Uttar Pradesh's hidden culinary treasures: From royal kitchens to village hearth

The first bite melts almost instantly. That’s Lucknow’s galawati kebab—refined, aromatic and flavourful, carrying the finesse of Awadh’s royal kitchens where it is believed to have first been prepared for an 18th-century nawab who had lost his teeth.

Several kilometres away in eastern Uttar Pradesh, mutton takes on a more rustic character, cooked frugally in mustard oil and onions.

In winter, green peas become nimona, a simple vegetarian staple, while tehri, a humble one-pot rice dish, remains comfort food through every season. In Braj, meanwhile, Krishna mythology continues to shape the table, just as Afghan influences intertwined with Awadhi and Mughal culinary traditions continue to define Rampur’s.

If you search online for an Uttar Pradesh restaurant, chances are the results will lead you to Awadhi cuisine: a delicious spread of kebabs and pulaos, qormas and sheermal and, of course, shahi tukda. It captures the culinary essence of one region beautifully, but not of an entire state that stretches from the Terai to the dry plains of Bundelkhand, bordered by Bihar and Delhi, with Nepal to the north and rivers like the Ganga and the Yamuna running through it.

Uttar Pradesh is also the land of Krishna mythology and nawabs, of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, caste and migration. That complexity isn’t fully reflected either in the extensive list of dishes the state government released earlier this month.

Featuring 208 dishes, the Uttar Pradesh government’s One District, One Cuisine (ODOC) scheme aims to promote traditional food through branding, packaging and marketing. According to reports, selected dishes will receive subsidies and support to reach wider markets. All the dishes on the list are vegetarian. So Lucknow gets rewari and mango produce, Rampur gets hapsi halwa and Azamgarh gets tehri, even as some of the state’s most enduring meat traditions remain absent.

When one talks of Uttar Pradesh’s meat traditions, Awadhi cuisine tends to dominate the conversation. Preserved and popularised by generations of ustads and khansamas, it stands firmly on its own, its place cemented by Lucknow’s designation as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy. It may not need official support. But what about its culinary cousins elsewhere?

The kitchen of Rampur

While researching for her book, Degh to Dastarkhwan: Qissas and Recipes from Rampur, writer and food historian Tarana Husain Khan came across Persian cookbooks dating back to the 19th century at Rampur’s Raza Library. “There were over 300 recipes. I wanted to understand where so many of them had gone. We know perhaps one Rampuri pulao today, so what happened to the 40 or 50 others?” she says. The same was true of qormas and sweets such as Dar-e-Bahisht, literally ‘Gateway to Paradise’, a lost sweetmeat once native to Rampur’s royal kitchens.

Rampur was founded by the Rohilla Pathans of Afghanistan and was a vassal state of Awadh, and so its cuisine was shaped as much by Afghan tastes and local produce as by Awadhi and Mughal culinary traditions.

“The Pathan temperament appreciated straightforward, meaty flavours over extremely nuanced aromatics,” says Khan, explaining what sets Rampuri food apart from Awadhi and Mughlai. “Mughlai cuisine drew from Persian and Turkish traditions and used more spices. Awadhi cuisine became even more aromatic and elaborate. Rampuri cuisine sits somewhere in between, but with simpler aromatics.” A Rampuri chapli kebab, for instance, uses just five or six spices, a restraint reflected across much of the cuisine.

While some dishes such as tar gosht continue to be made, many have been lost. Among the reasons is the economic decline. “After privy purses, the guaranteed annual payments made to former royals, were abolished in 1971, many khansamas were laid off,” says Khan. Industries declined, and several affluent families moved out of Rampur and settled elsewhere in India, gradually losing touch with the cuisine.

Khan is now working with khansamas to revive 40 to 50 such recipes, adapting them for home kitchens rather than preserving them only as elaborate royal dishes. Among those she has brought back is do gosht pulao, made with two kinds of meat, and kundan kaliyan, translating into ‘golden meat’, a mutton-based dish. Her book on the same is set to be released later this year.

