or the holiday season last year my wife, Susie Orbach, was thinking about preparing her usual feast.

I said, ‘Why don’t I cook this year?’ She looked horrified.

Susie is an excellent cook. When we met I was an enthusiastic cook, but I soon realised that she didn’t want to eat any of my food – roasts, stews, pies, casseroles, sausage and mash, that kind of thing. I bought a Yiddish dictionary to find out what goyishe chazerai meant.

Our friend, the Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie was visiting Susie and me that December, and I asked her about Christmas in Karachi, her home city of twenty-five million people. She told me a wonderful story, heard on American news, about the great support for the Taliban in Karachi, as evidenced by stick-on Taliban beards being sold at traffic lights.

Kamila had called a friend in Karachi to verify this interesting detail – it turned out that the beards in question were the usual Santa Claus beards popular at the time of year.

Kamila Shamsie is many things, including a wonderful writer, and she diplomatically managed the shoot-out between Susie and me last Christmas by offering to cook her own Pakistani version of a Christmas-time meal.

Not to be left out, I made pheasant casserole from the Mary Berry Aga cookbook. I am glad to say that lots of our guests ate it, but there is no doubt that Kamila’s turkey – don’t call it curry – was the best.

This recipe came out of our discussion about fruit in main courses (see my recipe for mulled wine on page 193). As ­Kamila said, ‘The British colonised half the world and still ate boiled ­cabbage.’

So for those of you who like dried fruit and fresh spices and have too much turkey on your hands, try this – reproduced by kind permission of the cook.

Kamila says: Turkeys are not birds you’re likely to see in Pakistan so I can’t explain why there were two of them at a farm in Punjab, which belonged to family friends, that Christmas in 1980 when I was seven years old.

The first turkey made its way to our plates on the day my parents and sister and I arrived, and, having never seen it in living form, I had no qualms about eating it – roasted, ‘English-style’. But the next day five of us – my sister and I and the three siblings of the family we were staying with – heard an extraordinary noise, which we followed to an even more extraordinary sight: a puffed-up beast, all feathers and wattle and beak. We named him Aha!. (There were also, on the farm, two ducks whom we had named Déjà Vu and Voulez-Vous. We didn’t speak French but there was a café, recently opened, in Karachi named Déjà Vu and we all knew the ABBA song ‘Voulez-Vous’. And because the chorus of that song went ‘Voulez-vous . . . aha!’ it gave us the name for the turkey.)

This Aha! was soon discovered to have a characteristic that provided us with endless delight: if you raised your voice and spoke or sang to him in tones of a certain pitch he would reply, in ‘Turkish’, for exactly the length of time that you had addressed him. ‘Voulez-vous . . . aha!’ we would sing. ‘Gurgle gobble yip,’ he’d reply. ‘The hussy! – Ought to be ashamed of herself!’ we’d say (a favourite line from the musical ‘Oklahoma!’). ‘Gurgle yip gobble yip-bark gobble gurgle,’ sent back the turkey.

This story doesn’t end well, of course.

One day, Aha! disappeared. ‘He’s run away with a wild turkey,’ we were told and, to give this story credence, children and adults set off to try and find him. ‘A wild-turkey chase,’ we all cried out as we set off on foot, and in Jeeps, past the cotton fields and sugar-cane fields and orange groves and onto the sand dunes, which mysteriously bordered the verdant farm.

Aha! was never found, and it wasn’t until well into adulthood that two of the children who had been on the farm told me the terrible, inescapable truth: Aha! hadn’t eloped romantically into the desert; he had ended up on a chopping block.

But what happened after that?

‘We ate the turkey that night,’ the siblings insisted, and continue to insist.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We had turkey the first night, before we knew Aha!. I wouldn’t have held on to the turkey-elopement story for all these years if he’d appeared on our plates for dinner.’

Looking back, I can only surmise that we must have eaten the turkey in disguise. At the end of that day of searching, something would have appeared on our plates, presented as chicken, and I would have munched down on it thinking the darker flavour was the taste of my sorrow.

