Vegetarian on Thyme Travel

Orecchiette with Romanesco, Black Garlic and Pine Nuts

Akhilesh — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is something mathematically satisfying about a romanesco. The spiralling florets follow the Fibonacci sequence with an almost unsettling precision – nature doing geometry for its own amusement. Most vegetables don’t demand to be looked at before they’re eaten. This one does.

The question, then, is what to do with something so architecturally perfect. The answer, I think, is to keep it simple enough that the vegetable remains the point, but interesting enough that the dish earns its place at the table. Southern Italian cooking has always understood this balance. In Puglia, orecchiette with broccoli or cime di rapa is a peasant dish elevated by restraint: good olive oil, garlic, a whisper of chilli, and the pasta itself, those little ear-shaped cups that catch the florets and hold the sauce.

Romanesco is a brassica like its brasher cousins broccoli and cauliflower, but sweeter and more delicate – nuttier, somehow, with none of that sulfurous edge you sometimes get from an overcooked cauliflower. It wants a gentler treatment. So I blanch rather than roast, keeping that pale green colour and the structural integrity of the spirals intact.

The black garlic is my addition. Fermented garlic – aged for weeks until it turns soft and dark, with a flavour somewhere between molasses and aged balsamic – brings an umami depth that compensates for the anchovy I’m leaving out today. It melts into the olive oil and coats everything in a glossy, almost-caramelised sauce that looks dramatic and tastes of nothing but patient transformation.

Time

Prep Time : 10 minutes (including recomended time to marinade)
Cook Time : 30 minutes
Active Time : approximately 20 minutes

Ingredients

400g orecchiette
1 large romanesco brocolli
60ml extra virgin olive oil (use something good – you’ll taste it)
6 cloves black garlic
4 cloves fresh garlic
1 chopped red chilli, or 1/2 teaspoon of dried chilli flakes, or to your taste
50g pine nuts
40g parmesan, finely grated
Half a lemon
Fresh parsley, roughly chopped
Salt to taste

Method

Prepare the romanesco. Break it into small florets, keeping them uniform so they cook evenly, also keep the shape. Don’t discard the tender inner stem – slice it thinly.
Toast the pine nuts. Warm a dry frying pan over medium-low heat and add the pine nuts. They burn with vindictive speed, so stay with them, shaking the pan frequently. Once they’re golden and fragrant – two to three minutes – tip them onto a plate immediately.
Prepare the garlic. Thinly slice the fresh garlic. Take the black garlic cloves and mash them into a rough paste with the flat of your knife. They should be soft and sticky, almost like a thick jam.
Boil the water. Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil. Salt it generously – it should taste like the sea. This is not negotiable.
Blanch the romanesco. Add the florets to the boiling water and cook until just tender but still with bite – about three minutes. Lift them out with a slotted spoon or spider and immediately put into ice cold water to stop the cooking. Keep the salted water boiling; you’ll use it for the pasta.
Cook the pasta. Add the orecchiette to the same water and cook until al dente (or to your preference). Before draining, reserve a couple of cups of the starchy pasta water. You’ll need it.
Build the sauce. While the pasta cooks, heat the olive oil in a large frying pan over medium-low heat. Add the sliced fresh garlic and let it soften gently – you want it translucent and sweet, not coloured. Add the black garlic paste and the chilli flakes, stirring to dissolve the black garlic into the oil. The sauce will turn dark and glossy. Don’t be alarmed; this is correct.
Add the blanched romanesco to the pan and toss to coat in the garlicky oil. When the pasta is ready, transfer it directly to the pan using a spider or slotted spoon – the clinging water helps. Add a generous splash of pasta water and toss vigorously, adding more water as needed to create a glossy, emulsified sauce that clings to everything. The starch in the water is what makes this work; without it, you just have oily pasta.
Remove the pan from the heat. Add half the grated cheese and toss again. Squeeze over the lemon juice to brighten everything. Taste for salt – you probably won’t need more, but check.
Divide between warmed bowls. Scatter with the toasted pine nuts, the remaining cheese, and the parsley if using. Finish with a final drizzle of your best olive oil – something grassy and peppery, if you have it.

Notes

The black garlic will make the sauce look quite dark – almost dramatic. This is part of its charm. The flavour is sweet and deep, not at all like raw garlic. If you can’t find black garlic, you could use a balsamic reduction drizzled at the end, though the effect is different.
If you want more textural contrast, toast some coarse breadcrumbs in olive oil with a little grated lemon zest and scatter them over the top.

Eat in good health!

A Question of Doneness

Akhilesh — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Here is a question that rarely gets a proper airing in popular food culture: when did the world start eating rare meat?

I had been thinking about how much of European cooking, particularly for beef and lamb, treats medium rare as the default, the aspiration, the marker of a meal properly prepared. And yet, across vast swathes of the world – Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, North Africa – meat is cooked through. Not pink. Not blushing. Done. What we in the Western food world somewhat dismissively call “well done.”

And that led me to a second, sharper question: when exactly did well-done become synonymous with dried out? Because if you think about it for even a moment, cooking meat all the way through while keeping it succulent and tender probably demands more skill, not less, than pulling a steak at medium rare.

It turns out the answers to these questions unravel some deeply held assumptions about what constitutes good cooking.

A brief history of rareness

The word “rare” applied to meat traces back to the older English word “rear,” meaning underdone. The earliest print reference appears around 1615, in Gervase Markham’s The English Hus-wife. But here is the interesting thing: Markham actually warns against it, describing rareness as unwholesome. The concept existed, but it was not initially a compliment.

The preference for underdone beef solidified as a cultural identity marker in seventeenth and eighteenth century England. By the 1700s, the roast beef of old England had become famous throughout Europe. The British preferred their beef plain and simply roasted, and this was bound up with national identity in a fascinating way. Roast beef was seen as a symbol of English frugality, unfussiness, manly virility, and prosperity – a pointed contrast to foreign food dressed up with elaborate sauces. The French noticed, naturally, and coined the term “les Rosbifs” as a gentle jab at this very British obsession.

