Cuisine

Afghan

Kabuli pulao is a rice dish that treats the grain as the main event and the meat as the support. Long-grain rice is cooked in a seasoned broth, then mounded over lamb or beef and finished with carrots caramelised in sugar and oil, plus raisins and often almonds or pistachios. The rice should be separate, stained and scented with cumin, cardamom and cinnamon. The sweetness of the carrot is deliberate. This is guest food and Friday food. Naan, yoghurt and a green salad sit beside it.

Afghan rice hospitality sits on Central and South Asian palao/pilaf lines — Persian, Uzbek, Indian — and then caramelises the carrot in a way that cooks in Kabul treat as local. Landlocked trade brought nuts, dried fruit and spice. Home palao is everyday when there is meat; restaurant kabuli pulao is the dressed version. The country also cooks mantu, ashak, and kebab that this catalog does not yet hold. The mound still tells the truth about rice, lamb and a sweet-savoury finish.

Rinse and parboil the rice so the grains stay long. Broth must be well salted. Carrots are cut into matchsticks and cooked until they shine, not until they collapse into jam. Raisins plump in the same fat. Meat should be tender from a prior simmer. Afghan cooking overlaps Iranian and North Indian rice pots and keeps a carrot-raisin crown that those kitchens do not always use. It is not Saudi kabsa and not a Punjabi biryani. If the rice is sticky and the carrot is raw, the palao is unfinished.