The Economic Times - Delhi, 3/1/2020
22 food & drink
MARCH 01-07, 2020
Rice Above All
The importance of rice varieties — from sela to
basmati to kaima — tends to get overlooked
in the diversity of biryani across India
:: Anoothi Vishal
E
very Thursday, the grateful and the hope-
ful congregate at Feroz Shah Kotla, Delhi’s
14th-century Tughlaq-era fortress better-
known for the cricket stadium nearby.
While the hopeful make their pleas to
the djinns thought to reside in the ruins,
the grateful, whose wishes have come
true, distribute biryani in thanksgiving.
As the spicy, thick sela rice dish gets pol-
ished off, it is a moment that represents all
the contradictions of being in India,
where the sacred and mundane, rich and
poor, love and hate all coexist. In many
ways, the biryani brings together all these
contradictions of being Indian — even as it
continues to battle with stereotypes of be-
ing an outsider, “originally” Iranian.
In Iran, the beryan is quite another
dish. The famous Esfahani beryan is lamb
or sheep meat, broiled and minced, and
placed on sangak bread. Persian food
blogs now in fact exhort customers to use
sourdough instead. The only connection
of the beryan — which is just like a sand-
wich — with the Indian biryani is that both
are layered.
The beryan makes an appearance in
Nuskha e Shahjahani, a manuscript of
recipes dating back to Mughal emperor
Shahjahan’s 17th century kitchen.
But here in India, the beryan is a rice
dish, albeit layered. Whether this innova-
tion of meat layered with rice, instead of
bread, came about in Iran or India is im-
possible to tell. It seems to me Indian.
However, a dish that has been around for
400 years or more in many different re-
gional avatars throughout the subconti-
nent is decidedly Indian. That’s settled.
Pulao vs Biryani
The biryani incites love, hate and argu-
ments but the difference between a pulao
and a biryani remains hardly understood.
The yakhni pulao, to call it by its name,
made its way from Central Asia to India. It
is rice cooked in meat stock (yakhni
means stock). It is a dish found in many
parts and communities of India, including
the Kayasths, who follow a recipe almost
exactly similar to what is given in the
Nuskha e Shahjahani (Salma Husain’s
translation from the Persian). Stock is
made with meat, water, ginger and spices.
Pieces of broiled meat are fished out and
sautéed and put on rice. This is then
mixed with the stock and the whole dish is
cooked in a sealed pot in the dum style of
cooking. The dum allows food to cook in
its own juices. It is a technique of Mughal
slow cooking. Indirect or slow heat is ap-
plied at the bottom of a pot and often,
though not always, a piece of live coal is
kept on top to create a convection oven.
Cropped page Page: 22
Kolkata biryani (top),
Arcot biryani (left) is said
to have influenced the
Thalassery version (right)
This is the same Regional Variations
process used to Is the Mappila biryani better
make most of than Ambur? Is Lucknowi
the biryanis in better than Calcutta or Hy-
India. Many re- derabadi? These are endless
gional varia- debates. In a country as di-
tions are, in verse as India, where the
fact, offshoots of basis of cuisines is diversi-
the “courtly” biry- ty in spicing, these person-
anis, though com- al preferences are just that
mercial biryani innova- —personal.
tions tend to add on spice and However, what does tend
shorten cooking processes to give us the to get overlooked is the im-
likes of tawa biryani, where some sort of portance of rice in biryani’s di-
gravied meat and rice are tossed together versity and its democratisation.
in the tawa or karahi, like fried rice. The aroma of Lucknow’s best biryani
The biryani itself can be seen as a short- came not just from saffron or re-
er version of the pulao — cutting out the strained kewra but basmati, exclusive-
stock making. The traditional method of ly cultivated for Lucknow aristocracy.
cooking pulao was fairly intricate, using Basmati is a much abused term today,
spices tied up in a muslin potli, similar to with impostor long-grained varieties
the French bouquet garni, to flavour the pulao”, erroneously called “veg biryani”. flooding the market.
broth. The pulao is found all across India In UP and Delhi, “tahiri” is the correct Coarser sela (referring to a cheaper way
in communities as varied as Parsis, Bunts term for a vegetarian rice and spice dish of processing by boiling to remove husk)
and Kashmiris. Present day recipes that I cooked like pulao. rice was used by poorer people; it lacked
checked out on many blogs, however, In effect, how the biryani is different aroma of dry-milled basmati but was easi-
again tend to shorten the process of stock from the pulao is that in biryani, the rice is er to cook than basmati that required pre-
making, bringing the pulao closer to the not cooked in stock. cision with water or would dissolve into
biryani. Second, biryani is layered and then fin- soggy mess, belying the courtly ideal of
In the courtly cuisines of Lucknow and ished on dum (traditionally so is pulao). each grain separate. Sela rice, however, is
Delhi, the pulao had many variations and Third, saffron is used to prettify the top now the common choice for biryani.
was cooked with a number of vegetables layer of rice in a biryani, unlike in a pulao The Ambur biryani, which is a variation
or lentils added to the meat. We can con- which uses simpler aromats like carda- of the courtly Arcot style (a cook of the
jecture this led to the innovation of “veg mom and cloves. nawab opened the first biryani shop in
Ambur in Tamil Nadu, the story goes,
which became popular with truck driv-
Many regional variations ers), replaces basmati with seeraga sam-
are offshoots of “courtly” ba, a small grained flavourful variety, the
biryanis, though commercial common man’s food.
biryani innovations tend Kaima is biryani rice of Kerala. The
to add on spice and shorten spicy Thalassery biryani is an adaptation
the cooking processes of the Arcot biryani, according to Abida
Rasheed, expert in Mappila food whom I
met many years ago and who makes a dis-
tinction between the hot Thalassery and
more subtle dum biryani of Mappilas.
Though the Calcutta biryani was
cooked with sela rice, experiments by
chefs with more flavourful local varieties
are leading to new creations. More biry-
anis may evolve. More the merrier.„
The writer looks at food and culinary traditions
Esfahani beryan Tawa biryani