The French, for their part, pushed things even further toward the rare end. Their taxonomy of doneness runs from bleu (barely seared) through saignant (literally “bleeding”) to a point, which they consider the ideal middle ground but which most British or American diners would still call rare. The term a point is revealing in itself. It literally means “to the point” or “perfect,” which rather gives the game away: built into the very language is the assumption that medium rare is the correct state of affairs, and everything else is a deviation from perfection.

Why most of the world cooks meat through

The geographic split between rare-preferring and well-done cultures is not arbitrary. There are several interlocking reasons, and they rarely get discussed together.

The first is the question of which animals are being eaten and how they are raised. The European preference for rare meat is overwhelmingly a beef phenomenon, and to a lesser extent lamb. It developed in cultures where large, well-fed cattle were available and where the dominant cooking method for prestige meals was roasting whole joints over open fires or on spits. Northern European cultures had abundant grazing land and a tradition of raising large ruminants, giving them access to the big, tender cuts that lend themselves to quick, hot cooking.

In much of Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent, the dominant meats have historically been goat, mutton from older sheep, and chicken – all leaner, tougher, and enormously improved by slow, thorough cooking. The culinary traditions of these regions developed around braising, stewing, and slow-roasting with aromatic spice pastes and liquid, precisely because the animals available demanded it. A goat leg from a free-ranging animal in Rajasthan or the Levant is a fundamentally different proposition from a well-marbled side of English beef. You would not want it rare. It would be chewy and unpleasant.

The second factor is climate and food safety. In hot climates without refrigeration, meat spoils quickly, and parasites and bacterial contamination are more dangerous. Cooking meat thoroughly was a practical survival strategy that became culturally embedded over millennia. The elaborate spice traditions of Indian, Middle Eastern, and North African cooking are not just about flavour. Many of those spices – turmeric, cumin, garlic, chilli – have genuine antimicrobial properties. The entire culinary grammar evolved around the assumption that meat would be cooked through.

The third is a structural difference in how meat features in the meal itself. In the European tradition, especially the British one, a large piece of meat is the centrepiece, carved at table, served in thick slices. The interior of the joint is the star, and its colour and texture become the focus of preference. In most Asian, Middle Eastern, and subcontinental cuisines, meat is cut into smaller pieces before cooking and incorporated into sauces, curries, stews, and rice dishes. It is a component of a larger composition, not a solo performer. When you are cooking meat in a complex curry with yoghurt, tomato, and a dozen spices for two hours, the question of whether the interior is pink is simply irrelevant. The entire cooking philosophy is different.

The inconvenient history of roast beef

There is a complication in the rare-steak-as-ancient-tradition narrative, and it is a significant one. For most of European history, cattle were far too valuable to raise just for eating.

Medieval cattle were primarily oxen used as draught animals to pull ploughs, and cows provided milk, cheese, and whey. Zooarchaeological evidence tells us that among cattle remains from medieval and early modern sites, the overwhelming majority were adults. These animals were being kept alive for work and dairy and only slaughtered at the end of their productive lives.

The deliberate breeding of cattle specifically for beef is astonishingly recent. Robert Bakewell was the first to breed cattle primarily for meat, and this was in the mid-eighteenth century, from around 1760 onwards. Before Bakewell, cattle were first and foremost kept for pulling ploughs or for dairy, with beef from surplus males as a secondary benefit. And the cattle of that era were nothing like what we eat today: extremely large-framed, late-maturing animals, flat-muscled, with finished steers weighing as much as 3,000 pounds when marketed at four to five years of age.

This creates a genuine paradox. The “roast beef of old England” that became a symbol of English identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was almost certainly not particularly good beef by modern standards. It was meat from old working animals or spent dairy cows – lean, tough, and fibrous from years of hauling ploughs through heavy clay soil. The idea that this meat was being served pink in the middle and celebrated as a national delicacy is, frankly, a bit hard to square with the likely reality.

If most beef before the late eighteenth century came from retired draught animals, you would think it would have been treated more like the goat and mutton of Asian and Middle Eastern cooking: slow-braised and stewed to break down all that tough connective tissue. And in fact, a great deal of medieval English meat cooking was exactly that – pottages, stews, pies, and long-braised dishes. The “roast” in roast beef referred to spit-roasting over an open fire, which for a tough old ox would have been a long, slow process by necessity, not the quick high-heat affair we associate with a modern medium-rare steak.

The preference for rare beef, in the way we understand it today, may only become truly viable after Bakewell and his successors created purpose-bred beef cattle that were young, well-marbled, and tender enough to eat pink. The whole rare-steak culture we think of as ancient and traditional may in reality be largely a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Europe’s quietly forgotten braising tradition

And this brings us to another thing that gets swept under the carpet in the modern rare-steak-as-sophistication narrative: the vast majority of the European meat cooking canon is braised, stewed, and slow-cooked food.

France has boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin, pot-au-feu, daube provencale, cassoulet, blanquette de veau, navarin d’agneau. These are not minor dishes in the repertoire. Pot-au-feu was considered the foundational dish of French home cooking for centuries. Italy has osso buco, bollito misto, brasato al Barolo, ragu that cook for hours. Germany has sauerbraten, which marinates for days and then braises for hours. Hungary has goulash. Belgium has carbonnade flamande. Ireland and Britain have their stews, their pies, their potted meats.

These are all dishes where the meat is cooked completely through, often for many hours, in liquid, until it is falling apart. And they are, by any honest reckoning, far more representative of what Europeans actually ate for most of history than a pink steak. The steak-frites or the Sunday roast carved pink at the table is the exception, the relatively modern prestige dish, not the everyday reality.

What is particularly telling is that even French haute cuisine, now so closely associated with rare meat, was built on a foundation of stocks, sauces, and braises. The entire mother sauce system, the fonds de cuisine that Careme and Escoffier codified – these all assume meat is being cooked slowly in liquid. The clear consomme, the demi-glace, the jus: they all come from hours and hours of gentle extraction from bones and tough cuts. The vast majority of classical French technique is about making tough, cheap, well-done meat taste extraordinary.

When “well done” became an insult

The stigma against well-done meat is, I think, a relatively recent phenomenon, probably emerging in its current virulent form during the mid-to-late twentieth century with the rise of American steakhouse culture and the professionalisation of food criticism. Before that, opinions were more varied. Early twentieth century cooking texts actually warned against rare meat, echoing their seventeenth century predecessors.

