You Are What You Eat
Chef, presenter and author Dina Macki explores her Zanzibari-Omani heritage through its varied cuisine.
By Charles Shafaieh
Photos by Patricia Niven
In the late 18th century, the Omani empire stretched across two continents. Its sultans expelled the Portuguese from Zanzibar, controlled most of modern-day UAE as well as Bahrain, and claimed territory across the southern coasts of Iran and Pakistan. Even before the kingdom’s expansion, Oman was a significant trading centre for merchants who gathered where the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean meet. Today, the country’s borders have shrunk, but the empire’s vastness remains alive in its cuisine.
“We use the coconut palms and fresh fruit of Zanzibar, fragrances from Iran such as rosewater, and spices from India,” says Dina Macki, author of Bahari: Recipes from an Omani Kitchen and Beyond, which was published last year by DK. “Omani food cannot be judged by one ingredient or a particular dish. It’s meat. It’s fish. It’s spice. It’s fire.”
Macki grew up eating this culinary medley in Portsmouth, England, where her mother’s family and hundreds of others emigrated from Zanzibar after the 1964 revolution. Her grandmother’s kitchen burst with the scents and tastes of East Africa: mutton biriyani studded with fried onions that her grandmother would spend all week before Eid preparing; mandazi, beignets generously suffused with coconut and cardamom and doused in powdered sugar; comforting chuku chuku, a deliciously sour chicken curry with lemon and unripe mango that produces a sharp tang; and labour-intensive chapati made with coconut milk, which yields a softer bread with a longer life.
She didn’t always embrace her gastronomic roots, though. As a child, she even resented them. “When my friends came to my house, our food always had strong smells and flavours whereas their houses smelled of Febreze,” she says. “I really pushed to the side our beliefs and values because, to survive school, I was desperate not to be associated with them.” It would later come as a shock to her that many people were genuinely curious about her culture, and especially about its food.
Ma’ajeen (opening image), Dhofari beef in a sweet milk stew, is a dish from the mountains of Dhofar. Dina Macki (above), author of Bahari: Recipes from an Omani Kitchen and Beyond.
The first epiphany followed a disaster. “One day in year one, my lunchbox fell to the floor,” she recalls, the horror still evident in her voice. What emerged wasn’t a sandwich—she never understood the idea of a cold lunch—but curry and rice with copious amounts of butter. Two teenage girls came to help. While Macki was trying to hide the spillage, they grabbed morsels to try. “I couldn’t believe it. I remember going home and telling my mum, ‘They like our food!’”
The second came years later, in 2013, when she was a student at Regent’s University London studying fashion marketing. It was her first Ramadan alone, and, for iftar, she longed for her favourite dishes from home: crunchy chicken samosas flavoured with her family’s baharat spice blend; comforting cumin and chicken pilau; mchicha, a thick, creamed coconut spinach side whose drippings she believes are best soaked up with spongy sesame flatbread. She called her mother and grandmother, who thought the mission was hilarious because she had never made these dishes. “They stayed on the phone for most of the time I was cooking, not thinking I was going to get it right,” she says. Her flatmates invited their friends to enjoy what became a feast for 12. “I was so scared to give them the food and defended myself from the beginning, but they just ate and ate,” she says.
When she launched her Instagram page, “Dine with Dina,” in 2019, viewers from Australia to America messaged her with earnest enquiries about Oman. This time she decided to act on what she understood as international interest and ignorance about a cuisine never before highlighted in an English-language cookbook.
Khaliat Nahal, or honeycomb bread, is associated with Qaranqasho, an Omani celebration that takes place during Ramadan. It’s always filled with cheese, but the syrups drizzled over it differ from family to family.
The three-year journey to publish Bahari (the Swahili word for “the sea”) began in earnest in 2021, when she was stuck in Oman during the pandemic’s second wave. Equally sequestered within its borders were people whose recipes and traditions she was excited to learn. “I got in random cars with random people, thankfully in a safe country, to go to their villages and see what they eat,” she says. Travelling across the date-filled north to Sur on the east coast, where chillies and fish dominate, she learned that each region has its own distinct cuisine and often little interest in its neighbours’ food. In her favourite city, Salalah in southwest Dhofar, she met Fatima, who had been born in a cave and only moved to the capital in the mid-1970s when roads were built down from the mountain. Macki learned her techniques for ma’ajeen, a sweet milk and beef stew laden with golden ghee, which she adapted for the book to account for the difficulty of acquiring fresh cow’s milk. Other women, she discovered, were more keen to take their recipes to their graves than share them with anyone.
Her experience with Oman’s culinary landscape piqued interest in the region. Her first consultancy job was redesigning the menu for Al Falaj, the restaurant at Anantara’s Qasr Al Sarab Hotel in the Liwa Desert of Abu Dhabi. Other restaurants in the hotel group followed, recently in Salalah and soon in Zambia. In November, she presented cooking demos at the Sharjah International Book Fair, and she works on recipe development and content creation for Spinneys in the UAE.
“I really want to remove the misconception of ‘Middle Eastern food,’” she says. “I hate that everyone thinks that these 21 countries are all the same.” For her, that starts with sharing recipes and conversation, whether on social media or during her travels, of the type she avoided as a child. “I don’t want anyone to have any regrets about not knowing their culture,” she says, “and I believe food is the best way to learn about it.”
