Women Who Travel Podcast: Two Best Friends Eat Their Way Round the World
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Mumtaz Mustafa and Laura Klynstra are best friends who love to cook—and host—together. Lale chats with them about how their respective childhoods in Pakistan and Michigan helped shape their passion for food, travels in Guatemala, and memories of Karachi street snacks and Dutch potlucks.
Lale Arikoglu: Hi there, I'm Lale Arikoglu, and in today's episode of Women Who Travel, we are talking about how a friendship develops and is deeply enriched through food. I'm joined by Mumtaz Mustafa and Laura Klynstra, co-authors of a beautiful new cookbook of 400 recipes, which they describe as a love letter to their Pakistani and Dutch heritages.
Mumtaz Mustafa: I'm so proud of my Pakistani heritage, and I feel like this, people actually don't know much about Pakistani food. Everyone knows Indian food. There are some similarities, but a lot of differences too.
Laura Kylnstra: I think Dutch food is very farm to table. The things that are really important in their cuisine are things that they grow and cheeses. You've got a lot of cows, you've got a lot of goats. They're all out grazing on these beautiful fields. The Netherlands is, I think, the second biggest agricultural exporter in the world.
MM: One of the most exciting things for me was to see Laura make some of the Pakistani food.
LK: I think people might think, oh, well, Mumtaz did the entire Pakistan chapter, but that's not how we did it. We broke it up by how it was made. The sweets and anything that was baked I made.
MM: She tried so many things from Pakistan, which was amazing for me because she'd never seen these street foods like this thing called Jalebi, which is these skilled people, it's like a form of acrobat or magic. They're putting these beautiful orange spirals in these big hot oiled filled pans, and Laura managed to figure it out, and she did a really good job.
LA: The book itself is about sharing food and hosting. How was food shared in your households growing up?
LK: Growing up in the Midwest, we might not have a lot of spices and all of the great things that Mumtaz has, but we do have a lot of comfort food, and my mom was known for being a good cook. People love to come to my house to eat, and all my friends were welcome, and she let them go through the fridge. She didn't care. She was just like: the more the merrier. She was just very welcoming. She also used to cook for church dinners at our church where she'd prepare food for a hundred people with another one or two women in the kitchen. She always showed love through food. Say somebody was sick or somebody had lost someone in their family, love was served in a casserole dish or in a pie plate.
My great-grandparents immigrated here from the Netherlands, so we're pretty removed, but the community is all still pretty much Dutch on the west side of Michigan. A lot of my ancestors were farmers, so my mom has always been into canning food and freezing corn, so taking advantage of the harvest basically, and using fresh ingredients and preserving them so that you can use them throughout the year. I now live on 11 acres and I have chickens and ducks, so I get to have the best eggs because my chickens go out and forage and do all the natural things that chickens are supposed to do.
LA: Mumtaz, you grew up in Pakistan before you moved over to the states. I love Pakistani food and all of those flavors and spices. What was it like eating in your household?
MM: I go back twice a year now, even though my parents live in Texas, but there were certain moments, certain memories. Well, there was a special occasions such as Eid, which is our celebration, and in the morning we would wake up to this dish called sheer khurma being slow-cooked, which was milk and cardamom and saffron, and just slowly. That was one thing my mother did. Every Friday, my father would bring us halwa puri. I don't know if you've ever tried that, which is a fried bread and a halwa, and this chana, which is like a chickpea dish. It's the nostalgia about this food coming in these little plastic bags dripping with a bit of oil that was going to be put. But every Friday we knew that that was going to be our meal, and we were going to gather around a table and talk. Anyone was welcome to come and visit. The same with my grandmother. Even if there wasn't enough food, sometimes she would quietly go into the kitchen and tell the cook just add some more water to the curry and just cut the pieces of meat into half so there's enough. There's a piece for each person.
LA: Trick them. They'll eat it.
MM: Trick them in. Yeah, exactly. Just so that nobody would go home hungry. It's just everything revolves around food. It's the one thing nobody fights about. It's a big part of why I love to go back. When people are angry and they’re hot and they're feeling bitter and they're feeling sad, you just have a cup of tea and some cookies and some samosas and everything's good.