The shift happened through a confluence of factors: the post-war boom in American steakhouse dining, the influence of French haute cuisine on Western food culture with its built-in bias toward rare, the rise of food media and celebrity chefs who adopted rare and medium rare as a marker of sophistication, and the development of better refrigeration and food safety which made eating rare meat safer and therefore a viable mass preference rather than a risky one.

There is also a class dimension that is hard to ignore. Ordering rare became a signal of culinary knowledge and confidence, a way of distinguishing yourself from the unsophisticated masses. “Well done” became coded as the preference of people who did not know any better. This is a remarkably snobbish position when you consider it globally, since it effectively dismisses the culinary traditions of most of the world’s population.

The question of skill

And this brings me to what I think is the sharpest point in this whole discussion. Cooking meat well done and keeping it juicy is arguably a harder technical challenge than cooking it medium rare.

A medium-rare steak is relatively forgiving. You sear it, you pull it at the right temperature, and the internal fat and moisture do most of the work. But cooking meat all the way through while retaining succulence requires genuine understanding of technique: low-and-slow methods, the use of marinades and braising liquids, knowing when to rest meat, understanding carry-over cooking.

This is precisely what the great non-European meat traditions do extraordinarily well. A properly made rogan josh. A Yemeni mandi. An Egyptian fattah. A Chinese red-braised pork belly. These are dishes where the meat is cooked completely through and yet is falling-apart tender, deeply flavoured, and anything but dry. The “well done equals dry” equation only holds true if you are applying the European method of dry-heat cooking – grilling, roasting – and simply leaving the meat on too long. It is a failure of technique being treated as an inherent property of the doneness level.

The real irony is that the Western culinary world has been slowly rediscovering this. Low-and-slow barbecue, sous vide cooking, 24-hour braises: these are all methods of cooking meat well past medium rare while keeping it spectacularly tender and moist. They are essentially the same principles that Indian, Middle Eastern, and East Asian cooks have been using for centuries, repackaged with modern technology and different cultural framing.

The anomaly, not the standard

So to answer the question I started with: the world did not “start” eating rare meat so much as one particular culinary tradition, rooted in northern Europe’s specific agricultural conditions, animal breeds, and cooking methods, developed a preference for it and then, through colonial and cultural influence, managed to position that preference as the universally correct one. It is a classic case of a regional habit being elevated to a universal standard.

The traditions of cooking meat thoroughly – the way India, the Middle East, and much of Asia have done for millennia – were not just appropriate for the animals available in those regions. They were also how most of Europe cooked its beef for most of its history. The rare steak is the anomaly, the latecomer, the product of a very specific set of agricultural innovations in eighteenth century England that created an animal that had never existed before: one bred purely to be eaten young.

The Indian cook making a slow-braised nihari, the Moroccan cook building a tagine, the French grandmother assembling a daube – they are all working within a tradition that has far more in common with the historic European mainstream than the modern rare-steak orthodoxy does.

The irony is almost perfect.

The Layered History of Biryani

Akhilesh — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Few dishes can claim to have been shaped by empires, carried along trade routes spanning thousands of miles, refined in royal kitchens, and then democratised on street corners — all while remaining essentially, recognisably itself. Biryani is one such dish. What arrives at the table as fragrant, layered rice and spiced meat is, in truth, a palimpsest of civilisations: Persian, Central Asian, Mughal, Deccani, and now global. Its history is contested, its origins claimed by many, and its variations so numerous that no two cities in South Asia can fully agree on what constitutes the real biryani. And that, perhaps, is precisely the point.

To understand biryani, one must first understand pilaf — for biryani did not emerge from nothing. It evolved, over centuries, from a family of rice and meat dishes that have been central to the culinary traditions of Persia, Central Asia, and the wider Islamic world.

Ancient Roots: Rice, Meat, and the Persian Tradition

The story begins with rice itself. While rice cultivation had spread from the Indian subcontinent to Central and Western Asia in antiquity, it was in Persia that the cooking of rice was elevated into a sophisticated culinary art. Persian cuisine developed an intricate vocabulary for rice preparation — polow (rice cooked in broth with separate grains, from which the word “pilaf” derives worldwide), chelow (plain steamed rice), kateh (sticky rice), and tahchin (slow-cooked layered rice) — reflecting a culture that took its rice very seriously indeed.

The earliest documented recipe for a pilaf-like preparation comes from the 10th-century Persian polymath Abu Ali Ibn Sina, better known in the West as Avicenna. In his medical texts, including sections of the Canon of Medicine, he described therapeutic rice dishes cooked in broth, elaborating on several types of pilaf and their nutritional properties. For this, the Tajiks still consider Ibn Sina the “father of modern pilaf.” His name for the dish was reportedly palov osh — said to be an acronym in Uzbek compiled from the basic ingredients: onion (piyoz), carrot (ayoz), meat (lakhm), fat (olio), salt (vet), water (ob), and rice (shali). Whether this etymology is folk tradition or historical fact is debatable, but it speaks to the deep cultural investment these peoples have in their rice.

Even before Avicenna, literary references to pilaf-like dishes appear in the histories of Alexander the Great. When Alexander captured the Sogdian capital of Marakanda — modern-day Samarkand — in 329 BCE, his soldiers reportedly encountered and were so taken with the local rice dishes that they carried the recipes back to Macedonia. These stories, while likely apocryphal according to historians like John Boardman, do testify to the antiquity and prestige of rice preparation in Central Asia.

By the time of the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258 CE), methods of cooking rice that approximate modern pilaf had spread across a vast territory from the Iberian Peninsula to Afghanistan. The 13th-century Kitab al-Tabikh by Muhammad bin Hasan al-Baghdadi, compiled in Baghdad, describes rice cooked in broth to achieve separate grains, termed ruzz mufalfal — “rice like peppercorns” — preserving the Persian and Central Asian influences that flowed through the Abbasid courts. These texts describe a desired consistency where each grain should be plump, firm, and entirely separate, with no mushiness or clumping. The Spanish paella, the South Asian pulao, and biryani all evolved from this culinary tradition.

