North Indian Cuisine
The food from North India traces its descent from Persian ancestors who started filtering in India from the 11th century A.D. onwards and then more definitely from the 16th century A.D., when the Mughals came to power. The Mughals brought with them Persian and Afghan cooks who started North Indians on the rich and fragrant Persian rice dishes, such as pilafs and biryanis (meat-based pilafs). Garnished with pounded silver (vark), these dishes along with spicy kormas (braised meat in creamy sauces), koftas (grilled spicy meatballs) and kababs used to grace the tables of emperors. Even today, these dishes are cooked and eaten all over north India.
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Cuisine of Delhi
Everyone in Delhi loves eating. When people in Bombay and Bangalore are either partying or drinking, Delhites are, you guessed it, eating. Perhaps that is why Delhi is the restaurant capital of India, just like Bombay and Bangalore are the discotheque and pub hubs respectively. The city is crawling with restaurants of all variety, nationality and vintage. |
The Punjabis love to experiment and try everything; there is a veritable splash of cuisines you can sample. Thai, Lebanese, Chinese, Israeli, Italian, Indonesian, Spanish, Mexican, French, Moroccan, Swiss and much, much more of the local Indian stuff. What the Delhites don’t like, they amend. Like the famous Indian-Chinese, which is a Delhi product.
‘Going out’ in Delhi is usually associated with food. However not very long ago, in fact right into the fabulous forties till before the coming of the Punjabis, orthodox Hindus in Delhi would not eat food cooked outside the home, dismissing it as ‘unclean’. Reading between the lines this meant they were not sure about the caste of the cook – Brahminist squeamishness, which was followed by a surprising aggressiveness by non-Brahmins castes like the kshtriyas, kayasthas and so on.
All that stopped very abruptly when one enterprising family of fleeing Punjabis from the Partition holocaust set up shop as a Tandoori (Punjabi-Mughal cuisine) eatery in the old City, near the Red Fort. Tandoori food, rich and succulent, cooked in hot clay ovens was an immediate box-office hit that set the cash registers ringing permanently. Today the standard menu at any Delhi restaurant takes in a fair share of Tandoori dishes, while also giving the nod to the more delicate (and difficult to make) Mughlai dishes like pilafs and kormas. |
