Persia and the Pulao

The pulao reached India along the roads that joined Persia and Central Asia to the Indo-Gangetic plain, and it settled where Persianate courts settled: Delhi, Agra, Lucknow and Hyderabad. The word itself is Persian, and the Persian kitchen of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal court, writing in the language of administration and poetry, gave the subcontinent a way of cooking rice in seasoned stock that its own older rice dishes had not made central. Babur's Baburnama and Abul Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari (c. 1590) are the texts of history on which the court's table rests, and the Ain-i-Akbari sets out pulao among the dishes of the imperial kitchen.

The Persian pulao is a method before it is a recipe: rice is cooked in a measured quantity of stock, or first part-boiled and then finished by steam, so that each grain stays separate and carries the flavour of the meat, fat and aromatics with which it is cooked. Rice had long been eaten in India with dal, vegetables and sour fish and meat preparations, and it was boiled plain, soured, or soaked and ground into batters. What the Persianate kitchen added was the idea of rice as the body of the dish itself, enriched with ghee or other fat and brought to the table as the centre of the meal. Kalra, writing in Prashad from the standpoint of the Indian masters, treats this as the point at which court cookery in India took on a discipline of its own: the stock, the ghee, the whole spices and the sealed pot are all matters of control rather than of improvisation. In the Indian kitchen the Persian method met Indian ingredients and was changed by them. Basmati, Oryza sativa, the long-grained aromatic rice of the northern plains, suited the technique so well that the two became inseparable in the mind of the cook. Green cardamom, Elettaria cardamomum, black cardamom, Amomum subulatum, cassia, cloves, black pepper, Piper nigrum, and bay leaf entered the pot as whole spices, while saffron, rose and kewra water, fried onion, nuts and dried fruit marked the richer court versions. The Indian cook also kept a plainer line: the vegetable pulao and the yakhni pulao, in which rice is cooked in a clear meat stock, remain a household dish of the north, quieter than the festive versions and closer to the daily table. The distinction between pulao and biryani is one the authorities draw with care, and it lies in the cooking rather than the name. In a pulao the rice and its flavourings cook together in the stock, and the liquid is absorbed completely. In a biryani, the meat is cooked in a marinade or gravy and the part-cooked rice is layered over it and sealed to finish by steam, the method called dum. Both belong to the same Persianate inheritance, and in practice the two overlap in the cooking of Lucknow and Hyderabad, where regional houses shaped the technique to their own tastes and the Nizams of Hyderabad kept a table of great elaboration. The spread of the method followed the movement of courts, soldiers and cooks. Lucknow, under rulers such as Wajid Ali Shah, became a centre of refined Persianate cooking, in which the patience of the kitchen mattered as much as the ingredients. In the Deccan, Hyderabad married the northern technique to the chilli, tamarind, sesame and coconut of the south. The Nimmatnama of the Sultans of Mandu (c. 1500) shows that a written culture of the court table existed in India before the Mughals' height, which cautions against treating the pulao as a single import from a single date. It is better understood as a long exchange, in which Persian technique and Indian grain, spice and fat were gradually made into one cooking. The pulao also travelled outward again with the Indian cook. Traders, soldiers and migrant labour carried it across the Indian Ocean and beyond, and it survives in the dishes of the diaspora, where rice cooked with whole spices and fat is a familiar form. Its centrality in Indian festive eating, at weddings, at Eid and on the tables of the great houses, shows how thoroughly a foreign method was absorbed into the Indian table.

At the table a pulao is eaten as a dish in its own right, usually with a raita of yoghurt and a simple salad or pickle to set against the richness of the fat and stock. Festive pulaos carry saffron, nuts and fried onion, while the household version is quieter, scented with whole spices alone. In Ayurvedic tradition rice cooked with ghee and warming spices is counted among foods suited to certain occasions, a matter of custom and history rather than of any effect on the body.