From Pilaf to Biryani: A Distinction Emerges

Here is where matters become interesting, and contested. The word “biryani” itself carries multiple Persian etymological threads. It may derive from birian or beriyan, meaning “to fry” or “to roast,” or from bereshtan, also meaning “to roast.” The usage traces to the phrase birinj biryan — literally “fried rice” — with birinj being the Persian word for rice. All roads lead back to Persia, linguistically at least.

But a name is not the same as an origin. Rice and meat preparations existed across the ancient world wherever these staple ingredients were available. The nomadic pastoral cultures of Central Asia relied heavily on both for sustenance, and a one-pot dish of rice with whatever meat was at hand would have been a practical and efficient meal for peoples on the move. The distinction between pulao and biryani, in fact, has never been entirely clear-cut. The British-era author Abdul Halim Sharar noted that biryani carried a stronger curried taste due to greater quantities of spices. The food historian Sohail Hashmi pointed out that pulao tends to be plainer, with meat or vegetables cooked together with rice, while biryani contains more gravy and is cooked longer. The cookery writer Pratibha Karan offered what is perhaps the clearest structural definition: biryani consists of two layers of rice with a layer of meat in the middle, while pulao is not layered.

This layering is crucial. It is the defining architectural principle of biryani — the separation and then reunion of components, each partially prepared independently before being brought together in a sealed vessel to complete their cooking through steam and aromatic exchange. This technique, known as dum pukht (literally “slow breathing oven” in Persian), distinguishes biryani from its simpler pilaf ancestors.

The Mughal Synthesis: Where Biryani Became Biryani

The prevailing scholarly consensus, articulated most influentially by the food historian Lizzie Collingham, holds that the modern biryani developed in India in the royal kitchens of the Mughal Empire, specifically during the reign of Emperor Akbar (1556–1605). The Mughals, who traced their lineage to both Timur and Genghis Khan through their Persianised Turkic heritage, were great patrons of Persian culture. When they established their empire in the Indian subcontinent, they brought with them Persian court traditions, art, architecture, and — crucially — cuisine.

As Collingham describes it, in the Mughal court kitchens, “the delicately flavoured Persian pilau met the pungent and spicy rice dishes of Hindustan to create the classic Mughlai dish, biryani.” This was not a simple transplantation. It was a genuine synthesis: Persian slow-cooking methods and yoghurt-marinated meat combined with the assertive spice traditions of the subcontinent — garam masala, green chillies, turmeric, coriander, mint — to produce something neither purely Persian nor purely Indian, but distinctively Mughal.

The Portuguese Friar Sebastien Manrique, visiting the Mughal court in the 1630s, made a clear distinction between Persian pilau and Mughal biryani, describing grand feasts featuring “the rich and aromatic Mogol Bringes [biryanis] and Persian pilaos of different hues.” The Ain-i-Akbari, the detailed administrative chronicle of Akbar’s court written by his historian Abu’l Fazl in 1590, records multiple rice dishes including palaos, biryanis, and shulla, though it draws little formal distinction between them — suggesting that the taxonomy was still fluid in Akbar’s time.

The emperor Aurangzeb, writing to his son, mentions biryani with evident fondness: “I remember the savour of your khichidi and biryani during the winter. Truly the kabuli cooked by Islam Khan does not surpass them.” He requested that a skilled biryani cook be sent to him — a telling detail about the status the dish held in imperial circles.

The legend of Mumtaz Mahal — that Shah Jahan’s queen, visiting army barracks and finding soldiers malnourished, ordered the royal chefs to create a nourishing one-pot rice and meat dish — is almost certainly apocryphal. But like many food origin stories, it speaks to a truth about the dish’s character: biryani was always simultaneously courtly and martial, elaborate and practical, a meal fit for a banquet and for an army camp.

Across the Subcontinent: The Great Diversification

The genius of biryani lies not in any single definitive recipe but in its capacity for regional adaptation. As the Mughal Empire expanded and then fragmented, biryani travelled with governors, soldiers, pilgrims, and displaced courts, absorbing local flavours and techniques at every stop.

Hyderabadi Biryani

When the Mughals conquered Hyderabad in the 1630s, the dish entered the Deccan. Under the Nizams, who ruled Hyderabad from 1724 until Indian independence in 1948, biryani was refined with an almost obsessive dedication. The Nizams’ kitchens are said to have developed nearly fifty varieties, using proteins ranging from goat and chicken to fish, prawns, quail, and deer. The signature Hyderabadi method is the kacchi (raw) biryani — raw meat marinated overnight in yoghurt and spices, layered with partially cooked rice, sealed with dough, and slow-cooked on dum. The result is bold, spicy, and intensely flavoured, with the meat juices infusing every grain of rice. When the Mughal Empire declined in Delhi after 1857, Hyderabad emerged as a major centre of South Asian Muslim culture, and its biryani became arguably the most famous iteration of the dish.

Lucknowi (Awadhi) Biryani

In Lucknow, the capital of the Awadh region, biryani took on a markedly different character under the Nawabs. Where Hyderabadi biryani is bold and assertive, Lucknowi biryani is subtle and fragrant. The distinguishing technique is the pakki (cooked) method: meat and rice are prepared separately — the meat in a yoghurt and milk-based stock, the rice parboiled with whole spices — before being layered in a copper vessel and finished on dum. The spicing is gentler, with an emphasis on saffron, star anise, kewra (screwpine water), and rose water. The Nawabs of Awadh, renowned for their luxurious taste, approached food as an art form, and Lucknowi biryani reflects that sensibility — restrained, aromatic, and refined.

Kolkata Biryani

When the British deposed Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh in 1856 and exiled him to Calcutta, he brought his court — and his cooks — with him. The Lucknowi biryani tradition thus migrated eastward, but in its new home it underwent a distinctive transformation. The most notable innovation was the addition of the potato — large golden chunks of it, cooked within the biryani. Whether this was born of economy (stretching the expensive meat further under reduced royal finances) or of culinary adventurism (the potato was still a relatively exotic ingredient in mid-19th century India) remains debated. Begum Manzilat Fatima, the Nawab’s great-great-granddaughter, favoured the latter theory — potatoes were expensive and unusual in 1856, making their inclusion a mark of sophistication rather than poverty. Regardless, the boiled egg and the potato became the signatures of Kolkata biryani, along with a lighter spice profile and a subtle sweetness from kewra essence.

