It is best not to think of haleem, that famous Hyderabadi stew, when you meet Shahzadi Haleema Begum, one of the last surviving granddaughters of the last Nizam of Hyderabad. Haleem, as Haleema Begum will tell you, means patience, a person slow to anger and ready to understand, in Arabic.
And if you are wondering what this has got to do with the stew, apparently a lot. As the name suggests, haleem is diametrically opposite to the very concept of fast food. It is slow food, cooked over many hours, with patience.
The five-storey flat that Haleema Begum now lives in is no palace or even a sprawling mansion that her family was used to in her childhood. But fragments of her glorious past still live on in her home. The carved wooden drawing room chairs on the first floor, where Haleema Begum lives, could easily have been part of a palace. And the walls are adorned with two medium-sized portraits – one of the sixth Nizam, Mir Mahbub Ali Khan, and of the seventh Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan.
But more than that it is the fragrance from the kitchen that tells you that you are in a home that has kept the royal past alive. Haleema Begum is among the few surviving descendants of the family who spent childhood savouring the dishes made in the Nizam’s royal kitchen and would go on to shape the cuisine and cultural identity of modern-day Hyderabad.
Despite her age and her reluctance to share the recipes she learnt, she is today at the heart of a cloud kitchen that runs from her home and takes great pride in keeping alive the tradition of the Mezkhana – the King Koti palace’s royal kitchen that cooked some of Hyderabad’s most famous dishes not only for the Nizam but for his extended family as well. Her family members say that many claim to serve real Hyderabadi cuisine today, but none has tasted the food of the mezkhana.
“Until the seventh Nizam was alive, we received all our meals from the mezkhana,” says Haleema Begum’s son, Mir Riasat Ali Khan, a lawyer in the Telangana high court. “Each dish was special and dessert was never left out.” Her other son, Mir Karamat Ali Khan, who manages the cloud kitchen, says many dishes that had their birth in the Arab world, evolved in Hyderabad with local spices added to them. The royal kitchen of Nizam VI and Nizam VII had played a prime role in making these otherwise foreign dishes, purely Hyderabadi. The royal kitchen of Nizam VI alone had contributed about 700 dishes including about 30 different types of biryanis, he says.
Haleema Begum picked up her culinary skills from her mother in the early years. Once the seventh Nizam passed away and the royal families were forced to move out of their villas next to King Koti, the food tradition was kept alive by the khansamas from the royal kitchen. “The khansamas were often invited to cook for ‘dawats’. In the process they passed on the magic and the secrets of their recipes to other members in the families,” says Najaf Ali Khan, grandson of Nizam VII.
Haleema Begum now zealously guards those recipes. When her son asks her for a couple, she shares them reluctantly. “I haven’t written anything down,” she says, and in the grand tradition of Indian cooking she insists there can’t be fixed measurements. “I just know what to put instinctively.”
For the evening snack, Haleema Begum prepared two dishes that are not unknown to the Hyderabadi palate – Shikampur kebabs, Nargisi koftas and Puran puri. But the flavours are like nothing you have tasted in the zillion restaurants in the city that claim to specialise in Hyderabadi cuisine.
Everything about the Shikampur is delicate – it is delicately spiced, it shows no resistance as it melts in your mouth even as you can separately taste the mincemeat, the curd and the coriander. With the Nargisi koftas, the spiced meat layering challenges the sturdiness of the boiled egg filling and there is more puran (abundantly flavoured with saffron) and less puri in the Puran puri.
Most recipes have been long forgotten. She treats her family and relatives with these on festivals or important occasions. A few of them are hariboot ka halwa, anokhi kheer (a sweet porridge with onion), ande ke peosi, ghode, and sutri. Dum ke roat, which is popular during Muharram, is the most sought-after Hyderabadi cookie from the kitchen of Haleema Begum.
Nutritionist Fiza Khan, granddaughter of Haleema, often chips into Haleema’s kitchen giving her nutritional advice to keep the food low on calories for the calorie-conscious Hyderabadis. Fiza ensures that every dish prepared by Haleema has a fixed number of calories so that it is not heavy on the stomach.
At the end you realise this was nothing like what one may have in Hyderabadi restaurants. The after taste is part Indian, part Arabic, part Yemeni, part Turkish, all the flavours that came together to give Hyderabadi cuisine its unique flavours and seem to be slowly disappearing in the world of kitchens designed for mass production. You wonder if haleem – patience – is missing in Hyderabadi restaurants.
