Cuisine

Punjabi

ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਪਕਵਾਨ

Wheat breads and dairy fat do more work in Punjabi cooking than a long list of spices does. Tandoor heat gives naan and meats a blister and a smoke that a home grill only approximates. Gravies are often onion, tomato, ginger, garlic and yoghurt or cream, cooked until the raw edges go. Butter chicken — murgh makhani — is tandoori chicken finished in a tomato-butter sauce, a restaurant plate that travelled farther than most village pots. Chole, saag and dal makhani sit on the same table as the famous gravy.

Punjab's wheat and dairy farming, on both sides of the later border, shaped a bread-and-gravy kitchen. The tandoor moved with cooks into Delhi and the diaspora. Butter chicken is widely credited to a Delhi restaurant that needed a sauce for leftover tandoori chicken; it is Punjabi-derived restaurant food, not an ancient royal recipe. Partition, dhabas and overseas kitchens spread the style until many people met 'Indian food' first as makhani sauces, naan and tandoor smoke. That is a regional success story, not the whole of Indian cooking.

Ghee and butter carry spice. Yoghurt marinades tenderise and sour. Tomato-onion gravies should be cooked long enough that you do not taste raw puree. The tandoor is a clay oven; at home you chase char with a grill or a very hot pan. Butter chicken should taste of tomato and toasted spice under the richness, not of cream alone. Punjabi food is a wheat-belt kitchen with a tandoor and restaurant descendants that now stand in for the region abroad.