I dislike a plot with holes and so I’m compelled to imagine that in-disguise meal of Aha!.

I like to think it was turkey biryani.

That seems a fitting send-off for a bird of panache, one who offered so much by way of delight – down to the last morsel.

Overleaf you will find my left-over turkey biryani recipe (gobble gobble gobblegobble).

YOU NEED

Left-over turkey, diced (or if you want to start from scratch, roast a couple of turkey legs and then chop up the meat into cubes. The skin you can discard or devour as you choose – fowl skin never finds its way into Pakistani cooking.). I’ll suggest 500 g, but really it depends how much turkey meat you have left. You can adjust other quantities in this recipe as need be.

500 g rice. Only basmati will do. Please believe me on this point. (I use Tilda.)

2 large onions, chopped finely

1 tablespoon grated ginger

3 garlic cloves, crushed

Red chopped chilli or 1 teaspoon chilli powder (or more, depending on your tastebuds)

1 teaspoon turmeric powder

1 teaspoon salt (can be adjusted, as can all ingredients here, to suit your particular needs/desires)

8 green cardamom pods

6 cloves

1 teaspoon whole black pepper

1 cinnamon stick

1 tablespoon coriander seed

3 medium tomatoes, diced

100 ml milk (if feeling extravagant – and why not? – infuse a little saffron in the milk when you start preparing the biryani)

Handful of large raisins (optional)

Handful of cashew nuts (optional)

Method

Do this well ahead of time, if it makes life easier:

Rinse the rice until the water runs clear. Place in a pan and add 500 ml water. Cook on a high-ish heat until the water is absorbed (approx 8-10 minutes). The rice should be parboiled. If you think the rice is cooking too fast and the water hasn’t been completely absorbed, just strain out the excess water. I get the rice-to-water quantity right about two times out of three – possibly because I don’t actually measure out the water before placing it in the pan. The parboiling is what matters most here – if you press down on a grain of rice it should be mostly yielding, but with a hard centre. Fluff it all up with a fork to prevent the rice kernels from sticking together as it cools.

In a separate pan, cook the onions over a high heat until they are golden brown. This is an important step. The heat should really be high and nothing less than golden brown will do. Of course, you’ll need a generous quantity of oil so that the onions don’t stick to the bottom. Remove a tablespoon of the fried onions and set aside to use for garnish later.

Add all the spices to the onions that remain in the pan. Stir them about for a minute or two – they should start to release a fantastic fragrance. (Not everyone loves the fragrance of frying onions and spices – one way to counter it is to place a stick of cinnamon on the stove in boiling water. That will absorb the scent.) Add the diced tomatoes to the spice mix, and turn down the heat to low. Cook until the tomatoes and spices form a thick paste (you may need to add a tiny bit of water if the mixture appears to be sticking to the pan). This should take 15-20 minutes (trust your eyes more than you trust the timing I’m giving you).

Add the turkey and cook for around 10 minutes, still on a low heat, so it can absorb the flavours.

If necessary at the end, turn the heat up high for a few minutes to absorb any excess liquid.

Do this 40 minutes before you’re ready to serve:

Grease a casserole dish. Spoon a third of the rice onto the bottom of the dish. Sprinkle milk on top. Layer half the spiced turkey mix on the rice. Add another layer of rice. Sprinkle milk on top. Add the rest of the spiced turkey. Then cover with the remaining rice. Sprinkle milk, the fried onions you had set aside and a generous quantity of shredded coriander leaves on top. Cover with foil or a lid. Place in the oven at 180°C for about half an hour, maybe slightly more.

Final optional step – depending on how deeply you’ve been scarred by fruit and nuts DONE WRONG in Christmas food:

Fry the raisins in a little oil until they swell up. Set aside. Fry cashews for a minute or so.

Before serving the turkey biryani, scatter the raisins and cashews on top.