LA: Over the years, since they first met at work, Mumtaz and Laura have cooked together, they shared recipes, and they've hosted parties.
LK: We do all kinds of different parties, but I'm thinking about a margarita party. There was also a Halloween party that was pretty feisty. We actually had the cops come to that one.
LA: What?
LK: Yeah.
LA: Can you divulge why?
LK: We were making too much noise and Mumtaz even asked the police if they were wearing costumes.
MM: I thought it was a costume.
LK: I mean, it's Halloween. Yeah.
MM: Yeah.
LK: But yeah, I think the thing that we would do a lot of prep work so that we could, so at the party itself, we could just have fun. Everybody was just drinking and having a good time and eating of course.
MM: I remember, Laura, that's the day you wore an Indian sari for the first time.
LK: Yeah, I got my henna put too.
LA: You're at Harper Collins during the day, and then you are cooking and hosting together in the evenings occasionally, although it sounds like quite a lot, getting the cops called. What was your dynamic emerging to be in the kitchen together? Do you take turns in being chef and sous chef, or do you fall into particular roles? I mean, obviously you have different skill sets.
MM: Yeah, Laura is the baker and she makes a combination of things. I began to cook with Laura, just kind of wanting to introduce her to my world of food, and I was nervous because I didn't think she would like it. It was flavors she wasn't familiar with, and she said she grew up a picky eater. She's not a big fan of condiments, and I'm like, oh God, but there's so many different chutneys and things in our food. She wouldn't like it. It began with that, but Laura, what did you think?
LK: I think what it is is I don't like American condiments. I hate ketchup. I just hate ketchup, but I love Mumtaz's chutneys and I love anything.
LA: Oh, I love a chutney.
LK: Anything from Mexico, every sauce from Mexico I pretty much love. It's just, I think growing up, because I was American and the sauces that were presented to me, the condiments that were presented to me were mayo mustard and ketchup. I always said, I hate condiments because those really aren't good.
LA: You're like, what condiments? They're just these sort of gloopy-
LK: Yeah, corn syrup with, yeah, yuck.
LA: And not healthy. They developed, wrote, photographed, styled, and designed their book over a year and cooked mostly at Laura's as she has a huge kitchen. It was a Herculean effort. What were some of the challenges of putting this book together? Well, there's some rocky patches.
LK: There was definitely rocky patches. We're in two different parts of the country. Every time we got together for a photo shoot, we had to travel. Either I had to travel to New York or Mumtaz had to travel to Michigan. Most of the time she came here because there's just more space for shooting, and so there was a time limit on every single photo shoot that we had scheduled. It wasn't like, oh, well, we can just add another day, because she had to fly back. The pressure of getting all those shots in was very heavy.
MM: I would arrive and I would take a nap for four hours, five hours sometimes because I'd take an early morning flight and tell Laura, hey, I'm going to get there, and then we're going to go straight to the grocery store and we're going to do this, and we're going to cook and we're going to plan. I would come there and I'd pass out and she'd be like, oh, hello, are we still going to be doing any work? I would disappear for a few hours, and so she was quite patient with me on that. Obviously, it was a lot of fun too, because we were cooking, something we love to do together and chatting. But her kitchen, which was this beautiful kitchen that she'd renovated recently, and we would make such a mess. Poor thing, she didn't say anything. Towards the end, I think we had all just, we were done. We were officially done. We were working on other cookbooks for other authors at the same time. We were doing our full-time jobs. She lost her dog who was a baby and everything to her during our last shoot.
LA: Oh my God, I'm so sorry.
LK: Sorry. I didn't know you were going to say that.
MM: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. He was only two years old and yeah, he got hit by a car and it was the most traumatic thing. I mean, I've never seen Laura in that state, which is-
LA: I can't even begin to imagine the trauma of that. I mean, this book really is a sort of reflection of the strong friendship that you formed, and so much of friendship is the challenges and the hardships as well as the fun hosting and cooking things together.
LK: Yeah, we definitely, we've kind of been with each other through some of the lows and highs in life, that's for sure. I remember Mumtaz, she was able to fly in after my father passed away, which was amazing for her to do. I think there's been other things too that we've been together through.
LA: Well, one immediate thing that I do have jotted down, which is, I mean, it seems like it worked out okay, but Mumtaz I think you sliced off part of your finger.
