Biryani’s new buddy
A food cart offers an odd coupling
Biryani is traditionally identified with chicken or mutton. But a quiet revolution seems to be unfolding in the street biryani civilisation, and scores of stalls have sprouted up in the entire Delhi region selling vegetable biryani. Such biryani has rice cooked with lots of peas and gobhi (cauliflower) or any other veggies, and often with one more additional element that gives the dish an illusion, a texture one might say, of “non-veg.” It’s soybean. This is the primary ingredient of almost every veg biryani on the pavement carts. Actually, soybeans embedded in oil-covered glistening rice do look like (undercooked) meat balls.
Now, at least one cart in Gurugram is offering yet another radical twist to the biryani. It’s veg biryani served with poori.
This afternoon Tika Lal’s modest cart is parked beside the road in Gurugram’s Roshanpura. It has two large pans—one is filled with the soybean biryani, the other is filled with potato curry. “Earlier I was only selling aloo subzi with poori, but after I noticed how popular veg biryani had become in so many stalls, I started serving it too.”
Mr Lal introduced the rice dish some time last year, after the lifting of the first coronavirus-triggered lockdown. He supposed that his customers would either pick aloo-poori or biryani for their meal. He hadn’t expected that they would make their own combo by mixing biryani with poori. “That’s what most of my daily customers ask for,” he says. His regulars include lots of rickshaw pullers. “May be because biryani has more vegetables than aloo subzi (which is just aloo and tamatar and gravy)… and who doesn’t like poori?!”
It is possible that those of us whose daily life involves intensive physical exertion will take it very naturally to this double consumption of carbs—but then very many of us have both roti-chawal in our meals. Even so, for others, this odd coupling might be slightly disorienting. Whatever, the poori is addictive and biryani is super yummy, speckled not only with soybeans but also with paneer. The vendor sells two poori for ₹10 (you cannot pay for just one) and he charges biryani by measuring it in a weighing scale—200 gm for ₹20. The rice is topped with red chutney and fried green chillies, only on request.
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