I left Kabul when I was twelve, which means most of my childhood memories are filtered through time and nostalgia. But the food memories are visceral. I can still taste the kebabs from the cart near my uncle’s house, smell the bread from the dawn bakery, feel the sticky sweetness of jelabi on my fingers.

Sydney has some good Afghan restaurants, and I’m grateful for them. But they can’t replicate street food. Street food is about context - the crowded markets, the charcoal smoke, the chaos of Kabul’s streets. You can’t bottle that and serve it in a suburban restaurant.

The kebab carts were everywhere in Kabul. Not the fancy sit-down kebab houses, though those existed too. I’m talking about the street vendors with their small charcoal grills, selling kebabs wrapped in fresh naan. The meat was usually lamb, marinated simply in yogurt and spices, grilled over hot coals until charred on the outside and juicy inside.

The vendor would pull the kebabs off the skewers directly onto a piece of fresh naan, add some sliced onion and a squeeze of lemon, wrap it up, and hand it to you. You’d eat it standing there on the street, grease dripping down your hands, the bread still warm from the bakery.

I’ve tried to recreate this at home. I’ve marinated lamb, grilled it on charcoal, bought the freshest naan I can find. It’s good, but it’s not the same. The meat’s right, the bread’s close, but the whole experience is wrong. You can’t recreate the smoke and noise and energy of a Kabul street market in your backyard in Marrickville.

Jelabi is another thing I miss. They sell jelabi at Afghan sweet shops here, but it’s different. In Kabul, you’d buy it fresh from vendors who made it right there - squirting the batter in spirals into hot oil, watching it puff and turn golden, then dunking it in sugar syrup. You’d eat it hot, the outside crispy and the inside soft and soaked with syrup.

The jelabi here is fine, but it’s been sitting for hours usually. It’s not hot and fresh. The texture’s different. It’s like comparing fresh donuts to day-old donuts - technically the same food, but completely different eating experience.

Breakfast foods are what I remember most clearly. My father would go to the bakery early and come back with fresh naan, still hot, and we’d eat it with chai and sometimes halwa or clotted cream and honey. The naan was baked in a tandoor oven, with those characteristic bubbles and char marks. The smell of fresh bread in the morning is one of my strongest food memories from childhood.

Sydney has Afghan bakeries that make good naan, but they’re never quite right. The flour’s different, the water’s different, maybe the air is different. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I can tell. My mother says the same thing - the bread here is good, but it’s not Kabul bread.

Bolanai from street vendors was different from homemade bolani. Vendors would make them huge and thin, cook them on big griddles, cut them into sections, and sell them hot. The filling was usually potato or pumpkin, simple and cheap. You’d eat them walking through the market, burning your fingers on the hot bread.

The version we make at home is smaller, more refined. We use multiple fillings, make them more carefully. They’re probably objectively better than the street version, but I still have nostalgic memories of the rough, greasy street cart bolani.

There was a vendor near the market who sold shorwa - Afghan soup - from a big pot on his cart. I remember the smell of it, meaty and spicy, with chunks of lamb and vegetables. He’d ladle it into a bowl, give you some bread, and you’d slurp it down standing at his cart. This was winter food, warming you up on cold Kabul mornings.

I’ve made shorwa at home plenty of times. It’s not a complicated recipe. But eating it from my own kitchen table isn’t the same as eating it on a cold morning in a crowded market with strangers pressed around the same food cart.

Sheer yakh - Afghan ice cream - was a special treat. The vendor would have a metal container of it, and you’d buy it served in a piece of naan. Think of it like an ice cream sandwich, but with flatbread instead of cookies. It sounds weird, but the combination of creamy rose-flavored ice cream and slightly chewy bread was perfect.

I haven’t seen anyone selling sheer yakh in naan here. You can buy Afghan ice cream from shops, but it’s served in cups like regular ice cream. The bread element made it street food, made it Afghan. Without that, it’s just rose ice cream, which exists in lots of cuisines.

My uncle ran a small chai khana - a tea house - in Kabul, and I spent a lot of time there as a kid. People would come in for chai and conversation, and there’d be street vendors outside selling snacks. My uncle would sometimes buy pakora or samosas from the vendors and share them with customers. This intermingling of formal and informal food service was very Kabul - the boundaries between restaurant and street food were porous.

The Sydney Afghan restaurant scene is much more formal. You sit down, you order from a menu, you pay with a card. It’s proper and organized and probably better from a food safety perspective, but something’s lost. The informality and spontaneity of Kabul street food culture doesn’t translate.

Part of this is just nostalgia. I was a child, everything seems better in childhood memories. The kebabs were probably sometimes cold, the jelabi probably sometimes stale, the street carts probably not always hygienic. My memories are selective, keeping the good and filtering out the bad.

But part of it is real. Street food culture in Kabul was vibrant and alive in a way that’s hard to replicate in regulated, wealthy Western cities. Food regulations are good - I’m not arguing against health and safety standards. But they do change the nature of street food.

There’s also the question of what gets preserved when a food culture moves to a new country. Restaurants preserve the fancy dishes, the special occasion foods. Home cooking preserves family recipes. Street food, being informal and often unrecorded, is harder to preserve. It exists in memory and description, but the actual experience is lost.

I tell my kids about the food I remember from Kabul, but it’s abstract to them. They know Afghan food from family dinners and restaurant meals. Street vendors and market carts are just stories. Their Afghan food memories are being formed here in Sydney, in a very different context.

Maybe in 30 years, my daughter will write something similar about Afghan food in Sydney that her kids won’t understand. The restaurants that exist now might be gone, replaced by new places. The specific dishes and vendors she remembers might not exist anymore. Food culture keeps changing, and each generation has its own reference points.

For now, I have my memories. The taste of kebabs from that cart near my uncle’s house. The smell of fresh naan in the morning. The sticky sweetness of hot jelabi. These memories are mine, and even if I can’t perfectly recreate the experience, I can keep the memory alive through the approximations I cook at home and the stories I tell.

That’ll have to be enough.