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Why a public holiday is the best day to try a new recipe
01st June, 2026 12:22 PM
There is a particular kind of cooking that you cannot do on a Tuesday evening after work. It requires a slow morning, an unhurried afternoon, and the quiet knowledge that nowhere needs you today.
Biriani from scratch. A pilau built spice by spice. A batch of mandazi mixed, rested, and fried in rounds.
These are not weeknight meals. Madaraka Day, falling on a Monday, hands you a free day to attempt them.
A 2021 peer-reviewed study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that people who cooked during extended periods of unstructured time (free from the usual pressure of producing a meal quickly) moved through their kitchens with what researchers describe as hedonic and eudaimonic well-being.
They started cooking for the pleasure of it and came out the other side having genuinely learned something.
“People who intended to spend time with culinary activities with the expectations of pure happiness left the kitchen with eudaimonic outcomes by gaining special skills and knowledge, self-actualization and self-enrichment,” the authors wrote.
That is a slow biriani in a sentence.
What to cook on Madaraka Day
A biriani ya nyumbani is the obvious centrepiece. The version worth attempting on a day off is the one where you fry the onions until they are deeply golden, bloom the whole spices in oil, layer the half-cooked rice over the meat, and seal the pot to let it finish in its own steam.
Pilau is a smaller project but no less instructive.
The difference between a flat pilau and a magnificent one lies in the spice toasting: cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, and black pepper cracked by hand and added one by one to the oil before anything else goes in.
A free Monday is long enough to do this properly.
Mandazi are perhaps the most forgiving of the three, the dough comes together quickly, but the rest time matters. Thirty minutes, covered, before you roll and cut.
The result, fried in batches and dusted lightly, is incomparably better than anything made in a rush.
Why the time actually matters
A 2024 Nature Research Intelligence report, drawing on more than 23,000 papers on cooking and well-being, confirmed what most home cooks already sense: the quality of a meal is inseparable from the conditions in which it is made.
“Numerous studies of large cohorts, ranging from the elderly in Taiwan and children in Japan, to healthcare professionals in the US, suggest that a higher frequency of home cooking and preparing food is associated with higher intakes of whole food and health benefits,” the authors noted.
A public holiday removes the one thing that sabotages ambitious home cooking: the clock.
The biriani does not need to be on the table by 7 pm. The pilau can sit on low heat for another twenty minutes. The mandazi can have their proper rest.
This is why you should be cooking on a holiday – the rare gift of time that the working week never gives back.