Southern and Coastal Variations

Biryani’s journey was not exclusively a northern affair. Some food historians, notably Salma Hussein, have argued that biryani may have arrived in South India’s Deccan region before the Mughal era, brought by Arab traders and travelling soldier-statesmen. The ancient Tamil literary tradition records a dish called Oon Soru — rice cooked in ghee with meat, turmeric, coriander, pepper, and bay leaf — from the Chola Dynasty period, as early as the 2nd to 3rd century CE. Whether this was a direct precursor to biryani or merely a parallel development is an open question, but it complicates any simple narrative of biryani as a purely Persian or Mughal import.

Kerala’s Malabar coast developed its own tradition, using the short-grained Jeerakasala (cumin rice) rather than basmati, cooked with seafood, chicken, or mutton and infused with coconut and curry leaves. In Tamil Nadu, Ambur biryani is distinguished by dried chilli paste, whole spices, and a dum-style cooking method using coconut milk. Dindigul biryani uses the local seeraga samba rice and is tangier than its northern cousins, with generous amounts of curd and lemon. Each coastal and southern variation tells the story of biryani meeting local ecology, local palates, and local identities.

Beyond the Subcontinent: A Global Migration

Biryani’s reach extends far beyond South Asia, carried by diaspora communities, trade routes, and the simple force of its appeal.

In the Persian Gulf states — Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and the UAE — biryani is a staple, often saffron-based with chicken, reflecting the dish’s deep roots in the wider Islamic culinary world. Oman’s maqbous uses dried lime, saffron, and smoking charcoal for a distinctive aromatic character. In Southeast Asia, biryani adapted to local ingredients and traditions: Myanmar’s danpauk, derived from the Persian dum pukht, is a mainstay at weddings and festive events. In Malaysia and Singapore, biryani is served with local spice blends and accompaniments. Indonesia’s nasi kebuli is a spicy steamed rice dish cooked in goat broth, milk, and ghee. Thailand’s khao mhok uses chicken, beef, or fish, topped with fried garlic and served with a green sour sauce.

The 19th-century movement of Indian indentured labourers to the Caribbean, East Africa, and beyond carried biryani to yet more kitchens. In Trinidad and Tobago, in Kenya, in South Africa’s Cape Malay community — wherever South Asian populations settled, biryani settled with them, adapting and evolving, absorbing new ingredients and new meanings.

The Modern Biryani: A Democratic Feast

Today, biryani occupies a unique position in the culinary world. In India, it is the single most ordered dish on food delivery platforms — a remarkable achievement for a preparation that was, for centuries, the province of royal kitchens and master chefs. According to Swiggy, India’s largest food delivery service, biryani tops their annual food trends year after year, with hundreds of thousands of new users placing their first orders for chicken biryani. World Biryani Day is celebrated on 7th July.

The dish has proven extraordinarily adaptable to modern life. Vegetarian versions — tahiri made with potatoes and peas, or paneer and mixed vegetables — cater to India’s large vegetarian population. Health-conscious variations substitute quinoa or brown rice. Fusion biryanis experiment with international flavours. Ready-to-eat biryani kits and meal delivery services have made the dish accessible far beyond the traditional centres of biryani mastery. And yet, the classic preparations endure: in Hyderabad, Lucknow, Kolkata, Chennai, and Karachi, biryani restaurants with decades or even centuries of tradition continue to serve dishes made by methods that would be recognisable to a Mughal court chef.

As the food historian Mohsina Mukadam has observed, while biryani may not have originated in India, “with its spices and flavours, it is a completely Indian innovation.” This seems right, but also perhaps too narrow. Biryani is Persian in its ancestry, Central Asian in its heartiness, Mughal in its refinement, Indian in its spicing, and now global in its reach. It belongs, in the end, to everyone who cooks it and everyone who eats it.

What makes biryani endure is not any single recipe but the principle at its core — that separate ingredients, each prepared with care and attention, can be brought together in a sealed vessel and, through the slow alchemy of steam and heat, transformed into something greater than the sum of their parts. That is a metaphor, if you want one, for the civilisational exchange that produced the dish in the first place. But it is also, more simply, the reason it tastes so extraordinarily good.

Sources consulted include Lizzie Collingham’s work on Indian food history, K.T. Achaya’s A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food, Pratibha Karan’s Biryani, Colleen Taylor Sen’s Feasts and Fasts, the Ain-i-Akbari of Abu’l Fazl, the Kitab al-Tabikh of al-Baghdadi, and accounts from the Google Arts & Culture project on the origins of biryani.

Eggplant Caponata

Akhilesh — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Silver Spoon is considered the encyclopaedia of Italian food, and obviously I have a copy. This recipe is inspired from a ‘Grandmother’s stew’ amongst its pages.

A caponata is a traditional dish of eggplants from the Sicily region. My recipe here is my variation, staying true to the spirit of Italian cooking with a little bit of a personal twist

Its a simple recipe, and makes a nice vegetarian main, served best with an nice crusty bread to soak it up. It can even act as a side to any roast meat or chicken.

Time

Prep Time : 15 minutes
Cook Time : 30 minutes
Active Time : approximately 30 minutes

Ingredients

500gms eggplant (Long Purple ones, or small ones. Not the big round ones)
1 large Capsicum (80gms)
1 small onion - chopped (½ cup approx)
1 large red chilli pepper seeds and all, (not the too hot variety)
1/2 cup and a scant more of sliced green olives
1 teaspoon of chopped capers
4 largish cloves of garlic - crushed and minced.
1 small can of tomato paste
Couple of sprigs of fresh oregano or thyme
Salt and black pepper to taste
Olive oil

