The Politics of Biriyani | Grub Waz
The first time I heard Hotel California, it was a version with a beautiful guitar intro from the ‘Hell Freezes Over’ live album. I listened to it over and over again and fell in love with the song. Later on when someone played the ‘Original’, I couldn’t relate to it. I couldn’t bring myself to accept this ‘original’, when all I loved was the version that I first heard. No other version cut it for me, even the Eagles’ new version played at a later concert. What’s this got to do with the biriyani?
As much as it creates drool, it also creates tension. One man’s biriyani is another man’s tomato rice, the ultimate insult for a biriyani. Chefs have fought over what a biriyani should and shouldn’t be, but with a distorted history and years of evolution, the biriyani fight isn’t going away easily. Not only home cooks, amateur food writers and even chefs cling on to the biriyani they know and dismiss the other versions.
But is Biriyani the only such dish with a tormented history? Apparently not. Most cultures from around the world have some form of a one pot rice dish. The Italian Risotto? With a mishmash of rice, cooked to the way Italians like it is one. While the risotto clearly originated in the Lombardy region of Italy, there are similar versions that are not appreciated by those from the other parts of the country. Go down to West Africa and the Jollof Rice, with its heavy tomato flavours is another one that appears to have satiated the palates. In Kenya and South Africa, there are no synonyms, they are called the Biriyani with different spellings, most commonly Beriyani. The Mandi in Mid East with its tomato heavy rice and meat is also an example that tomatoes weren’t entirely left out to create one pot dishes, and the Mandi being cooked underground (in its classic form), one pot dish creators found creative ways to increase flavours.
India hasn’t been left out. In the Tamil Sangam literature, there is a dish called the Oon Soru, that loosely translates to meat rice, a form of one pot rice dish meant to feed soldiers. Quiz masters like to refer to a Mumtaz, who asked her cooks to prepare a more nutritious meal when she found her soldiers weak, but the cook ended up mixing all left overs to create the biriyani, is also doing the rounds.
The origin of the word biriyani is often credited to ‘Beriyan’, a Persian word, but if the Biriyani originated from there, then what is Beriyan? In Iran, which is largely the modern day Persia, Beriyan, the dish still exists, but it is a sandwich. Scholars have often referred to the Biriyani first being a rice sandwich, something that hasn’t really caught on with chefs, but for me that seems the most plausible explanation, since it clearly explains the layering of rice. Maybe the biriyani was an exotic sandwich to begin with! And a sandwich needs heat on both sides, so maybe that is why the ‘dhum’ came to being!
Since India was a collection of princely states before them, the Moghuls are largely credited with bringing Biriyani to modern India. Which is why, most of India’s biriyani variations are similar, except the South Indian ones, namely the Tamil Muslim and the Malabar variations. In today’s day and age, while national political parties have struggled to capture power in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, imagine a few centuries ago, the Moghuls’ logistic difficulties in managing the boundaries from Delhi. With the strong South Indian kings keeps them off, the Tamil Nadu and Kerala biriyanis are a stark difference from the biriyani’s from the rest of the country, simply because they weren’t the subjected to the influence from outside.
So does the biriyani have to be cooked a certain way for it to be called biriyani? Chefs think so, though I have no idea why. We have evolved so much that if we are able to find efficient ways to replicate the flavour, then why not? Then of course, I’m not a fan of adding biriyani masala or taste maker, though that is my personal opinion. Then OPOS a form of cooking with one pot, called One Pot, One Shot which is essentially what a biriyani is, was apparently finally cracked by Ramakrishnan and team who found a way to make the biriyani in a pressure cooker in one shot. Again, chefs have come out with their swords; while those who’ve tasted it have said that they can’t tell the difference and others refusing to accept it as an innovative cooking method, leave alone accepting biriyani cooked by the method. If you can cook the same thing in a microwave, then why not? Can you extend the same argument to Biriyani masala? I’m sure Anisa Arif’s customers have a view that is equivalent to calling her a saviour. She makes different Biriyani masalas that makes home cooking of biriyani a breeze. To each his own, I guess.
Then there is a slightly bigger problem? What meat for biriyani? While most biriyani lovers do not consider vegetarian versions as anything more than joke, purists believe that only mutton/lamb is biriyani. Even chicken biriyani is a joke for them. Going back to the origins of the biriyani where beriyan is a sandwich, maybe the original biriyani was a mutton sandwich!
Well, who would have thought the Biriyani has such a troubled past? For most of us, Happiness is biriyani. But the next time you try biriyani from a different region, you should probably try to understand the difference before dismissing it as tomato rice. Of course, that doesn’t mean that there are not too many terrible versions of biriyani that are made by short changing the recipe for cost cutting that deserve the ultimate insult! They certainly do.
*Pic credit By Gabagool — Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8350442
Originally published at https://www.grubwaz.com.
