The secret recipes of Awadh’s taluqdars revealed
When Salma Husain arrived in Delhi in 1964 to take up a translator’s job in the Persian section of the National Archives of India, she was the first young woman from her community to move out of her parental home and pursue a career when she was still unmarried.
Salma apa, as she’s known among her younger colleagues, has never worn this fact as a badge of honour — I have known her well for 20 years, but I just learnt about it. She doesn’t need to, for Salma apa, encouraged by the former boss of ITC Hotels, Habib Rehman, has quietly been digging up culinary gems lost in old India-Persian manuscripts, stumbling upon such beauties at the British Library as the Nuskha-e-Shahjahani, a cookbook dating back to emperor Shahjahan (that was when red chillies were still not common, nor were tomatoes, and brinjals were popular because of their ubiquity).
You’ll find the accumulated fruits (or orchard, I would say!) of the long hours she has invested in locating old cookbooks and recreating recipes from sketchy descriptions given in royal memoirs and the accounts of foreign travellers in her anecdote-studded cookbook, The Emperor’s Table. With Flavours of Avadh, though, Salma apa has produced for the first time a cookbook that goes beyond the much travelled by-lanes of Aminabad, Lucknow, and travels across the kitchens of the taluqdars who defined (and refined) the culture of region after 1857.
Salma apa’s journey starts at the dastarkhwan of Rajkumar Muhammad Amir Naqi Khan of the Mahmudabad family, whose stunningly attractive wife, Kulsum Begum from Hyderabad, has had Delhi and Mumbai eating out of her hands during her stints with the ITC. It moves on to Kotwara, a principality 160km from Lucknow bordering Nepal in the Lakhimpur Kheri district. Kotwara is famously associated with the filmmaker and fashion designer Muzaffar Ali, whose kitchen in his Gurgaon home is presided over by Rehana, the family’s retainer for six decades.
The Flavours of Avadh story hits the Grand Trunk Road and meanders into the principality of Tirwa in Kannauj district, whose most illustrious ruler, Durga Narain Singh, travelled extensively across Europe in the years before World War II and came home with a French chef to preside over his kitchen. The story returns to Lucknow, where we meet the colourful Nawab Jafar Mir Abdullah in his lair, Sheesh Mahal; moves to Sitapur, which was awarded by a grateful British raj to the Kapurthala family for leading the operation against the sepoys behind the historic siege of the Lucknow Residency; has a kharbooze ki kheer at the Lucknow home of the Zaheer family of the old Congress leaders, whose most illustrious member was Syed Nurul Hasan, the erudite historian and Indira Gandhi’s education minister who introduced the 10+2 system; and it ends at Shakarganj, the ancestral home of the descendants of Baba Farid, the most famous of whom was the late Dr Abdul Jalil Faridi, a sought-after medical practitioner and popular MLA with a famous sense of humour.
From these blue-blooded families, Salma apa has collected old recipes to put together a fascinating collection. Of course, you can’t have an Awadhi cookbook minus recipes of such celebrity dishes as the galawat ke kabab, kundan qaliya, murgh mussallam, dumpukht gosht and ande ka halwa. Salma apa has them all.
What makes her cookbook special, though, is its ability to cater to our appetite for the exotic. We have, for instance, the Mahmudabad house favourite, dhungare baigan (smoked brinjals with yoghurt, onions and Serrano chillies), or the Tirwa family’s subz mewa malai pulao, where ghee, cream and hung yoghurt are used as generously as seasonal vegetables, or the ananas ke paranthe (layered pineapple paranthas) served by the Sheesh Mahal family for breakfast during winter, or the gajar ka bharta perfected by Sitapur’s cooks, or Baba Farid ki meethi khichri, which has been cooked at Shakarganj on every death anniversary of the mystic saint. Salma apa has made sure that we’ll see Awadhi cuisine in an entirely different light.