I’m afraid Eid in East Lulworth, where we now live, wasn’t any different from other days, but the sun shone, and the good weather induced us to drive to Swanage for lunch. I have no desi friends in the area; in fact, I’m not sure there are many desis around this neck of the woods. So I was quite resigned to doing without large portions of meat on Eid.

In Swanage, we found a table at a seafood restaurant on the pier, and I ordered a platter of oysters and grilled tuna. The oysters appeared on their shells on a bed of crushed ice, accompanied with slices of lemon and a bottle of Tobasco, the hot chilli sauce. Personally, I just use a squeeze of lemon on the raw, live crustacean: but don’t let the fact that it is alive put you off. The small delicacy is not known for its swift movement — or any movement at all. In fact, it slides very easily down the hatch, leaving behind a taste of brine and lemon.

Oysters, while an acquired taste, have been around a very long time. Alexander Dumas recounts, in his marvellous meditation on food, how a Greek introduced the technique for fattening them some 2,300 years ago. And while they are a luxury now, there was a time in the 18th century when they were cheap snacks for Londoners who flocked to their city’s hundreds of gin-palaces. Now, you can easily pay 10 pounds for half a dozen. Here, Dumas describes the best way to eat them:

“Oysters are eaten in the simplest way in the world. One opens them, extracts them, sprinkles a few drops of lemon juice on them and swallows them. The most refined gourmands prepare a kind of sauce with vinegar, pepper and shallot and dip the oysters in this before swallowing them. Others — and these are the true oyster-lovers — add nothing at all to the oysters, but eat them raw without vinegar, lemon or pepper.”

But Dumas glosses over the business of opening oysters: in reality, this is not as simple as it sounds as the creature is anchored firmly to its shell by a large muscle. The two parts of the shell have to be separated using a special knife. The point is inserted, and then the blade is twisted. You have to be careful not to cut your hands on the edge of the shell.

Incidentally, there are two rocky islands just off Karachi known as Oyster Rocks. As kids we used to sail there and fish, but now the water is so polluted, nobody in his right mind would think of eating anything that is still alive there. But these rocks were so named because a century ago, the Karachi coast was famous for its oysters. You can still buy some at Empress Market, but I’m not sure how safe they are.

Anyway, returning to Eid, while the fish lunch was fine, I missed my quota of Eid tikkas, qorma and biryani. Although there are a couple of Indian takeaways in Swanage, this is not the centre of desi cuisine in the UK. So I was resigned to spending the festival entirely bereft of the usual meaty treats. But apparently, my luck was in as we had been invited to dinner at our local friends, Eugene and Cindy. He is a retired BBC journalist from Fiji, and had promised a desi meal the last time he had come to us for dinner. But frankly, desi meals cooked by non-desis are almost always disappointing affairs where curry powder is a feeble substitute for our complex spicing.

In fact, Eugene laid out quite a spread: plain pilau came in a large earthenware pot, accompanied by a dish of prawn and courgette curry, as well as a lamb chop salan. Daal came in small bowls for all of us. And there was raita and kuchumbur as well. I sat down, expecting to make polite, appreciative noises. But as soon as I had my first mouthful, I realised that Eugene’s spicing was spot on, and while the food wasn’t very hot, it had all the flavour of good desi cooking. So I did manage to have an Eid dinner after all.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, October 4th, 2015

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