Method

Dice the eggplant and put in a sieve.
Liberally salt the eggplant and put a little weight on it to squeeze out some of the water
Meanwhile roast the bell pepper over a open fire on all sides; remove and dunk it in cold water. You should then be able to peel off the skin. Remove the seeds and chop up into big dice, similar in size to the eggplant
Heat a pan and when hot, add a splash of olive oil
Brown the eggplant all sides in the oil, remove from pan and set aside.
In the same pan, now add the onions and soften them over a low heat, we are not caramelising them, just softening them to remove the sharpness, so till they go translucent.
Continuing on low heat, add the garlic, and let it soften, again , not browning just reducing the sharpness.
Add the thyme / oregano and the remaining ingredients except the tomato paste. (Eggplant, bell pepper, chili pepper, olives, capers)
If using dried oregano, don’t add it until step 11.
Mix all the elements together and let it cook together.
Add the tomato paste and a scant splash of hot water (there should not be any sauce, just enough for everything to coat the eggplant.
After cooking for about 4-5 minutes ( you are looking for the eggplant to still maintain its shape, but to collapse with a slight pressure from a fork.
Remove the stalks of oregano / thyme
Check for seasoning, add salt and pepper. Do not add any more salt until this stage, as we have added a lot of salty ingredients, eggplant in the beginning and the capers and the olives.
The oil will get released as well. Remove from the flame and serve.
Serve with crusty bread or over a shorter pasta.

Tips

This is one dish where I don’t recommend salting and seasoning often. The olives and capers have their own salt and will release it.
Like most braises, stews and curries, this will be better the next day.

Eat in good health!

Black Pepper Curry Chicken

Akhilesh — Sun, 07 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Many Indian curries use lots of spices to great effect, by building layers of flavour. This chicken curry has the same effect, but uses less spices than most north indian recipes call for. This dish is redolant of black pepper, whose heat is tempered by a base of pureed onions and yoghurt.

Its a simple recipe, and makes a nice main, served best with an Indian bread like a roti or a simple paratha. Because it is a thick sauce, I don’t recommend it with rice. I’ll share a black pepper recipe for eating with rice in a few days.

Sorry, no image, We ate it all before photos. 😋

Time

Prep Time : 40 minutes (including recomended time to marinade)
Cook Time : 30-40 minutes
Active Time : approximately 20 minutes

Ingredients

1.25 kg chicken pieces (Breast, Leg, Thigh) on the bone recommended.
2 ½ tablespoons of whole black pepper (Yes, it sounds a lot, but it will get tempered by the other items)
200 grams of whipped greek youghurt
200 grams of sliced onions
2 Bay leaves
4 cloves
1 Tablespoon of garlic paste
1/2 tablespoon of ginger paste
Salt to taste
2-3 tablespoons of oil

Method

Grind the black pepper in a spice grinder or a mortar and pestle. You need a coarse grind
Marinade the chicken in half the ground black pepper, 1 tbsp of oil, and the ginger and garlic pastes, 1 tsp of salt.
Allow the chicken to marinade for at least half an hour.
If rushed, you can cook the chicken directly also, but marinading is always better.
In a thick bottomed pan, heat the remaining oil and add the bay leaves and the cloves.
When they become aromatic and release thier smell, reduce the heat to low and add the onions.
We need to soften the onions, not brown them. This gentle cooking removes their pungency.
Once the onions are soft and translucent, remove them from the heat and pick out the bay leaves and the cloves.
Grind the softened onions into a puree. Add a little water if necessary to get a smooth paste
Meanwhile, brown the marinated chicken pieces in the pan
Return the pan to high heat and add back the onion puree, the bay leaves and the cloves.
Return the chicken to the onion puree in the pan and stir and mix everything together
Add the remaining black pepper (reserve a large pinch for garnish)
Reduce the heat to low, whip the greek youghurt and add it, stirring to mix everything together well
Add upto 1/2 cup of warm / hot water to help blend everything together well. Season with salt at this point
Cook for about 30-40 minutes depending on the size of the chicken. Check for seasoning again.
You should have a thick curry napping the chicken.
Serve hot, garnished with the reserved black pepper.

Tips

Always add dairy on low heat to prevent it getting scorched and burning
Use ghee instead of oil for cooking the onions, to give an interesting depth to the base
Like most braises, stews and curries, this will be better the next day.

Eat in good health!

Better than meat Vegetarian Lasagna

Akhilesh — Sun, 04 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A well made vegetarian pasta can make you forget about meat (temporarily). This particular favourite of mine is a satisfactory meal served with a simple salad or some garlic bread.

The lasagna has 2 layers, mixed vegetables in a tomato sauce in the base and a cheesy spinach and mushroom layer in the second. All topped of with some more cheese for a nice crust.

Its a simple recipe, but takes a little bit of work. The reward is well worth it.

Time

Prep Time : 40 minutes
Cook Time : 30 minutes for sauce and 30-40 minutes for final lasagna
Active Time : approximately 60 minutes

Ingredients

For 4 people, based on a 2.5 ltr baking dish.

12 standard size lasagna sheets. I use the variety that does not need to be pre-boiled.
1 medium size green capsicum
1 medium size yellow capsicum
1 medium zucchini / 1 medium eggplant
200 grams cherry tomatoes / or similar deseeded and chopped tomatoes
200 grams tomato paste
200 grams mushrooms
800 grams spinach leaves
3-4 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 tablespoons of cream
fresh basil / oregano / thyme or dried oregano or thyme
Red chilli flakes to your liking
200 grams fresh mozzarella
50-60 grams parmesan or any preferred cheese for the top.
Freshly cracked black pepper
Salt to taste

Method

Tomato and Vegetable Sauce

Chop the capsicum, zucchini, eggplant, and mushrooms into a 1" dice.
If using eggplant, once you have chopped it, rub a little salt into it and let it drain in a colander. This helps remove some of the bitter flavour of the eggplant. Leave it for 10 minutes and then give it a quick rinse
Heat some olive oil and add the cherry tomatoes. Let them heat up a bit till they soften and start bursting with a little pressure, gently break down about 1/2 of the tomatoes and add the vegetables you are using.
Mix them through and add the tomato puree, basil and other herbs.
Season with salt and add the red chilli flakes to your desired level of heat.
The vegetables should just slightly start to soften, no more, we want a chunky type of a sauce.

