Rice and shine

The other day, a celebrity chef who was going to shoot in India for a television series asked me which single dish could be described as India’s signature food. In Scotland, for instance, he was going to cook and talk about haggis; in England about fish and chips. So what in India could he showcase as a national dish?

He finally zeroed in on the biryani — and I agreed whole-heartedly with him. It’s a dish that all of India revels in. Every region has its own biryani; in fact most states have their peculiar versions of the dish. And the biryani is as loved as it is respected across the country.

I, for one, love this dish. It never fails to surprise me what you can do with some rice, meat and spices. I had my fill of surprises when I went through Pratibha Karan’s book on biryanis. The author, who had earlier written an excellent book on Hyderabadi food, is just out with her new book — simply called Biryani. The book, published by Random House India, consists of over a hundred recipes collected from all corners of the country of different kinds of biryani dishes.

Some of the recipes, of course, are known to food lovers. After all, dishes such as the kachche gosht ki biryani of Hyderabad and the Kolkata biryani are easily available in most metros. But what caught my interest were the little-known biryanis that you can find in different corners of India.

Did you know the role that flowers and fruits have played in enhancing the flavours of a biryani? Come to think of it, that’s not really surprising, for a good biryani is all about aroma — the fragrance of rice melting with that of meat, enhanced by the heady scents of spices. So a fruit or a flower biryani adds a light or a heavy fragrance to the rice, giving it a new flavour altogether.

Take for instance, a dish that is known as rose biryani. This Lucknow dish is cooked with rose water and garnished with rose petals. Lucknow has two other interesting biryani dishes — one flavoured with the scent of jasmine flowers, and the other cooked with pineapples. A few drops of jasmine essence go into the motiya ki biryani to give it a fragrance.

In the ananas or pineapple biryani, mutton is marinated for 20 minutes or so with ginger, garlic and chilli paste, coriander and mint leaves, sliced onions, whisked yoghurt and pineapple chunks. Then you parboil some rice. Cook the mutton with the marinade in oil till it’s almost done. Add a paste of poppy seeds, crushed onions, and some whole spices. Cover and cook. Turn off the heat when there is a glass of gravy left in the mutton. Now smear ghee in a heavy bottom pan. Place half the rice in it and then the meat with the gravy. Top it with the remaining rice. Cover with a tight lid and let it cook on steam till done.

I found two fruity biryani dishes from the east. In fact, both were from West Bengal. One was a fish biryani cooked with aloo bukhara — or dried plums. The second one was an apricot and chicken biryani, in which apricots were puréed and cooked with chicken stock to flavour the rice. When the biryani was put together, some fried apricot pieces went into the rice which was placed on a layer of cooked chicken and then together cooked some more. In the fish and plum biryani, semi-cooked fish and parboiled rice were cooked together with pieces of plum.

Indeed, the kinds of biryani that India has to offer boggle the mind. Karan stresses that even small towns have their own biryanis. These can be cooked with lamb, chicken, pork, fish, prawns, vegetables — and, as we have just seen, with flowers and fruits.

And the biryani, I must add, is as Indian as Shah Rukh Khan. It may have come with the Mughals, as most believe, or it may have (as a south Indian chef once told me) originated in the Chola period, then gone to the Arab world, and finally returned with the Mughals. Either way, the biryani is a veritable part of our lives now. Next week, I shall tell you about a few other exotic biryanis.

I don’t know if the celebrity chef finally cooked a pot of biryani for his television programme. If he did, I wonder which one of the hundreds of biryani recipes caught his fancy. Somebody should have told him that there’s not just one biryani — but as many kinds as there are people in India!

Santare ki biryani (serves 8)

Ingredients

500g long grain rice, 2 oranges, 1kg mutton cut into medium-sized pieces, 2 tbs ginger juice, ½ tsp saffron, crushed and dissolved in 2tbsp water, ½ cup ghee and oil mixed. Salt to taste
Spices: 2 bay leaves, 2 crushed black cardamoms, 2 one-inch cinnamon sticks, ¼ tsp grated nutmeg

Method

Wash the rice and soak it in water for 15-20 minutes. Drain. Boil 2 litres of water. Once it starts to boil, add the rice with a little salt. Cook for 5-6 minutes till it is half done. Drain and transfer the rice to a wide pan. Set aside. Squeeze the juice of the oranges. Take the peel of half an orange. Remove the inner white thread-like part from it. Slice the peel finely into medium-sized pieces. Boil with 1 cup water for about a minute. Drain and set aside.Wash the mutton. In a large and heavy pan, heat the ghee-oil mix. Add all ingredients listed under ‘Spices’ along with the meat and fry for 7-8 minutes. Add just sufficient water and cook till the meat is tender and somewhat dry. Add the orange juice, the rind and the ginger juice to the meat. Cover with parboiled rice. Sprinkle the saffron dissolved in water over the rice. Cover with a tight-fitting lid and cook for 2 minutes on medium-high flame and then on low flame for 10-15 minutes till the rice is done. Serve hot.


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