Reflections On A Supper Club
There are containers filled with spices, marinades, and sauces. Pots and griddle pans laid over a hob. There’s a 3 kg lamb roasting in an oven and hurried last-minute preparations for the construction of a 3-course meal. A table with plates, cutlery, and flowers is neatly set for an assembly that will experience their first Somali supper club.
My process for bringing about any project is defined by two key aspects of my personality: an obsessive pursuit of perfection and beauty, typical of a Virgo, and a paralysing fear that these standards may prove unattainable, rooted in my tendency towards anxious avoidance. So when the idea of hosting a supper club arose, encouraged by friends and family after years of culinary exploration, I knew it would take some time to bring to fruition.
I’ve not always loved food. Growing up I often considered eating a chore, preferring running about in a park with my twin brother and a football to sitting down for lunch. It just didn’t excite me. Like most journeys into the world of food, mine didn’t begin independently. It started, as all good origin stories do - with friends. When I moved away from home and into my first flat in Finsbury Park, I was able to experience another level of independence with food. I invited friends over and as we cooked together I steadily honed a new skill.
During the pandemic, I found myself with time on my hands, and so this obsession grew. I began carefully crafting complex meals - and made an unconscious promise to myself that I never wanted to have a bad or poorly planned meal in my life if I could avoid it. I also wanted so desperately to share these meals and more broadly this newly developed ethos with others. So when lock-down lifted, what began as an excessive number of dinner parties during the week, then became an idea, and then a menu, and then a date.
On the 3rd of March, In a beautiful kitchen situated in a leafy north London suburb, I gathered friends and family for the first iteration of my Somali supper club. The menu consisted of the following:
It was a testing ground. Could I experiment without drifting too far from definitive aspects of Somali cuisine? Drawing upon memory, nostalgia and a palette shaped by London’s diverse and creative food world, I was able to piece together dishes like the moreish meaty-yet-vegan sambusas, to rich and dense cabbages that fell from the stem like lamb, desserts and palate cleansers like vimto tarragon sorbet that would transport people to memories of my childhood. The menu was cultivated with a desire to make the unfamiliar, familiar - to shift both Somali cuisine and my guests into new ground.
The process of bringing Casho together took about a year, it culminated in hours of brainstorming, delving into specific cultural and culinary research from Somali sign-painting to recipe development, continuously refining recipes that I’d pieced together in my mind and claimed as my own. The first supper club was called Casuumad, which means an invite or gathering (of people you love). At Casuumads in Somali households you are likely to find huge pots of aromatic rice, well-seasoned, slow cooked lamb, packs of shani or vimto as a refreshment, and endless cups of shaax (spiced tea). I wanted to bring these defining features to the menu in a playful way without losing their essence, so I re-imagined these flavours in dishes such as the silky and warmly spiced shaax and tonka bean creme brulee, and the sharp and sweet vimto and tarragon sorbet.
Over the past year, we have seen an increasing presence of Somali cuisine within the ever-changing food landscape in London. It has been surreal to experience foodie friends inviting me to Somali restaurants. The thing I have found most surprising, perhaps, is the acceptance of bananas and rice - an emblem of Somali food which was once teased and treated with scepticism by other diaspora groups - and this fills me with joy.
As a project, Casho not only seeks to build upon the supper club, it also seeks to capture, document and reflect upon these cultural shifts. From recipes, to food writing, to events - Casho is firmly grounded in the points of connection that food allows us to make.