The Home Kitchens Reviving Asal Hyderabai Recipes

There’s more to Hyderabadi food than biryani and haleem. Deepshika Pasupunuri goes searching for asal food in the homes of a few cooks keen on retaining the region’s rich culinary diversity and recipes.

‘Watery soup, mince chops, dull pudding.’ That’s how one disappointed guest described his 1930s meal with a noble family in Hyderabad. Little did he know, however, that these dishes were a mere English formality. The real meal was to follow. “As soon as the pudding was removed,” he reveals, “there began an unbelievable succession of dishes served in beautiful Persian-style utensils: pullaos and biryanis, naans and farmaishes, rogan joshes and qormas, chickens, quails and partridges...”

Extravagant meals like this might seem like a thing of the past. But in some local homes, they’re far from forgotten. 

Hyderabadi cuisine, beyond a few crowd-pullers, isn’t as widely recognised. Take Khwān Neʿmat-e Āṣafiya, a famous nineteenth-century cookbook with its whopping 680 recipes compiled by the Nawab’s kitchen manager. Such books list staggering demands: expensive saffron, special deghs, and as many as twenty ingredients ground into one masala. Until 1948, the last days of Nizam rule, these practices were upheld by cooks and khansamahs. But with the onslaught of commercial joints and the long cooking hours needed, many have fallen out of use. 

Yet, they never left the kitchens of old families.

Dinners, the asal Hyderabadi way

I’m in the bylanes of Banjara Hills, where 75-year-old Dilnaz Baig welcomes me to her bungalow with saffron-perfumed ande ki piyosi (baked dessert made with almonds, khoya, and saffron) and a steaming cup of chai. On low-slung furniture, overlooking yellowed family pictures, Baig sits back and laughs remembering the insipid soup that most meals would begin with. “Everybody would be holding back, you know,” she says. “Because they knew that the asal Mughlai food would come.”

Baig embarked on an unexpected career path as a home chef when she was in her 60s. Now, she is renowned for hosting Dastarkhwan-e-Naz (traditional Hyderabadi dinners) at her stately residence.

Baig’s meal is served on a chowki, a low table. Guests sit on the floor. The chowki is laden with dishes like shikampur (mutton patty), dum ka murgh (slow-cooked chicken), mirchi ka salan (curried chilli peppers), tamate ka kut (rich tomato gravy usually made with eggs), baghare baingan (tangy eggplant curry), ande ki piyosi, and lastly, a mouth-cleansing paan. 

Baig recounts how dinners like this would once be prepared on lakdi ke chulhe (wooden stove) with several dishes like nahari (lamb tongue and hooves) left to cook overnight. Now, it’s not uncommon to use pre-boiled cuts. Baig doesn’t have room for shortcuts. “Meat, especially mutton, is very slow-cooked. It needs a minimum of one hour to tenderise.” 

When Baig’s children are home, only one dish seems to matter: khatti dal, Hyderabad’s favourite no-frills lentil dish. Khatti dal is best known for its distinct sourness, obtained from a splash of tamarind. “My children won’t even sit down for dinner without khatti dal,” she says.

Deccan’s culinary influences

Deccan’s love for khatta, or sourness, isn’t just an acquired taste. As food historian Lizzie Collingham notes, it was in Hyderabad that early Deccani cookery, full of “shredded coconut, the tang of curry leaves, the astringent bite of fresh fenugreek leaves, and the sharp sour note of tamarind” beautifully combined with outside influences. When these arrivals — Mughlai, Turkic, and Arabic — met local Marathwada and Telangana kitchens, it brought the region a unique range of multicultural food practices — and more importantly, birthed something distinctly Hyderabadi.

“People would influence each other, pick up what they like, leave what they didn’t,” explains Baig. Marag, a mutton soup now served as a starter in Hyderabad, makes her case. It originally came down with Yemeni migrants, but Hyderabad made the soup its own. “We add a lot of hari mirch (green chillies). Now if you drink the marag in the Middle East, you wouldn’t recognise it,” she laughs.

