KABUL, Afghanistan — There's a comforting immutability to the way Waheed Merzazadah prepares for his day's work: the methodical cutting of the sheep carcasses down to the right size, the readying of the vegetables and spices, the patient poring over of his well-worn collection of chainaks, or teapots. Watching him in the one-room kitchen of his two-room restaurant, you see him embody a constancy in a country often defined by its lack, as he repeats the process by which he makes superlative chainaki.
What is chainaki? The neophyte would contend it's nothing more than a hearty lamb stew, because it certainly looks like that. But the connoisseur knows that chainaki is less about the ingredients than it is about how, or more accurately in what, you cook them.
As the name implies, if you want chainaki, you've got to have the chainak, which serves as the perfect vessel for the hours of slow cooking the dish requires. And not just any one will do — it's got to be clay, for it is only those teapots that produce the right thickness of the sauce, the melts-with-a-hard-stare tenderness of the meat and the silky texture of the sheep fat that make a proper chainaki.