MM: Yes. I think it sounded a bit traumatic. I did.
LA: It sounds horrendous.
MM: I know it does. It does.
LK: That was the same trip as the dog.
LA: Oh my God.
MM: That was the same trip, by the way.
LA: Of course, it was the same trip.
MM: It was the last shoot. It was the last of the shoot, so we were like, no matter what, we just keep going. We keep going. We were grilling outside. Laura was setting up the light. It was a race against time. She knows the shot needed to happen, and so while I'm grilling, there's raw meat and then there's a little bit of blood dripping from my hand. Nobody, it was just at that given two minutes, it was tough. Then we went to, she took me to the doctor and the ER, and then we ended up spending a few hours there.
LK: But it was when you had, you had to wrap that finger to try to keep it dry. You were trying to put, because there was a bandage on there, and then you're trying to deal with food, so didn't you feel like-
MM: And I lost a sliver of piece.
LK: Like a glove?
MM: Yeah, I put a glove.
LK: You put a glove over it.
MM: It kept filling up. It kept filling up. It kept filling up.
LA: Oh my God. Wait, so you lost a sliver of the finger. Did you find the sliver or was that unidentified?
MM: It was unidentified, which is why that particular dish, we didn't really serve to anybody.
LA: Good to know. Oh, no.
MM: But it was a sliver that grew back. It was one of those-
LK: We did still photograph it though, right?
LA: Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. It looked great. Just had a bit of finger in it.
MM: We did. It just, oh, God.
LA: Well, it sounds like, I mean, literally blood, sweat, and tears went into this book.
LK: I'd say by the end of that one, we were both so burned out and we definitely were struggling at that point.
LA: After the break, Laura and Mumtaz are interested in introducing people to foods from other cultures rather than appropriating them.
MM: We first said, okay, let's narrow it down, try and represent a little something from each part of the world. Of course, it's not easy to do that. Then come up with how many savory, how many sweet recipes. Then come up with what recipes? It begins with the Pan-Asian table. There's a khow suey table, there's a Pakistani street food table, Middle Eastern, Greek, Italian, Dutch, Chai from a French English high tea because that's a big part of my world. Spanish tapas, Portuguese, Moroccan, Ethiopian, Mexican Tropical, South American, New York City brunch, because that was one of our favorite things to do when we were in the same city.
LA: The chapters of their book, Gather & Graze start with a photo of a sharing platter, what they term a food board.
LK: A board would be any sort of a tray or a cutting board or something that you could serve all of these things on one board. Some of these chapters, I guess is a good way to call them, have everything on a board. For instance, we did a Greek chapter and everything fits on one board and it's just this beautiful, you put it on the table and there it is. But a lot of them expanded beyond what could fit on a board, so then we called those “Table Scapes”. For instance, the Mexican table is more of a buffet style set of food, and it just kind of fills the whole table.
MM: This is our love letter to these foods. We had no wasting. This is how you make these particular items of food. It's our inspiration, our having tried these dishes at people's homes and in restaurants and various places. I mean, so many of these, I don't have the authority to say this is how you make a certain thing, but I will say that, oh, these are the flavors that I'm trying to recapture in my kitchen, and it's a respect, it's a homage. My little tribute to these dishes that I tried.
LA: Did you travel much for it or were you really just traveling through recipes and experimentation, or did you actually move around a bit?
LK: Mumtaz traveled much more than I did. I can't travel as easily as she can because I had a deep vein thrombosis when I'm in my twenties when I was in Germany after a flight, so I have to fly first class or business class, and so that's made it a little bit difficult for me to get across the Atlantic.
LA: That is, that is very limiting, God, that is.
LK: Yep. But I do go down to Central America quite often. I'm very much hoping that I can find a way to afford to get to Pakistan, but that's kind of on my bucket list to get to see where Mumtaz is from and to eat the food directly at the source.
LA: You mentioned how important it is to know where the food comes from, which often is actually a harder thing to figure out in practice than you'd think. How do you navigate that when you are traveling or you're in a new place? Have you got any tips?
MM: I feel like there's no real rules when one's traveling. I think it's more important to go to places that have been suggested by the locals, places that are not touristy, places that actually, like in Portugal, whenever, when you see that the menus are English, you run in the opposite direction. You want it to be right, so that's the kind of, as authentic as possible.
