In the court of Avadh, fashion, poetry, calligraphy, architecture, music and dance scaled monumental heights. And in its cuisine, there was a coming together of the most delicate visual, artistic, spiritual, and gastronomic delights.
There is not a city in India today without at least one restaurant offering Avadhi delicacies. But most of these can hardly hold a candle to the tastes that were so relished in what was once India’s most glittering court. Take the biryani, a delicacy widely perceived to have originated in Avadh (also Awadh, or Oudh). Yet it is a dish that was never cooked in the province to start with! Biryani came to Avadh through the royal brides of Delhi and Hyderabad, and their retinue of cooks. But the parboiled rice with meat pieces was at once declared by the nawabs to be too coarse for their delicate palates. Thus, efforts were made to improve it. This resulted in the yakhni pulao, in which the rice was cooked in rich meat stock with no bones or whole spices.
The book, Dastarkhwan-e-Awadh—The cuisine of Awadh, written by Sangeeta Bhatnagar and Raj Kumar Saxena, contains recipes from erstwhile royal and elite kitchens of Avadh, tried and perfected by the authors. Bhatnagar, a food consultant, says that while there is a revival of interest in Avadh’s cuisine, many misconceptions remain. One of the most glaring of these is that it is synonymous with Mughlai food.
She offers an easy primer on the standout difference—Mughlai food uses overpowering spices, and often, an excessive use of kasoori methi or fenugreek. The finished product often swims in oil. In Avadhi food, everything is ground to a fine paste. Even curries are sieved through muslin. “It is a smooth symphony of flavours,” says Bhatnagar. So smooth that the true flavours of an Avadhi kitchen will not even smell of ghee, in which the dishes are cooked. This is achieved by what is known as ghee durust karna—a tempering of the cooking medium with the addition of kewra water (distilled extract of the screwpine flower) and cardamom.
So why was the diversity of such a refined cuisine lost over the years? And why did it come to be identified almost solely with kebabs and (the misleading) biryani? And why was it so wrongly limited to only non-vegetarian food?
Saxena, who was director of the Institute of Hotel Management, Lucknow, when he was asked to write the book, says that the food exists today in a “modified and corrupted form”.
“Unlike, say French cuisine, the history, documentation and classification of which is well preserved, there is little written material available on local cuisines. This is true of other cuisines, such as Punjabi food, as well. Much of the art and experimentation were born in the kitchen of the elites and was not [available] in the public domain,” says Saxena.
There is also the challenge of how the food was cooked. The maxim that what is cooked slow tastes best is almost impossible to follow in this day of fast, processed and convenient food. “Dadi se suna tha” (heard it from my grandmother) often remains the most quoted source for attempts to recreate lost recipes.
It was these memories that Mohsin Qureshi, chef at Azrak, a restaurant in Lucknow’s Lebua Hotel, harnessed to capture the essence of flavours of yore. Qureshi comes from a family of chefs, or khansamas, as they were then known. An ancestor had even got a certificate of appreciation from the English royals. “The journey from khansamas to chefs gave us hope that our calling would not die out,” says Qureshi, whose patrons include many film stars.
At Azrak, Qureshi curates food experiences where he tries to never repeat the dishes. “The spices are the key to Avadhi food,” he says, listing jarakus (lemon grass), pathar ke phool (black stone flower) and the stem of betel leaves as some long-forgotten condiments. According to him, the leaves of cauliflowers and taro make for some of the most sumptuous vegetarian dishes. He dismisses the myth that Avadhi cuisine is all non-vegetarian by serving fig, palak and cream kebabs in which the flavours come through definitely yet delicately.
However, a reliance on memory can also lead to some level of subterfuge. An example of this is a dish called ‘Wajid Ali Shah ke baghare baingan’ (fried aubergine of Wajid Ali Shah—Avadh’s last nawab). In the few texts which document the food of the time, there is no mention of this dish. And thus, it has no backstory. But food and stories must go together. Take the case of dishes like the Pavlova meringue—a dessert created and named after a Russian ballerina when she toured New Zealand and Australia.
Subterfuge was elevated to an art-form in Avadh’s erstwhile kitchens. In the book Lucknow—The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, Abdul Halim Sharar, who served in the court of Wajid Ali Shah, recounts some examples. In one, a ‘light, tasty and delicious’ murabba (a conserve) was placed before a prince invited to dine with Shah. Though it looked like a conserve, it was actually a meat curry and left the connoisseur guest highly embarrassed at his inability to recognise it.
Shahnawaz Qureshi, chef at the Lucknow restaurant Tanatan, has put this deception to use in his chicken barfi (a sweet that resembles snow). He got the idea from a dish called mirchi ka halwa (a sweet made of chilli, seemingly an oxymoron). For the barfi, which he produces only on request, minced chicken leg and breast are boiled in a ginger and garlic paste, repeatedly strained and added to ground split Bengal gram. “Those who have not eaten it do not ask for it. But once you eat it, you will ask for it repeatedly,” he says.
For true food lovers, no lane is too narrow and no distance too long to partake of Avadh’s delicacies. Around 20km from Lucknow is the small town of Kakori, known for one of the most famous kebabs of Avadh. Here, Faheem Ahmad’s seekh kebabs draw film stars and politicians. Ahmad is a fourth-generation expert on these delicious kebabs. Other than their known ingredients—cloves, papaya, black pepper, cream, poppy seeds and almonds—there are the secret ones. “The taste comes from the hand grinding of these on a mortar,” says Ahmad. The whole family contributes to this process.
Sheeba Iqbal has been curating Avadhi dining experiences at her lavish home in old Lucknow since 2018. She says that, over time, there has been a steady rise in the number of tourists who reach out to her to experience the Avadh of yesteryears. “It is the true travellers who scour lanes and by-lanes that come to me. It makes me happy that more young people are attracted to it,” she says. It is in these experiences that the glories of Avadh are re-born and re-lived.