The other flavours of UP

But many regional traditions rarely find mention. “Jaunpur has one of the lesser-known Muslim food traditions,” says Sangeeta Khanna, author of Culinary Culture of Uttar Pradesh: A Food Trail.

Chef and food historian Sadaf Hussain points to another difference within the larger meat-eating culture in the state. “In places like Gorakhpur, Azamgarh, Mau, Ballia—the Bhojpur belt, offals are eaten,” he says. “These dishes are more rustic and may not have the refinement associated with Lucknow or Rampur. But... mazedar hain [they are delicious].”

Khanna also highlights the state’s lesser-discussed shikar (hunting) culture. “There is a rich history of shikar and wild meats, river fish and shrimps, and even wild birds being eaten in Uttar Pradesh,” she says. “My father used to go for shikar in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and animals ranging from rabbit to wild boar and birds were regularly brought home and cooked.”

The missing fish

Over 30 major and minor rivers flow through Uttar Pradesh, with the Ganga and the Yamuna among the largest. Fish iconography is everywhere, from the motifs on monuments to the two fishes on the state’s emblem. Yet fish remains curiously absent from conversations around the state’s food.

That absence, experts say, doesn’t reflect what is actually eaten. “Sarso masale ki machhli (fish made in mustard masala) is the most common everyday fish curry. Then there are bhuni machhli (roasted fish), tali machhli (fish fry) and many more,” says Khanna.

So why hasn’t fish entered the mainstream conversation around the state’s cuisine? “People who live around rivers don’t have courtly affairs or traditions. Hence, they end up becoming local and hyper-local. That could be one of the reasons the fish didn’t come on the culinary map of the state,” explains Hussain.

Food of exclusion

In India, food is shaped not only by geography and climate, but also by caste. Yet, conversations around several traditions remain missing, whether in the government’s list or otherwise, particularly those shaped by exclusion, displacement and unequal access.

For instance, it is only recently that dalit kitchens have begun entering mainstream conversations, especially after the publication of Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada, the stellar book by Shahu Patole. Though written in the context of Maharashtra, the book opened a larger conversation on how caste determines not just occupations, but what one gets to eat.

“Caste shapes the food we eat, the ingredients we use, cooking techniques,” says Hussain. Speaking on dalit kitchens, he adds, “The food is cooked with restraint, but in the most innovative manner.”

That holds true in Uttar Pradesh as well, where scheduled castes make up roughly 21 per cent of the population. If Awadhi and Rampuri cuisines are celebrated for their regality and complexity, dalit food traditions often emerged from making the most of scarce resources and inherited exclusion. The Musahar community, concentrated in central and eastern Uttar Pradesh, is one such example. The word itself translates to ‘rat-eaters’—a label rooted in generations of poverty and caste discrimination. Bringing such food histories into conversations around cuisine is not simply about representation; it is also about confronting longstanding social hierarchies.

Food culture is often defined through what is royal, widely consumed or currently trending, but it can also reveal something much deeper—how inequality shapes everyday life.

The same question of erasure extends to tribal communities in southeastern Uttar Pradesh. Sonbhadra, which has one of the state’s highest tribal populations, is marked by hills, forests and rivers. Yet while the district is represented through gulab jamun in the ODOC list, indigenous food traditions have steadily disappeared from view.

Khanna says that while researching the state’s culinary culture, “the most disturbing finding was that the southeastern part of Uttar Pradesh that developed as an industrial and power plant region, has displaced the tribals and their forest-derived food culture”. The shift, she adds, reflects a wider change across the state: “It’s changing like the rest of the country, everything getting erased due to industrial food reaching every corner, and food systems being broken.”

The Uttar Pradesh government’s aim with ODOC is to promote district-specific cuisines and traditional recipes. Much of the conversation around this much-criticised list has focused on its vegetarian tilt and the absence of the state’s non-vegetarian food cultures. But the culinary history of a state with over 243 million people is layered far beyond that. And a list of kachoris and rewari, however varied, can only capture so much of its diverse food traditions.