Buttery, spicy stew/gravy the hallmark of Raughan Josh
This arrived last week from Randy Burnside, of Jupiter, one of my regular correspondents:
“Once I visited a wonderful restaurant in Wellington, New Zealand, that had a delicious dish on the menu – ‘Rogan Josh.’ When I tried to find it on a local Indian restaurant’s menu, it wasn’t there, but when I ordered it by name they served it right away and it was delicious. Is it that easy to prepare?”
Although some Indian cookbooks spell the word as “rogan,” the correct transliteration from the Urdu-Persian word would be “raughan,” with the middle “gh” having a guttural “G” sound — like the first two letters in my name — Gholam, which begins with the ArabicPersian “ghain.” As for the meaning, raughan means fat, aka ghee or butter, and josh means boiling or long simmering.
With that semantic lesson aside, Raughan Josh is basically a long-simmered lamb/goat dish in a buttery, spicy stew/ gravy. The dish is supposed to have originated in the old Kashmir, which is now fractured into two warring halves between India and Pakistan – a constant spark point between the two nuclear-armed nations on the Indian subcontinent.
One of the distinctive spices of this dish is the Kashmiri chilly pepper, which is very flavorful but much milder than the common Indian cayenne pepper or its powder, akin to hot Hungarian paprika. There are many versions of the dish with important variations between Muslim and Hindu cooks of Kashmir.
The following recipe is adapted from “Great Curries of India” by Camellia Panjabi (Simon & Schuster, 1995). She says she has combined the Hindu-Muslim versions in her rendition. Judge the complexity of the dish for yourself!