Spinach and mushroom sauce

Prepare the spinach by blanching it in hot water for 4 minutes and then removing it and plunging it in ice water.
Drain the spinach and squeeze all the water out of it. You will probably end up with about a 200 grams ball.
Heat a little oil in a skillet and add the garlic, once it is fragrant, add the mushrooms and let them brown a bit. Add the spinach and mix everything together. Season with salt pepper
Turn off the heat and add the cream to the spinach and mix it through.

Build the layers

Put a little of the liquid from the tomato sauce in the base of the baking tray and spread it around.
Put 3 sheets of the lasagna on top of the sauce. Try and cover the whole of the baking tray
Put the vegetable and tomato sauce on top of the lasagna sheets. Avoid putting too much of just liquid and try and keep the sauce chunky. Reserve some of the sauce to dress the top of the lasagna
Cover the tomatoes with more lasagna sheets
The next layer is the spinach and mushroom layer. Cover the lasagna sheets completely.
Once the spinach and mushroom layer is ready, put the fresh mozzarella on top of the spinach and mushroom.
I usually tear chunks of the mozzarella and spread it around the spinach. You don’t want a complete layer of cheese, but studded throughout.
Once the cheese is on, you want to put on the last layer of the lasagna sheets.
Lightly dress the last layer of lasagna sheets with the remaining tomato sauce. You are not going to cover it completely, in-fact you want some of the sheet showing.
Grate the parmesan finely and spread it over the tomato sauce and the pasta sheets. Again, you don’t want to have a complete layer of cheese, but just spread over
Let the lasagna sit for 10 minutes to settle, and now it’s ready for baking.

Baking

Pre-heat the oven at 200°C
Lightly cover the baking tray with foil, so that it is not touching the cheese
Place the baking tray in the middle shelf and bake for 30 minutes
Remove the foil and bake for another 10 minutes to brown the cheese.
Remove the baking tray from the over and let it rest for 10 minutes. This let’s the liquids settle and the lasagna will be easier to cut and serve
Use a wide spatula and a knife to cut the lasagna into squares and serve

Tips

Use any vegetables you have or you like. Even potato works well
To turn this into a meat lasagna, add meat instead of the vegetables to the tomato sauce
Traditionally a lasagna uses a béchamel sauce, which is a sauce of roux (toasted all purpose flour) and milk. I like the mozzarella cheese more.

Eat in good health!

Squid with Curry Leaves and Mustard Seeds

Akhilesh Sabharwal — Wed, 19 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Squid is one of my favourite seafoods. Though my favourite way to have it is simply fried, this simple method takes less than 15 minutes and gives a flavourful squid which can be eaten as a main, a side or with drinks.

Time

Prep Time : 10 minutes
Cook Time : 10 minutes
Active Time : 20 minutes

Ingredients

400 gms squid cut into rings. Or Frozen squid rings (its quite forgiving).
1 level teaspoon of Turmeric
2 1/2 teaspoons of Mustard Seeds
About 3 stems of curry leaves - about 30 odd leaves
3 dried red chillies
Optional : A teaspoon of roasted channa dal or some salted peanuts.

Feeds about 2-3

Method

This dish cooks quickly, so have everything ready to go
Toss the squid in the turmeric and leave for about 2-3 minutes
Heat a couple of teaspoons of vegetable or peanut oil
Once the oil gets hot (but not smoking) add the mustard seeds and the red chillies
Once the mustard seeds start popping, throw in the curry leaves and the channa dal / peanuts if using
Immediately follow with the squid, and toss it so that the squid is coated with the mustard seeds and the curry leaves.
Cook for about 3-5 minutes until the squid is done.
Remove and serve hot, with a squeeze of lemon.

Tip: Squid needs to be cooked really quickly or really long. When squid is ready it will be an opaque milky white inside, and when you bite it, it will have a little resistance.

Curry leaves are native to India. They’re highly aromatic and have a unique flavor with notes of citrus. Most Indian homes have a plant.

Eat in good health!

Roast Pork with Crispy Crackling

Akhilesh Sabharwal — Sat, 15 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A beautifully golden hatted leg of pork served with a selection of sauces. The pork itself is seasoned basically so it can be combined with any manner of flavours.

Time

Prep Time : 15 minutes
Cook Time : 5.5 to 6 hours
Active Time : 30 minutes

Ingredients

3 Kilograms Pork Leg (I used a deboned one which was 2.5 Kg )
Fine Sea Salt - about a tablespoon
Freshly ground black pepper - about a tablespoon and a pinch more
1/3 Tablespoon of a flavourless high heat cooking oil - Vegetable, Peanut, Canola

Method

This is a slow cooked leg, so set some time aside for it on the day you want to eat it. The slow cooking gives you tender meat and then by using high heat to finish cooking you get the crackling.
The crackling depends on the moisture inside the pig evaporating to steam in a flash of high heat
Dry the pork thoroughly, no surface moisture.
Score the fat lightly, I didn’t go too deep, because I wanted this inflated type of crackling. If you score deeply, you will get crispy strips.
Rub all over with the salt and the pepper, especially salt the skin.
Set oven at 125C
Place the pork on the middle shelf, in a rack, with a tray underneath for the drippings.
Cook for about 5 hours, checking every hour, turn the leg around every couple of hours.
At about the 5 hour mark, pull it out and let it rest, tent it in foil.
You should check for doneness regulary. The safe internal temp should be abou 70C. But by checking regulary you ensure it does not dry out.
Note that you will cook for another 25 odd minutes to get your crackling happening.
An hour before you are ready to eat, crank up your oven to 250C.
Rub some oil over the crackling. Use an oil that can take a high temperature. I don’t recommend olive oil, but peanut, canola, vegetable, all are good.
Put the Leg in and let the crackling form, checking every 10 minutes. You can cover the meat with foil leaving only the crackling to prevent the meat from drying or getting charred (charred bits are good though IMHO)
Pull it out once you are satisfied, and let it rest for about 15 minutes before carving.

I served this with fresh Nuoc Cham, A Chimichurri, a Korean Barbeque sauce, and a Basil and Chili Sambal. We made lettuce wraps with spring onions, capsicum, green chilli peppers and more. But you could also make a pan gravy or a similar sauce to enjoy this.

Eat in good health!

