in 1986, which included three prized degchis.

When my mother married my father in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1986, she was given an entire kitchen’s worth of cookware and cutlery from her family in jahez — a cultural practice common in South Asian countries, of gifting daughters household items and assets upon marriage, to help them set up their new lives and homes. Families usually gift furniture, refrigerators, air-conditioners, jewellery, cars, clothes, and kitchenware for their daughters’ nuptials. 

Along with silverware and a dinner set of fine china, my mother was given three degchis. She has lovingly carried them across a dozen homes in three countries over two continents, cooking and feeding her growing family in good times and bad, after my father’s death and upon my children’s birth. If those degchis could speak, they would tell the stories of my childhood, my siblings’ lives, my parents’ marriage, and of a family finding its way in the world.                     

The Jahez System

At first, it seemed odd to feel such a strong sense of connection to inanimate objects such as pots and pans. But these degchis are woven into the fabric of my family. And perhaps unsurprisingly, I am not the only one who feels this way about her family’s traditional cookware.

“When I think of the pots and pans passed down generations in my family, I’m instantly transported to my childhood, to my grandmother’s house in the Old City of Lahore,” says Maria Nasir, a food blogger at Foodholic, and recipe developer based in Lahore, who runs her own catering business. “I can still picture my grandmother sitting on the cement floor of her shabby but practical kitchen, crouching beside a slab of stone (called sil), grinding an aromatic paste of ginger, garlic, cumin and red chillies with another handy piece of stone (batta), moving her hands rhythmically back and forth,” she recalls.

These traditional degchis often bear the weight of expectations. Photo Credit: Maria Nasir

Kausar Ahmed, international chef and author of the Pakistani cookbook, The Karachi Kitchen, inherited her mother and her grandmother’s cookware in her jahez. As a newlywed, she remembers the degchis bearing the weight of generations of expectations. “I had an arranged marriage, and a very conservative mother-in-law. On the second day of my marriage, she had me take out my degchis. The first thing you need to make in them is kheer. It’s been decades, but I still remember her standing over my head while I nervously made the kheer,” she recalls. “When I opened up my set of degchis, I went, ‘Phew, now I know why my mum gave this to me!’ The message was to make it in your own equipment.”

“For my mother and many other women from her generation, the quality and quantity of the cookware received in their jahez signalled their socio-economic class.” In Pakistan, the cultural and social aspects of marriage also translated to the woman cooking in the house. Having her own cookware was one way in which she could confidently assert her own identity within her new family. “The jahez rationale is that everything has to be present when she arrives; she takes her own pots and pans and starts cooking in those, which is very traditional,” says Kausar.

In Pakistan, a married woman having her own cookware was a way for her to confidently assert her own identity within her new family.

Maybe I covet my mother’s degchis because I didn’t receive any cookware in jahez when I got married in Canada.

With more and more women working outside the home after marriage in Pakistan, and with upper class society outsourcing their cooking needs to domestic workers and live-in chefs, the idea that a woman should know how to cook after marriage, and be prepared to bring her own collection of cookware, is becoming outdated. 

Despite its roots in tradition to help a young couple set up their new lives, jahez has sadly become a status symbol in Pakistan. Hence, it often becomes a financial burden for middle and lower middle class families, especially if it is demanded by the groom’s side. “Jahez leaves poor families with a huge burden of loans or spending all their savings to wed their daughter,” says Kausar. “It becomes financially impossible for parents with two or three daughters to put together large sums of money for jahez. There have been numerous cases where the girl is tortured, abused, or mistreated by her in-laws or husband because she did not bring enough jahez.” 

Changing Cookware Traditions

More recently, the kinds of cookware gifted in jahez have had a modern reinvention, with wealthy families preferring to gift costlier nonstick items over the traditional metallic and ceramic pots.

Pakistani cooking is predicated on processes such as bhunai — the process of cooking a masala base (typically made of tomatoes, onions, ginger and garlic) until the oil separates from it. Wide-mouthed and heavy-bottomed pans, either metal or ceramic, are best for bhunai as the thick bottom and walls keep the heat in, protect the food from burning, and infuse the dish with subtle, earthy tones and aromas.

A couple of Christmases ago, I gifted my mother an Instant Pot so it would cut down her cooking time when making dishes like nihari (meat stew) and paya (lamb trotters in gravy), which are often slow-cooked and need to be made over an entire day. My mom used the Instant Pot a few times but eventually went back to cooking those dishes in her degchis. While the Instant Pot did cut down the cooking time, it needed more water to come up to pressure, which meant a watery gravy and a less flavourful nihari. With paya, cooking it long and slow in the degchis allows the gelatin to seep out of the trotters and naturally thicken the gravy. In the Instant Pot, the gelatin didn’t have enough time to mix with the gravy, leaving the paya with a soupier consistency. After experimenting with a few other Pakistani dishes in the Instant Pot, my mother decided to use it mostly for making dals and Western dishes like French onion soup. For everything else, she has her degchis. 

My mother’s prized madhani collection. Photos credit: Hina Husain

As for me, I have traded in my mom’s pressure cooker for the Instant Pot, her metal chimtas for silicone tongs, and her white stone mortar and pestle for a Ninja food processor. But I cannot imagine giving up cooking in her degchis. In part, this is because I do not want to lose the connection I have, through them, to my Pakistani heritage, identity, family history, and culture, all of which I carry with me into every new dish I cook, and every meal I make for my own family. 

“I always say that we’ve forgotten how to stay close to earth, and we have lost touch with all those earthen flavours,” says Kausar, of the disconnect many young Pakistanis experience from the foods they eat. “This is what our ancestors used to do, so when I’m cooking, I like to be connected to the food and the whole process.” My feelings exactly, with an added touch of nostalgia. While she’s not very expressive of her feelings, I get the sense my mother has similar reasons for holding on to her degchis all these years, and her reluctance to give them away. 

“I’ve had them long enough,” she says, when I ask why she is finally willing to part with her pots. “It’s time for you to make your own memories with them.”

The day I returned home, my car loaded with the rugs and paintings she had passed on to me, I went into the kitchen to get the degchis. She pulled them out, stacked like Russian nesting dolls. She looked at them and slowly ran her fingers on the inside of each one before handing them over. 

“You know what,” she said, pulling back the mid-sized degchi. “I think I’ll keep this one. You never know.” 

Hina Husain is a Pakistani Canadian freelance writer based in Toronto and can be found on X @HinaTweetsNow.

 ALSO ON GOYA