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110 Six Dum Pukht A Pseudo-Historical Cuisine Holly Shaffer Ishtiyaque, Amin, and I drive in a green car, snaking through the old city of Lucknow. Darkness is punctured by the purple shades of fluorescent light reflected off whitewashed walls. We are debriefing, while peering through the windows, searching for the tell-tale sign of open-air cooking: flame close to the ground. We have just completed an unsatisfying yet rather expensive meal at the Taj Hotel’s five-star Oudhiana, a grey, alcoved space with oriental touches like arches, patterned fabrics, and a hookah, that exults in Lucknow’s historical, now mythical, cuisine. Our main interest is in dum pukht—the sealed pot cooking technique that renders meat tender, and rice divinely moist yet dry, fragrant yet pungent. “Now, what did you think of the rice,” Ishtiyaque asks, which is an entirely unfair question. Not only is he the chef of multiple restaurants in multiple cities, including Chote Nawab in Lucknow, a restaurant that specializes in “authentic Lakhnavi cuisine,” where I have been learning his techniques; but he is also the eldest son of Imtiaz Qureshi, perhaps still the most famous chef in India even after thirty years. Imtiaz’s, and therefore Ishtiyaque’s, story is as follows: in the 1970s, the chairman of the Indian Tobacco Company (ITC), Ian Aksar, decided to enter the high-end hotel business. One of his tactics, considering he was a gourmand and competing with the lure of luxury historic buildings like the Taj and modern buildings like the Oberoi, was to specialize, even brand, luxury restaurants offering “traditional” Indian cuisine . At this time, restaurants in five-star hotels mainly offered European or Chinese food, with a small static menu of Indian. Major S.S. Habib Rehman, the former business manager of the ITC, and a key player in its promotion of Indian cuisine, recalls: Dum Pukht • 111 When I entered the hotel business, the five star hotels were dominated by Western influence. Our cuisine, kitchens and service were focused around this palate, and the Indian kitchen used to occupy a corner space with the menu prospect quite small. It quite honestly offended our sensibilities for two reasons. What was offered in no way represented the accomplishments and diversity of Indian cuisine, and secondly, I discovered or rediscovered that I myself had a good background in Indian cuisine by virtue of my environment and upbringing [in an upper-class family in Hyderabad, like Lucknow a former Mughal capital]. This made me resolute to change the equation and I was quite determined to resurface Indian cuisine to its rightful place. It happened that I had joined a company, ITC, which in a sense, was also inclined to discover, Indian-ness and Indian roots in its ventures and initiatives . That created a good blend to propel my own desire to rediscover or bring forward the magic, width and depth of Indian cuisine. It is that desire or search that led us to the establishment of a broad classification of cuisine in our restaurants: Bukhara/Peshawri which brought tandoor food; Dum Pukht which brought traditional breads, curries, kebabs, rice and Dakshin which put together regional cuisine of peninsular India (Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra . . . ). Happily for us Indians also were woken up to such a wide range of Indian cuisine.1 Akeypartofthisplanwasobviouslythechef.Themantheyweresearching for, someone grounded in tradition yet able to innovate for an international and national audience and a linen-clothed table, china, and silverware context with a bill at the end, turned out to be Imtiaz Qureshi. They found him in Lucknow, where he was working for a hotel, the new patronage with the loss of the nobility’s wealth, but with a proper chef’s lineage to the Nawabs, or former Mughal rulers. For his trade test, Imtiaz prepared foods from the northwestern frontier (a.k.a. Pakistan and Afghanistan): succulent kebabs tingling in spice and limbs of goat or lamb tenderized and roasted. This is the menu now served at Bukhara, his first restaurant (1977), still consistently rated one of the best in India, as well as in the world. After two years working at the ITC, he traveled to America and England toseewhatthesituationofIndianfoodwasabroad.Hefoundthat“Mughlai” food was all that was represented, but that it depressingly consisted of butter chicken, chicken tikka, and naan. So he started thinking about this, that the original food was not locatable in any authentic form. He began to research the food of Lucknow, his home. Imtiaz is...

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