milk right from the dugs of the goats when grown ups were not watching. She was brought up to be married to a sheikh, but this was not meant to be. Instead she got married to a schoolteacher from Basrah, and with him and with a growing family they moved to different cities south and north. With these travels my mother inevitably widened her culinary repertoire, and when we settled in that little street in Baghdad we were exposed to even more diversity.

I remember the best shrimp with rice came from a Basrawi woman (from Basrah, the port city in the south), whom everybody called Um Sahira ("mother of Sahira"), as the custom was to call the parent after his or her eldest child. Whenever the occasion arose, she would boast of the excellence of the baharat (mixed spices) her relatives brought her from Basrah. She would laugh, and her gilded side tooth would gleam and glitter, and tell us how when she cooked the shrimp with rice the exciting aroma of her spices was everywhere. Her back yard neighbor would tell her that as the aroma was sucked by the air cooler into their living room, the kids would jokingly open up pieces of bread in front of the air cooler as if they were filling their sandwiches with the aroma of Um Sahira's spices.

Although we used to buy kubbat Mosul (flat discs of bulgar dough) readymade, the best ever made was by our Mosuli neighbor (from Mosul, a big city in the north), Um Yunis. They were so huge and yet so thin, as thin as the onion's skin as people used to say describing the perfect kubba. Our first encounter with a Kurdish specialty called parda palau (rice pies) was on a very sad occasion when my brother passed away. As the custom was, neighbors were to help out people in bereavement by cooking food for them.

That was the only time we ever received a dish from that Kurdish neighbor, of whom we knew almost nothing. We knew her name was Mary, but we were not sure that was her real name. She was a middle-aged retired belly dancer, and mingling with her was almost tabooed due to her profession.