I have dreams at night. Some are happy, some are not and most I’ve forgotten by the time I wake up the next morning. But what, after all, are dreams? ’Tis said that dreams are stories and visuals that our minds create involuntarily while we are sleeping. Sigmund Freud described dreams as “manifestations of your deepest desires or anxieties, often connected with repressed childhood memories or obsessions”. I agree with old Sigmund. The dream I am about to share with you has indeed got to do with my deepest desires and repressed childhood memories or obsessions.
I’ve been having the same dream again and again, over the last few weeks, and I’ve been waking up suddenly, not in a cold sweat, but with pangs of hunger. Unlike my other dreams, this is one I always remember. I’ve been dreaming about the three mutton dishes I most fondly remember from my childhood. Dishes I rarely hear anyone order in restaurants anymore.
These three mutton preparations were a staple in the old Punjabi-cuisine restaurants of the ’70s and ’80s. Whether it was Gaylords, The Society or Talk of the Town — all of which served some Punjabi dishes alongside their Continental fare — or Sher-e-Punjab, Copper Chimney, Berry’s, Khyber and Kwality, which specialised in Punjabi cuisine, all of the above were always dishing out plates and portions of these now-sadly-sidelined mutton dishes.
The three are mutton rara, mutton do pyaza, and mutton jalfrezi. Interestingly, none of the three is actually cooked in Punjabi homes. They are wholly restaurant creations. And while the names may seem familiar to you—when was that last time you ordered even one of them? Today, it’s all bhuna gosht and rogan josh and I feel bad for these old favourites. Perhaps that’s why they recur again and again in my dreams.
Let me start with the rara, probably the most complex and extravagant. This is a slow-cooked dish, with a double dose of mutton in ghee. The dish combines pieces of mutton and minced mutton kheema. While the recipe may vary from restaurant to restaurant, it was traditionally mutton that had been cooked lovingly for hours over a slow fire, the meat and mince slowly mellowing in the fragrance and flavours of tomato, onion, whole black peppercorn, bay leaves, cinnamon, clove, star anise, black cardamom, green cardamom, cumin seeds and Kashmiri red chillies — the rich kheema gravy turning from deep red to brown in pure ghee.
Legend has it the mutton rara originated in the Himachal area, where it was cooked up at dhabas along the highway. This may be true; even today most recipes for rara are titled Himachali Rara Gosht. For me, I just dream of hot, butter naan and mutton rara garnished with whole green chillies and coriander. My favourite place to eat this — United Coffee House in Connaught Place, Delhi.
The other neglected dish is the mutton do pyaza. As the name suggests, this dish relies heavily on onions. Some say that the meat should be cooked with double the amount of onions, so if you’re cooking a kilo of meat, you need to two kilos of onions, hence ‘do pyaza’. I recall this as a dish that used two kinds of onions — one translucent and long and not completely obliterated into the gravy, the other, shallots or small bulbs cooked until tender and soft. Together with the mutton, it simmered into a gravy that tasted slightly sweet because of the onion and spicy because of red chilli and spices. Eaten with steaming hot green peas pulao made from long-grained Basmati, the mutton do pyaza is a treasured memory.
Finally, the mutton jalfrezi. There are many stories about this Raj-era dish. The most plausible one is this: The Bara Sahibs of the East India Company in Calcutta, after a big Sunday roast, would insist that leftovers be recycled. So their Indian cooks tossed up the leftover meat along with whatever vegetables, bell peppers, onions and tomatoes were left unconsumed, in a pan with some Indian spices, curry powder and butter, to create a jhaal, from the Bengali words for spicy and gravy. And that’s how the jalfrezi was born. The mutton jalfrezi of my childhood, and my dreams, came to the table looking like a burst of colour, with invariably chunks of capsicum and tomato.
I will continue to relish these dishes anywhere I can find them, but I have only the slimmest of hopes that they will ever regain the pride of place they once held on our menus. What a pity!
