Truths and myths around the beloved biryani, and how to make the mutton version at home

Okay, this is almost certainly an apocryphal tale. It has not been mentioned by any contemporary writer or historian who lived in those times. A queen caring about ordinary soldiers sounds nice, but it is unlikely to have ever happened.

It is much like that other popular biryani origin story – the one involving Nawab Asaf-ud-Daulah of Awadh. The year was 1780. Awadh had been hit by a terrible famine. The Nawab, anticipating Keynes’ theory of government intervention in the economy centuries prior, came up with a brilliant employment-generating scheme. He would get thousands of workers to build a grand mosque during the day, and then break it down at night, only to rebuild it the next morning. It was a perpetual job machine.

Every night, before the demolition, the workers would take large pots, fill them with meat, rice, ghee, saffron, and other spices, seal them with dough and leave to cook on dum, over embers overnight. They would eat it the next morning, after a hard night’s toil.

This working-class dish reached the royal kitchen, where it was suitably refined for the nawab’s palate. This came to be known as the dum pukht biryani. Again, this is a lovely story, but like the Mumtaz Mahal tale, there is no contemporary evidence to prove its authenticity.

We do, however, have evidence of similar dishes being cooked in the imperial kitchens of Jalaluddin Akbar. Abu’l Fazl recounted a few recipes in the first volume of the Ain-i-Akbari. Among them, the closest was a dish called shullah, made of meat, rice, ghee, gram, onions, ginger, garlic, round pepper, cinnamon, cardamom and cloves. There was another called duzdbiryan, which had only three ingredients – meat, rice, and salt.

The dish that sounded most like biryani, called biryan, didn’t have any rice at all. Abu’l Fazl categorised it under the set of dishes containing “meats with spices.” His biryan recipe contained measurements for salt, ghee, saffron, cloves, pepper, and cumin seed, for a whole ‘Deshmandi sheep.’

This is not surprising, since, in Persian, biryan simply meant to roast or fry. The Persian dish that shares the name biryani is made of chopped meat and liver that is layered on top of lavash bread, and has no rice in it. Iranians eat something called birinj (rice) biryan, which is a kind of fried rice cooked with saffron and topped with nuts and berries, very different from the biryani we eat.

So, how did we get our biryani in India?

It was, most likely, a name that became popular in the last stages of the Mughal empire, where local meat and rice preparations were modified into a popular street food. Even today, if you visit the walled city in Delhi or in the markets around Nizamuddin dargah, streetside vendors with large deghs carrying biryani dish it out on small plates, much like a chaatwalah would.

In fact, biryani was never meant to be eaten by the elite. A friend, who traces his lineage to Asaf-ud-Daulla, once derisively called biryani hoi pulao, the pulao of the hoi polloi or the common people. Ashraf families in the north only ate pulao, especially Yakhni pulao, a much more delicately flavoured, and lighter dish. For them, biryani was an overly-spiced, crass dish better suited to the proletarian palate.

The only royal connection to any biryani is probably the unique Kolkata biryani, developed by the khansamas of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, who had been exiled to Calcutta by the British. We are told the improbable story that the impoverished Nawab could no longer afford meat, so his cooks substituted it with potatoes and boiled eggs.

Back then, the East India Company paid him one lakh rupees per month, which is more than Rs 2 crore today. Surely, despite all his expenses, he could have afforded meat in his biryani? In the mid-19th century, potatoes were still considered a rare vegetable in North India, and the exiled Nawab might have been delighted to find them so easily available in Bengal.

Interestingly, one of Kolkata’s most loved biryanis, served at the Royal Indian Hotel, began adding potatoes only in 2017. The restaurant was founded 120 years ago by a descendant of Wajid Ali Shah, who had just moved to the city from Lucknow. He began to serve a spicy pulao called khushka, mutton qalia, and mutton chaap, to the largely Muslim local community, which had migrated with the Nawab.

Royal only started serving its famous biryani in the 1940s. It was a variation of the Lucknowi Yakhni Pulao, made with a spiced mutton stock. In my opinion, it retains the subtlety of an haute pulao, while maintaining the more robust punch of a biryani.

Here’s my easy-to-make version of the Royal mutton biryani.