Hyderabad and the Deccan

The Deccan is the high southern plateau that lies between the Vindhya country of the north and the coastal plains of the south, and Hyderabad grew up on it as the seat of the Nizams, who ruled the state until 1948. The city's table is the product of that court: a Mughal kitchen carried south, set down among Telugu and Kannada-speaking people, and altered by what the plateau grows, which is sorghum, millet, rice, tamarind, sesame, groundnut and chilli.

The cooking of Hyderabad is above all a court cooking. The Nizams kept a large household and a large kitchen, and the dishes that bear the city's name were refined there for the palace and the nobility, then passed outward into the houses of the city. The Mughal inheritance is plain in the method: meat cooked in a sealed vessel, rice layered over it, saffron and fried onion used as a finish, and ground nuts and poppy seed used to thicken a gravy. In the hands of the Deccan cook the same grammar is bent towards sourness and heat. Tamarind, raw mango and dried coconut enter the pot, and the chilli, which reached the subcontinent with the Portuguese, is used with a freer hand than at the northern court. This is the point on which Hyderabad separates itself from Lucknow and Delhi. Kalra, writing in Prashad of the masters of Indian cooking, treats the dum method, the slow cooking in a sealed pot with a dough seal, as the centre of the great rice and meat preparations, and it is the technique that most defines the Hyderabadi kitchen. Biryani is made in two ways in the city: the kachchi method, in which the raw marinated meat is layered with part-cooked rice and sealed to cook together, and the pakki method, in which the meat is cooked first. The kachchi is the harder and the more admired, since the cook has no means of testing the pot once it is closed and the timing must be known by experience. Alongside it stand haleem, the wheat and meat porridge pounded to a smooth mass, which holds the protected name Hyderabad haleem, and mirchi ka salan, a sauce of whole green chillies in a base of peanut, sesame and coconut with tamarind, usually served with biryani. The plateau also gives a second, humbler table of the Telugu and Marathi-speaking countryside, built on jowar and bajra flatbreads, pulses, and sour leaves such as gongura, the roselle leaf, cooked into dal and pickles. The court and the village shared the same chilli and tamarind, and so the two cookeries, though different in wealth, are recognisably of one country. Sweets close the court meal: double ka meetha, bread fried and soaked in thickened milk, and khubani ka meetha, stewed dried apricots served with cream, are the dishes most associated with the city's feasts.

The Hyderabadi meal is built around contrast: a rich, saffron-scented biryani set against the sharp, nutty heat of mirchi ka salan, and a cooling raita of yoghurt to answer both. Sourness runs through the cooking, from tamarind in the salan to the gongura of the Telugu table, and this acid note is what the cook relies on to balance fat and chilli. A feast closes with a sweet such as double ka meetha, served warm and heavy with milk, saffron and nuts.