Posted on March 29, 2012
Biryani for 100 People
30g elachi (cardamom)
25kg chicken of mutton
7kg rice
750g ginger
250g garlic
2kg ghee
5 bottles oil
5kg masoor (black lentils)
50g whole cinnamon
3tsp cinnamon powder
2kg tomatoes (pureed)
3kg onions
10g saffron (1 level tablespoon of strands)
125g whole green chillies (fresh or dry)
28g tumeric (optional)
56g (shah jeera) cumin
14g cumin powder
6x 500ml plain yoghurt
2 doz eggs
4kg potatoes
Salt, approx. 600 grams
2 cups lemon juice or white vinegar
NOTE: For chicken biryani, use only 4 boxes of yoghurt.
Marinate meat with spices and fried onion.
At bottom of desk put only oil over which layer your meat, masoor, eggs etc., finally the rice.
Just put lumps of all the ghee called for in recipe over top of rice.
Seal desk with double layer of foil before closing lid.
This is easier and more economical than the old fashioned flour and cloth seal.
The real reason to go to a wedding was for the wedding biryani. The other pleasures were indulged with a slightly distracted air: The talk might be of whether the wedding was a shot-gun affair, and whether the bride was showing, despite the suspicious loosely arranged sari, with its tell-tale too many pleats bunched in front, of the family's trip to India to choose the wedding sari, and what it was rumoured to have cost, of comments on girls not Well Brought Up, wearing their saris indecorously low on the hip, and general pretences of interest in interminable details of children's success at school or 'varsity. Babies, miserable or resigned, were passed from hand to hand like so many parcels. Yet the attention, with a slight raise of the head, a surreptitious sniff, was really elsewhere, awaiting the wedding feast.
There are rules governing the true wedding biryani: It must be cooked in staggeringly large vats, on wood fires - gas fires, electric stoves, and ovens will not do. The cooks must have the proper lineage - the art must have been handed down through generations. Wedding biryani specialists are highly sought after, and fierce bidding attends the attempts to secure the right people.
As children, we were allowed to watch the making of the biryani for my uncle's wedding. We perched on small step-ladders on which the cook's assistants stood, and watched as dish upon dish of chopped vegetables, spices by the bag-load, and sacks of rice were tipped dizzyingly into the vats. The empty sacks, used later for sack races, were so large that instead of the usual hobbled hops and tripping, we ran in them unimpeded. The assistants were jocular, with mock threats to throw us in to flavour the biryani. The Cook himself stood aloof, a faint smile beneath the moustache acknowledging our fascination. He spoke little, his minions responding to quick looks, and gestures. Wedding biryani cannot be captured in measurements.
The recipes, rarely written down, are mere approximations. The art lies in the eye, and in the hand. The cooks do not taste - a glance decides the addition of more tumeric. A slightly raised hand halts the stream of salt crystals flowing over a shoulder into the vat. Vermeer dressed his Geographer in alchemists' robes to remind us that cartography was a thing of wonders and marvels, and not simply the science of measurements. Our cook, a small man, held court in a frayed old cotton shirt, and bad polyester trousers - no need here of 'flashing eyes and floating hair'.
The true biryani is mythic. Wedding guests are button-holed by food mariners' remembrance of biryanis past. It was this cook's grandfather whose biryanis only can be dreamed of. Families who offered tea and snacks instead of wedding biryani were condemned, out of hand, as 'ingy' - a slur piling shameless meanness upon stinginess. Feelings run high on the subject of the ideal wedding biryani. Should there be meat, or is the true wedding biryani a dish of vegetables, in keeping with the sacred occasion? Had the cook dispensed with ghee in favour of the cheaper oil? Is yoghurt necessary, or a poor substitute for cream? Were there too many cardamom pods? Too many would suggest a cavalier attitude to the queen of spices, a lapse of true judgment. For a wedding biryani demanded a fine balance between Brobdignagian proportions, and delicate restraint.
The feast itself was whimsical. The waiters were young boys, often vying for the pleasure of racing around the paper-covered trestle-tables; a large dish perched precariously on a shoulder, the serving spoon replaced with a saucer with which hasty servings were dashed onto paper plates. Adults might end up with a scattering of rice, while children stared in shock at a sudden heap of steaming food piled on their plates. Calls from august old ladies with grey hair in severe buns for the 'dhal uncle' to bring more dhal pursued the boys. They wore their short-lived mantle of the dignity of uncle-hood with insouciance.
Pudding, usually soji - semolina cooked with milk, butter, cream, sugar, sultanas, and almonds, and flavoured with cinnamon and cardamom - was served on the same plate. Food was eaten with fingers- 'you can't taste wedding biryani with cutlery!' - a matter of much comment upon Upbringing and messy eaters, careless of touching the food with no more than the tips of fingers. Some weddings placed banana leaves on the paper plates reminding one of temple food. Perhaps the marriage rites with the dripping of ghee, and water scooped with mango leaves into the sacred fire found its echo in the wedding biryani; the remoteness of the vows from everyday life, brought to us in palatable form. The wedding feast was not carnivalesque; a licensed inversion of social convention. It carried instead the pleasures of fiction - a metaphoric intensity, a heady bending of form.
C.A. Michael lectures in English Literature at the dept of English, UWC.