Speaking of Yemen, just a short drive to the city’s lotus pond is home chef Shahnoor Jehan. In 2015, Jehan started Khassa, a bespoke catering service with 100-year-old asal Hyderabadi recipes from her grandmother’s ancestral kitchen — Muzaffar Unissa Begum was the daughter of the former Sultan of Yemen and her recipes were savoured in the royal halls of Shah Manzil, or present-day Raj Bhavan. “It was my mother’s house," recalls Jehan. “I have no memories of Shah Manzil, but it belonged to my maternal grandfather, Nawab Ahmed Baig.” Here, Jehan’s mother, Faiq Jehan, prepared and preserved these heirloom recipes, carrying influences of early Mukalla (erstwhile Yemen) cuisine. Shahnoor vividly remembers cooking with her mother as a young girl. “Once the dish was completed, I would write it down. That’s how I started maintaining a recipe book.”

Shahnoor with her mother, late Faiq Jehan

Now, this traditional fare is listed on Khassa’s menu, which boasts popular Hyderabadi headliners like haleem and qubani ka meetha (dried apricot compote), lesser-known dishes like kuzi (Arabic slow-cooked lamb) as well as a generational mutton dalcha (mutton with bottle gourd and lentils) preparation. Jehan also introduces her signature dessert, badam ka kund (like an almond halwa), which takes around eight hours to prepare according to the original recipe. “It is cooked on slow flame and needs continuous stirring. Or else it gets burnt.” Still, Jehan wouldn’t dream of tweaking the dish. “It has to be 100 percent badam. I wouldn’t even think of changing the ratios, it would spoil the whole dish.” 

Khassa's Zaffrani Kheer

Khassa's famous Qubani Ka Meetha

When cooked the proper way, she explains that asal Hyderabadi dishes have a very different taste. Some need a slow flame, while others have to be made on coal. Meat, too, has to be freshly sourced — no frozen cuts. “These are small things,” Jehan admits, “but it’s what makes it different from commercial food.” 

Sweets fit for the Queen 

A few days later, as Hyderabad settled into a dry monsoon, I spoke to Faraaz Siddiqui. Alongside his mother, Farhana, he runs Naqsh, a 120-year-old dessert service that has kept traditional Hyderabadi mithai alive with heirloom recipes inherited from his great-grandmother. 

“I’ve grown up with her around,” he says. “I remember she used to have a storage space for the sweets. Whenever I went to her house, we used to attack that space,” he adds with a laugh. “But the importance of the brand wasn't known until I grew older.”

In fact, Siddiqui’s great-grandmother even made mithai for Indira Gandhi and Queen Elizabeth II. Having heard family stories about the latter, he details the ruckus surrounding her security team’s arrival in 1983. “Everybody came out of their house thinking someone was getting arrested. Because at that time, it was a big deal.” For security reasons, the sweets were taste-tested twice. “My great-grandmother was asked to eat it once. And they had a taster in their team. After that, the sweets were taken to Queen Elizabeth.” 

Today, Naqsh sticks to just five varieties: ashrafi, boat ki halwa, jaali, maske ke lauz, and paan. The ingredients for each sweet are more or less the same — cashew, almond, and ghee. But the techniques and the time at which they come out are what make each one taste different. 

Cooking these sweets isn’t easy. “For one kilo of sweet, you'll have to stir it for about an hour. And it has to be continuous. You cannot stop it even for a minute,” he says. Getting the jaali designs right is extremely tricky. “We have to use the moulds very carefully. Otherwise, the whole sweet gets discarded.” The moulds used at Naqsh are replaced every two years — that too, from descendants of the original suppliers. But the Nizami coin used to stamp their ashrafis is the same one his great-grandmother once used. 

Siddiqui plans to expand Naqsh into a store in the future. And while he hasn’t worked out the finer details yet, he’s sure about one thing, sticking to the original recipes. 

But Hyderabad has always been proud about its food. Baig illustrates this point with a story about travelling abroad for the first time to visit her cousins. “I was excited to try something different [in food]. But, when I got there, they said, ‘Oh, I’ll take you to the best Hyderabadi restaurant!’,” she laughs. “We’re so hung up on thinking our food is the best, no matter where we go.”

Deepshika Pasupunuri is an MLitt: Modernities graduate and features writer. You can find her work here.

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