Meher Mirza | Updated: June 29, 2016 16:50 IST
Image Credit: www.silverspoononline.comThe garnish for the haleem is pretty important also; it is always served with birista (crisp, fried onions), lemon and coriander, but my book of Memon Recipes tells me that the community also adds green chilli, ginger slices that have been fried and a teaspoon or so of spices. All of this is added to the main dish, which is then drenched in ghee and served hot with naan. The naan helps to cut the spice. The book also tells me to add baking soda while preparing the haleem, but that is something I am completely unfamiliar with.
Image Credit: Youtube/Chef Shaeen
Mughals and Haleem
Haleem has a long, long history in India that possibly wends its way back to the Mughals. The dishes served in Mughal courts revealed their diverse origins - Turkic, Persian and Arabic. In the beautifully-written Ain-i-Akbari, Emperor Akbar's courtier, Abul Fazl mentions haleem, which was a stew of meat, cracked wheat, turnips, carrots and spinach; and harissa, which was a porridge of meat and cracked wheat. Haleem and harissa were both Arabic words and no doubt the haleem we eat today is quite removed in taste from that which was served at the courts.
The inclusion of grain was a very important part of the Mughal diet, especially from the tenth century onwards, as they moved into grain-growing areas. Although meat was often served in Mughal courts, many of the Mughal emperors often eschewed it. Humayun mostly shunned beef and became vegetarian for a while, while Akbar "was practically a vegetarian, though his table was very sumptuous," writes renowned food historian, K T Achaya in The Story of Our Food. Abul Fazl writes that Akbar believed "it is indeed from ignorance and cruelty that, although various kinds of foods are obtainable, men are bent upon injuring living creatures, and lending a ready hand in killing and eating them." And the puritan Aurangzeb was almost completely vegetarian and fasted a lot, much to the dismay of his doctor who worried about his skinny frame - "he only drank a little water and ate a small quantity of millet bread," he grumbled.
Hyderabad and Haleem
When the Mughals were slowly edged out, regional governors became more powerful; Hyderabad, Awadh, Kashmir, Lahore and Murshidabad. Their courtly fare reveals many Mughal traditions that were refined and transformed into the dishes that we are familiar with today. In Colleen Taylor Sen's Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India, she writes that the classic Hyderabadi haleem that most of us are familiar with today, may be "a variant of the Arabian harissa introduced by the Nizam's Arab (mainly Yemeni) palace guards in the nineteenth Century." It was made famous by a nobleman, who served it at his feasts. Today, its popularity in the Barkas area in Hyderabad, home of the erstwhile Nizam's barracks, may be seen as proof of its military origins.
