The Indian subcontinent · Volume 23, The Court, the Chilli and the Temple Kitchen

Haleem

Name: Haleem
Total time: 8 h 40 min
Yield: Serves 8
Cuisine: Andhra, Telangana and Karnataka
Ingredients: 500 g mutton, on the bone; 250 g broken wheat (daliya), soaked overnight; 100 g split chana dal, soaked overnight; 50 g split moong dal, soaked overnight; 2 large onions, sliced and deep-fried until dark golden (birista); 3 tbsp ginger-garlic paste; 2 tsp red chilli powder; 1 tsp turmeric; 4 tbsp ghee; as available fresh mint, coriander, fried onion and lemon wedges, to serve; to taste salt

Hyderabad, via Barkas

Hyderabadi haleem, wheat and meat pounded for hours into a single smooth paste: a wide shallow bowl of thick, dense, dark brown porridge with a smooth, faintly fibrous sheen, a pool of golden ghee melted into a small well at the centre.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 8 hours 40

Researched: Researched from 18 sources in the brief, none yet linked in the text
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Hyderabad, via Barkas. An Arab soldier's wheat-and-meat porridge, arrived with the Chaush garrison and pounded, over hours, into something Yemen would no longer entirely recognise.

by Hyderabad, via Barkas

Haleem's direct ancestor is harees, a wheat-and-meat porridge from the Arabian Peninsula whose name derives from the Arabic harasa, to mash or pound; harees was formally inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2023. Its arrival in Hyderabad is a separate, later and better-documented route than the Persian court kitchen: the Chaush, Hadhrami and Yemeni Arab soldiers recruited into the Nizam's personal military household under the sixth and seventh Nizams, were settled in a purpose-built barracks district still known as Barkas, a corruption of the English word "barracks," now home to well over 200,000 people of Yemeni descent, a community The National newspaper describes reporting from the neighbourhood itself as "India's mini-Yemen." Local social activist Mabrook bin Muhammad AlSaari, quoted in that piece, describes the original settlers directly: "the men worked as warriors, personal and treasury guards and were given military barracks in the old city." The Arab dish these soldiers brought and cooked for themselves was gradually adapted with local spice, ghee and dried-fruit additions into the version now protected by Geographical Indication status, granted in 2010, the first non-vegetarian product in India to receive it, renewed in 2022 through to December 2029. Barkas has its own further variant, meethi haleem, sweet haleem, finished with ghee and sugar instead of savoury spice, evolved directly from the Yemeni aseed and eaten as an early winter breakfast, shops in Barkas typically selling out by nine or ten in the morning. Hyderabadi biryani, the more famous dish, holds no such protection: the Deccani Biryani Makers' Association's GI application was formally treated as abandoned after roughly nine years for failing to prove historic origin to the registry's satisfaction, a counter-intuitive fact worth stating plainly.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 8. About 6 to 8 hours, largely unattended simmering, then 30 to 40 minutes of pounding.

Ingredients

500 g mutton, on the bone
250 g broken wheat (daliya), soaked overnight
100 g split chana dal, soaked overnight
50 g split moong dal, soaked overnight
2 large onions, sliced and deep-fried until dark golden (birista)
3 tbsp ginger-garlic paste
2 tsp red chilli powder
1 tsp turmeric
4 tbsp ghee
as available fresh mint, coriander, fried onion and lemon wedges, to serve
to taste salt

Method

Simmer the mutton with the ginger-garlic paste, chilli powder, turmeric and salt in plenty of water for around 5 hours, until the meat is falling from the bone. Remove any bones once cool enough to handle.
Add the soaked wheat and both dals to the same pot and continue simmering for a further 4 hours, topping up with hot water as needed, until the grains have broken down completely and the mixture is thick and porridge-like.
Once fully soft, begin the ghota: pound and mash the mixture with a heavy wooden stick or masher, working continuously, for 30 to 40 minutes, until the meat fibres, wheat and lentils are fully homogenised into a single smooth, sticky, minced-meat-like paste with no distinguishable grains or fibres remaining.
Stir in the ghee and half the fried onion while still hot.
Serve topped with the remaining fried onion, fresh mint and coriander, and lemon wedges.

What a modern chef changes

A stand mixer doing the arm's work, without losing the air the arm was putting in.

Rung 2

Method

Once the wheat, lentils and meat are fully tender, work the mixture in short, deliberate pulses in a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, rather than running it continuously, checking texture by hand between pulses to avoid over-processing into a perfectly smooth purée that loses haleem's characteristic slight fibrous pull.
Fold the ghee in by hand at the very end, off the machine, rather than blending it through, to keep the same gradual, slightly aerated richness the traditional hand-pounded version has and a hard emulsion does not.
Finish under a hot grill for 2 to 3 minutes with a final drizzle of ghee, to build the faint crust the very best commercial haleem houses give the top of a served portion, without repeating the whole ghota by hand.

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