LA: As a British person, I also kind of feel somewhat responsible for my country making that happen in places like Portugal and Spain. I apologize to the world.
MM: Mallorca too recently. There's a lot of British people.
LA: Oh my God, we're everywhere. There are these, I feel like in sort of places in Portugal and Spain, you get these British cafes that only serve British food and everyone's sitting there and I'm like, oh my God, you are in Spain. Anyway, let's talk about the recipes in the book. You must have done so much recipe development and experimentation. What was that process like?
LK: It was just a lot of trial and error. Sometimes you're making something and it just doesn't work. You had to go back to the drawing board. Sometimes you'd make something and it does work, especially when it's something that you have a lot of experience with. Focaccia, for instance, was pretty easy for me because I've made Focaccia for years, but the Injera was very, very, very difficult for me because I've never made anything like that. There was a big range of testing and making mistakes.
LA: The book is so visual and it's really, really gorgeous. How did you approach presenting these recipes visually? What was important in terms of representing them and doing them justice through the staging and the photography and the locations? What was that whole process like?
MM: When Laura would pick me up from the airport or wherever, however I'd come into Michigan, we'd also often go to these vintage shops. We were always looking for props. We were always thrifting looking around. When I was in Portugal, I went to all the authentic markets and I found pieces that were made over a hundred years ago. For Pakistan, we got authentic dishes that people use for the street food there. We got newspapers that we used that was authentic. We began to gift each other props for the last four years.
LK: Then there's also just even the backgrounds themselves. In Michigan, we have salvaged barnwood where you can go to a store and buy salvaged barnwood, which I bought to make a rustic table. It looked like a table. We went to the craft store and bought paint, and for the Mexican table, we have one background that's all yellow that we painted just the night before we did it. We were like, we need some color in this so we just painted it yellow. I mean, visually that's what we do.
MM: I think we were able to combine our love for design and for pattern and for color and Laura's gorgeous photography where you paint with light because it's all natural light. It was very important to us that this look beautiful.
LA: Coming up, frequent trips and stays in Laura's new home in Guatemala, learning the real way to make a tres leches cake.
LK: We have a house down in Guatemala, so I have a place to stay down there, so that's kind of where I do travel. We actually did one of the shoots down in Guatemala. Mumtaz was along, and we shot the tropical spread there and got all of the local fruit. We fed the whole thing to my in-laws in Guatemala, and we had a big party. It was a Quinceañera. It was pretty fun.
LA: That sounds fabulous. Your partner's family is Guatemalan, so you must suddenly have all of that inspiration at your fingertips.
LK: Yeah, and I had a taste tester for the tres leches cake who told me that it was not saturated enough. But for me, I'm like, this is getting too soggy. Nope, more, more, more.
LA: A harsh critic. When you're going down to Guatemala, I want to hear a little bit more about those trips. What's your travel dynamic like and how are you spending your time there?
LK: Well, at first when we were building the house, I was going down there with our partner who built it with us, and we would go to all the different stores to shop for a tile and different things for the house. We were carrying down faucets and stuff like that. Those trips were not exactly fun, but they were productive and we ended up, the house is designed like a Spanish colonial. It's a white stucco with these beautiful brown columns, like wood columns. Now that the house is built, I pretty much just enjoy the view and the property. I have to work usually when I'm there, but I go out into, we have a garden. We grow cacao, we grow mango, avocado, and all these different limes. One of the best things is just being able to go pick limes off from the lime tree.
LA: Oh my god, heaven.
LK: They're just so different than limes from the grocery store, the fragrance. It's lovely to get to, oh and bananas. We also grow bananas and they taste way better right off from the tree than when they been shipped.
LA: Mumtaz, what was your first impression when you first went to that house?
MM: I had been to Ecuador before, so that was the closest I'd been, and I saw this house. Laura had been sharing the plans and the different fixtures and lighting, and I had already told her which room I wanted to stay in. It was one of the master rooms and it was gorgeous. The view and this tub that one could soak in and not move from and this gorgeous central fountain, it was like a dream. When I was taking work calls from there, they're like, where are you? In heaven? I said, kind of. Kind of.