And if you are wondering what this has got to do with the stew, apparently a lot. As the name suggests, haleem is diametrically opposite to the very concept of fast food. It is slow food, cooked over many hours, with patience.
The five-storey flat that Haleema Begum now lives in is no palace or even a sprawling mansion that her family was used to in her childhood. But fragments of her glorious past still live on in her home. The carved wooden drawing room chairs on the first floor, where Haleema Begum lives, could easily have been part of a palace. And the walls are adorned with two medium-sized portraits – one of the sixth Nizam, Mir Mahbub Ali Khan, and of the seventh Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan.
But more than that it is the fragrance from the kitchen that tells you that you are in a home that has kept the royal past alive. Haleema Begum is among the few surviving descendants of the family who spent childhood savouring the dishes made in the Nizam’s royal kitchen and would go on to shape the cuisine and cultural identity of modern-day Hyderabad.
Despite her age and her reluctance to share the recipes she learnt, she is today at the heart of a cloud kitchen that runs from her home and takes great pride in keeping alive the tradition of the Mezkhana – the King Koti palace’s royal kitchen that cooked some of Hyderabad’s most famous dishes not only for the Nizam but for his extended family as well. Her family members say that many claim to serve real Hyderabadi cuisine today, but none has tasted the food of the mezkhana.
“Until the seventh Nizam was alive, we received all our meals from the mezkhana,” says Haleema Begum’s son, Mir Riasat Ali Khan, a lawyer in the Telangana high court. “Each dish was special and dessert was never left out.” Her other son, Mir Karamat Ali Khan, who manages the cloud kitchen, says many dishes that had their birth in the Arab world, evolved in Hyderabad with local spices added to them. The royal kitchen of Nizam VI and Nizam VII had played a prime role in making these otherwise foreign dishes, purely Hyderabadi. The royal kitchen of Nizam VI alone had contributed about 700 dishes including about 30 different types of biryanis, he says.
Haleema Begum picked up her culinary skills from her mother in the early years. Once the seventh Nizam passed away and the royal families were forced to move out of their villas next to King Koti, the food tradition was kept alive by the khansamas from the royal kitchen. “The khansamas were often invited to cook for ‘dawats’. In the process they passed on the magic and the secrets of their recipes to other members in the families,” says Najaf Ali Khan, grandson of Nizam VII.
Haleema Begum now zealously guards those recipes. When her son asks her for a couple, she shares them reluctantly. “I haven’t written anything down,” she says, and in the grand tradition of Indian cooking she insists there can’t be fixed measurements. “I just know what to put instinctively.”
For the evening snack, Haleema Begum prepared two dishes that are not unknown to the Hyderabadi palate – Shikampur kebabs, Nargisi koftas and Puran puri. But the flavours are like nothing you have tasted in the zillion restaurants in the city that claim to specialise in Hyderabadi cuisine.
Everything about the Shikampur is delicate – it is delicately spiced, it shows no resistance as it melts in your mouth even as you can separately taste the mincemeat, the curd and the coriander. With the Nargisi koftas, the spiced meat layering challenges the sturdiness of the boiled egg filling and there is more puran (abundantly flavoured with saffron) and less puri in the Puran puri.
Most recipes have been long forgotten. She treats her family and relatives with these on festivals or important occasions. A few of them are hariboot ka halwa, anokhi kheer (a sweet porridge with onion), ande ke peosi, ghode, and sutri. Dum ke roat, which is popular during Muharram, is the most sought-after Hyderabadi cookie from the kitchen of Haleema Begum.
Nutritionist Fiza Khan, granddaughter of Haleema, often chips into Haleema’s kitchen giving her nutritional advice to keep the food low on calories for the calorie-conscious Hyderabadis. Fiza ensures that every dish prepared by Haleema has a fixed number of calories so that it is not heavy on the stomach.
At the end you realise this was nothing like what one may have in Hyderabadi restaurants. The after taste is part Indian, part Arabic, part Yemeni, part Turkish, all the flavours that came together to give Hyderabadi cuisine its unique flavours and seem to be slowly disappearing in the world of kitchens designed for mass production. You wonder if haleem – patience – is missing in Hyderabadi restaurants.
