Chainaki: The Afghani Dish That is Served in a Teapot

Photo by Ali Yasser Arwand from Pexels

My husband and I hunkered down with our then-six-month-old daughter in our relatively new two-bedroom apartment on Long Island, New York, during a global pandemic that promised to—and eventually did—upend all semblance of normalcy across the globe. One thing became clear: We all needed comfort.

 Unable to seek solace in cozy embraces by people other than ourselves, we turned to food to steady our minds and warm our hearts, specifically exploring traditional comfort foods from cultures other than our own. The best way to tackle a global crisis, we excitedly thought, would be to catapult ourselves into the culinary practices of other communities. How was the world dealing with sadness through cooking?

 And so we first prepared a pasta al limone, indulging my Italian background and my husband’s obsession with cheese. We reveled in the delicious comfort that a perfectly composed plate of cheesy pasta always provides before moving onto a dinner of rice and khoresh lapeh, a Persian dish that features a yellow split pea stew made with saffron dried lime, tomato paste and chunky pieces of meat. Pre-quarantine, we’d eat the delicacy every Friday night during Sabbaths spent with our Persian families. It felt nice and familiar to have the treat at home during uncertain times as well.

 Next up: an Israeli sabich sandwich starring eggs, fried eggplant, hummus and pickles in a pita. Although we discovered it years ago and have been quietly singing its praises for quite some time, the sandwich was suddenly imbued with a supportive aura that delighted our taste buds and proved to be extra heartwarming at the peak of a pandemic.

 We then decided to delve a bit deeper into the gastronomic tendencies of cultures we didn’t know as well, but whose birthplaces we hoped to be able to travel to soon enough. Eventually, we landed on the chainaki, an Afghani comfort food that is cooked and served in a teapot.

 The traditional South Asian recipe calls for cubes of lamb to be thrown into a chainak (Afghan for “teapot”) together with chopped onions, garlic, ginger, turmeric, coriander, celery, tomatoes and cilantro. Add some salt and pepper, a cup of water and place the teapot on a flame—ideally and traditionally, the food would cook over a charcoal fire—for at least an hour.

 The resulting concoction—a deep red and orange, hearty-looking stew that smells divine—is then brought to the table.

 “We bring fresh homemade Afghani bread, too,” says Afghani chef Hamidullah Noori, owner of restaurant Mantu in Richmond, Virginia. “We tear the tandoori bread into small pieces, put them into a soup bowl and take the chainaki and pour it into the bowl.”

 As is often the case with the sorts of food that linger in your palate for days after having first consumed them, the way the chainaki is eaten is as fundamental to the experience as the way the dish is to be prepared.

 Although the use of lamb allows for the cook to abstain from adding oil to the pot (“the lamb has the fat!,” says Noori), when pressed about potential substitutions, Noori suggests goat.

 But even that slight modification rubs him the wrong way. The chef has, in fact, opted not to serve chainaki at his restaurant just yet because unable to find the specific teapot that the food is to be cooked in.

  “The basic teapot is made out of clay, which is not breakable,” he explains. “I haven’t had the chance to find those [here]. People aren’t going to Afghanistan right now but, if my friends go, I was going to order a bunch of them so I could make it in a traditional way.” Noori did find a copper teapot that could potentially work, but he is still reluctant to use it. “If I say it’s a traditional dish, I should be serving it the way it is traditionally served, the way it was created,” he says.

 (Full disclosure: Less particular about a food we’ve never tried before and acting under the constraints of a weird world order, my husband and I cooked the chainaki in a relatively standard big pot. We did, however, find some tandoori bread to enjoy it with.)

 Clearly imbued with an essence that goes beyond the flavorful, chainaiki is typically served in Afghanistan at special events, especially during cold winters. As for its origin story, it’s all a bit murky.

 “It’s a dish from Kabul that traveled to all the villages around the country,” explains Noori. Unsure about specifics, the chef takes the opportunity to lament the lack of a chronicled history for his people. “Because we’ve had so many wars in the country for decades, the problem with Afghani cuisine is we lost our mentions,” he says. “Nobody mentioned [or wrote down] the names of people making things.”

 He hopes to somehow change that by offering American masses quintessential Afghani flavors presented in authentic fashions. “People need to know that there is a history behind these dishes,” he says.

 That history is hard to study from afar, although the powers of the internet introduce us to a world of rainbow-colored teapots covered in a smoke so thick it almost feels like it’s jumping out of the screen. A mere Google search of the dish leads to pages about Istalif, a village of potters about 20 miles outside of Kabul that is home to only two restaurants, one of which, Sayeed Amin’s, solely sells chainaki. Although undoubtedly different from the chainaki we devoured while under stay-at-home orders on the other side of the Atlantic on a random night in April, the food that’s been served for centuries in the remote Afghani town likely has one thing in common with our own version: It fills diners up with something beyond the nutritious, in a way morphing into the culinary equivalent of a good-old hug.