LA: Mumtaz, some of those kind of food rituals and traditions when you were in Guatemala, sounds like there's some sort of commonality.
MM: Absolutely, absolutely. I did. A lot of it is very, even some of our chutneys we make, she was making the mojo and different sauces, which the depth of the chili and the depth of the peppers and the tomatoes, it's very similar to how we make a lot of our foods. Back in Pakistan we would have people in our family that would grow their own vegetables and fruit and bring them over and cook them fresh, and similarly the same with Laura. Laura's sister, she arrived with this array of so many vegetables and all this meat. There were things that like cilantro and green peppers and tomatoes, and again, these are the things that really are the perfect way to begin a chutney that's full of depth and flavor. She was making some sauces with the same things, and I actually would love to go back and cook some Pakistani food with her at that point. She was really excited to show us the way they made their food. Of course, she made some items in pork that we don't eat, but I did try all the sauces and meat and then the chicken and the other stuff that she made. Yeah, a lot of similarities in the way they prepared the food and the love they prepare it with.
LA: We've discussed so many exciting regions and places and flavors for people to discover in this book. Beyond learning a recipe, what do you hope people who buy the book learn from it and gain when they're thinking about other cultures and other cuisines?
LK: Maybe you don't have enough money to travel yourself, but if you don't, if you can't go see the world, if you look around you, you probably have immigrants around you and you can meet them and learn to cook from them and eat with them and learn more about their culture directly from them, and that's what I would recommend people do if you don't have enough money to get across the Atlantic or get across the Pacific. Meet the people around you, learn about their food. It's a great way to experience the world from your own house.
LA: How has the journey of making this book changed the way you think about the world or has it reaffirmed the way that you see it and hope it to be?
MM: We can't solve world problems right now as much as I would love to. I think that being here and being in this country at the moment is a bit difficult also as a Muslim, but I think the one thing we can all do is hold our dear ones close, give them a delicious meal, be able to think about, appreciate every opportunity we have with our loved ones and our mothers and our families, and just be a little conscious of what's around. We were feeling the welcoming as an American or as a Pakistani American now. I just didn't want people to feel like, oh, they had to go home. Muslims had to go home or there were banned on any kind of particular religion or any of that, so we just started this whole idea of the book, so it was Gather & Graze.
LK: For me, it was more of a surprise when things started to turn kind of ugly in this country. I always thought of us as being welcoming to the stranger, but there were times in the last 10 years that it didn't feel that way anymore, and I wanted to kind of bring us back to the way it should be and welcoming the stranger is something that we should be doing in this country. Thinking this way, I feel this reaffirms the way that we should be and the way that I think we all are in our hearts if we really think about it.
LA: In addition to what it reaffirmed about the world and taught you about the world, what has this book taught you about each other?
LK: It taught us that we're both workaholics.
LA: That is an impression I've gotten throughout this episode, I will say.
MM: It's great to be in the company of a workaholic because a lot of my other friends are like, you need to stop. But when I'm with Laura, there's no judgment. We are just constantly, we're at it together, so that is true. I know I'm always welcome in her home and it's like a second home for me, which I'm very appreciative of, and I hope she knows that my home, as small as it, is, when she does come, she gets the bedroom and she always will because she's family. She's always going to be welcome and we are always going to continue to share tables and homes with one another.
LK: We also work really well together. We just understand each other so well creatively. When we start laying it out, we just go and it feels good.
MM: We love similar things, which is important I think when you're doing this kind of work.
LK: We were working together when we were both young and designed.
MM: Like early twenties it started.
LK: We were working side-by-side even. Everybody from no matter where you're from comes together around food. That's where people talk and that's where people connect, and that's true everywhere. We should always be looking for the things that unite us instead of the things that divide us.
LA: While there is much that can help unite us here in the US, for some there remains an appeal in choosing to leave. Join us next week when we'll be talking to Tamara J. Walker, author of Beyond the Shores, a history of African-Americans abroad in honor of Juneteenth. You can find me on Instagram at Lalehannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus and James Yost. The show's mixed by Amar Lal. Jude Kampfner from Corporation for Independent Media is our producer. Chris Bannon is Conde Nast's, head of Global Audio. See you next week.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