Fried Chicken in a chutney marinade

Akhilesh Sabharwal — Sun, 09 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I think the whole world knows that when you bread a bird and cook it in oil, you get the best food ever. This particular recipe is a variation of the Bengali Fried Fish which I did. This variation is for my mother who does not eat fish.

Time

Prep Time : 40 minutes + 3.5 hours marinade and rest
Cook Time : 20 minutes
Active Time : approximately 60 minutes

Ingredients

For 2 people

350-400gms boneless chicken thigh fillets. You can use Breast meat as well.

For the marinade

6 Garlic cloves
1/2" knob of Ginger
3 green chilies (seeds and all)
100 gms of coriander (leaves and stems)
1 Tbsp of lemon juice
3-4 teaspoons of water
Salt to taste

For the breading 8. 2 cups of breadcrumbs 9. 4 eggs 10. 1/4 cup of plain flour 11. salt to taste

Method

Marinade and Crumb

Prepare the marinade - take all the marinade ingredients (except the water) and grind them in a liquidiser or a spice grinding jar.
The marinade should be a thick paste, so use some of the water only to help the grinding of ingredients.
Once done - it should be a bright vibrant green.
Coat all the fillets with the marinade, you should have a generous layer across the fillets, not thick, but ensure complete coverage
Once done, rest the fillets covered in the fridge for at least 3 hours. I suggest using a glass or similar non-reactive container.
To prepare the breading season the bread crumbs, and the plain flour with a little salt
Beat up the eggs so it is a thick liquid, but not frothy.
Remove the chicken from the fridge
Dip it in the flour and lightly dust all sides. The chicken should be sufficiently damp from the marinade for the flour to stick to it.
Dip the chicken in the egg and then in the crumbs.
Dip the chicken in the egg again and crumb it a second time. This will give you a sufficiently thick layer to protect the fish and also get nice and crispy.
Let the crumbed chicken rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes before you start frying. This chicken can be allowed to rest for upto 4 hours. If resting any longer than 30 minutes, pull it out 10 minutes before you start cooking.

Frying

Use a sufficiently large skillet to cook 2 fillets at one time with about an inch and a half of space around each fillet
The chicken should be shallow fried, so use enough oil to fill the skillet to the half height of the fillet’s thickness
Heat up the oil on medium heat, till when you drop in a bread cube, it gently starts bubbling.
Put in the fillets and cook till one side is golden flip over and cook the other side till it reaches the same colour.
Pull out and let rest on absorbent paper
Prepare the other fillets in the same way.
Serve hot

I would serve this with Kasundi - Strong and Pungent, it looks like a liquid seeded mustard and bright yellow.

But this chicken holds up well to be used with Ketchup, Mayonnaise and I also recommend trying this with Tzatziki.

Tips

If you want a lighter breading, don’t double dip, but stick a bit more crumbs in the first round
Don’t let the oil get too hot or the crumbs will burn and the fish will be raw.

Eat in good health!

Fried Fish in a Bengali Style

Akhilesh Sabharwal — Mon, 03 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A well done piece of fried fish is a pure joy. This particular style of fried fish is from Bengal, and I imagine it came to be when a Raj era English bureaucrat asking his Indian cook to fry some fish. The fish is coated in a highly flavourful paste before being crumbed and fried.

Time

Prep Time : 40 minutes + 2.5 hours marinade and rest
Cook Time : 20 minutes
Active Time : approximately 60 minutes

Ingredients

For 2 people

350-400gms White fish fillet. Bhekti (Sea Bass / Barramundi) is an popular option, but any firm white fish would work. See the image below for a cut reference. The fillets are about a 1/2" thick.

For the marinade

6 Garlic cloves
1/2" knob of Ginger
3 green chilies (seeds and all)
100 gms of coriander (leaves and stems)
1 Tbsp of lemon juice
3-4 teaspoons of water
Salt to taste

For the breading 8. 2 cups of breadcrumbs 9. 4 eggs 10. 1/4 cup of plain flour 11. salt to taste

The perfect cut. Each filet is approximately 80-90 gms

Method

Marinade and Crumb

Prepare the marinade - take all the marinade ingredients (except the water) and grind them in a liquidiser or a spice grinding jar.
The marinade should be a thick paste, so use some of the water only to help the grinding of ingredients.
Once done - it should be a bright vibrant green.
Coat all the fillets with the marinade, you should have a generous layer across the fillets, not thick, but ensure complete coverage
Once done, rest the fillets covered in the fridge for 2-3 hours. I suggest using a glass or similar non-reactive container.
To prepare the breading season the bread crumbs, and the plain flour with a little salt
Beat up the eggs so it is a thick liquid, but not frothy.
Remove the fish from the fridge
Dip it in the flour and lightly dust all sides. The fish should be sufficiently damp from the marinade for the flour to stick to it.
Dip the fish in the egg and then in the crumbs.
Dip the fish in the egg again and crumb it a second time. This will give you a sufficiently thick layer to protect the fish and also get nice and crispy.
Let the crumbed fish rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes before you start frying. This fish can be allowed to rest for upto 4 hours. If resting any longer than 30 minutes, pull it out 10 minutes before you start cooking.

Frying

Use a sufficiently large skillet to cook 2 fillets at one time with about an inch and a half of space around each fillet
The fish will be shallow fried, so use enough oil to fill the skillet to the half height of the fillet’s thickness
Heat up the oil on medium heat, till when you drop in a bread cube, it gently starts bubbling.
Put in the fish fillets and cook till one side is golden flip over and cook the other side till it reaches the same colour.
Pull out and let rest on absorbent paper
Prepare the other fillets in the same way.
Serve hot

Traditionally this is served with Kasundi - Strong and Pungent, it looks like a liquid seeded mustard and bright yellow. If you cannot get your hands on Kasundi, mix dijon and seeded mustard to get the consistency. Or try with hot english mustard.

Alternatively if you have some mustard powder, just mix a teaspoon with a couple of teaspoons of water.

Tips

If you want a lighter breading, don’t double dip, but stick a bit more crumbs in the first round
If you have a slightly fishy smelling fish fillet, you should let it rest in a bowl of water with a teaspoon of plain vinegar and let it rest for 10 minutes before marinading.
Don’t let the oil get too hot or the crumbs will burn and the fish will be raw.

Eat in good health!