Shinwari sensation: Tikka to drive your taste buds wild
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The Mystery of Karahi
Where did this famous Pakistani dish originate from?
It turns out we’ve been eating this spiced dish for a LOT longer than anyone ever imagined. Karahi (کڑاہی) describes a bewildering number of spicy meat stews from Pakistan and, until recently, when the first karahi appeared was a culinary mystery.
The word karahi actually defines a type of thick, circular, and deep cooking-pot that is used not only in Pakistani cuisine, but also in Afghan, Bangladeshi, Indian and Nepalese cuisine. Traditionally made out of cast iron, karahi look like Chinese woks with steeper sides. Today they can be made of stainless steel, copper, and non-stick surfaces, both round and flat-bottomed. The word has also come to describe the famous meat stews which are prepared in these pots. But where does the word karahi come from? This is still a mystery, however, it could have possible origins from the Tamil language word "kari", which means sauce.
In the 18th century, English traders began coming across this stew and pronounced karahi as "curry". A curry, as the Brits defined it, is a mélange of onion, ginger, turmeric, garlic, pepper, chilies, coriander, cumin, and other spices cooked with various types of meat such as chicken, beef, mutton and dumba (lamb). These karahis that we have become accustomed to are actually a byproduct of more than a millennium of trade between the Indus Valley and other parts of Asia, which provided new ingredients to spice up traditional Indus stews.
People living at the height of the Indus Valley Civilization used three key ingredients—ginger, garlic, and turmeric—in their karahi...or shall we say "proto-karahi". You may be wondering how on earth anyone can know what people were cooking 4500 years ago? While the ancients left behind plenty of broken pots and mud-brick house foundations, they generally didn’t leave us their recipes. And foodstuffs, unlike pots, rapidly decay. But thanks to technological advances, scientists can identify minute quantities of plant remains left behind by meals cooked thousands of years ago. It is no easy task; researchers must gather crumbling skeletons and find ancient dirty dishes before using powerful laboratory microscopes to pinpoint the ingredients of ancient meals. But the effort is paying off, in the form of evidence that karahi may be far, far older than previously thought.
The Indus society began to flourish around the same time that the ancient Egyptians built their pyramids and Mesopotamians constructed the first great cities. However, unlike the hieroglyphic and cuneiform writing of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian scribes, the strange symbols left behind by their Indus counterparts have not yet been deciphered by today’s scholars. Deciphering their food traditions has, until recently, been equally challenging.
Archaeologists have long known how to spot some ancient leftovers. The biggest breakthrough came in the 1960s, when excavators began to drop soil from their sites—particularly from places where food likely was prepared—onto mesh screens. The scientists then washed the earth away with water, leaving behind little bits of stone, animal bones, and tiny seeds of wheat, barley, millets, and beans. This flotation method allowed scientists to piece together a rough picture of an ancient diet. But spices are absent in macro-botanical record. Archaeologists applied new methods for pinpointing the elusive remains of spices that don’t show up in flotation tanks. Instead of analyzing dirt from Indus kitchens, they collected cooking pots from the ancient town of Farmana, a modest settlement that prospered in the late third millennium B.C. They also obtained human teeth from the nearby cemetery from the same era.
Back in their lab, archaeologists used what is known as starch grain analysis. Starch is the main way that plants store energy, and tiny amounts of it can remain long after the plant itself has deteriorated. If a plant was heated—cooked in one of the tandoori-style ovens often found at Indus sites, for example—then its tiny microscopic remains can be identified, since each plant species leaves its own specific molecular signature. To a layperson peering through a microscope, those remains look like random blobs. But to a careful researcher, they tell the story of what a cook dropped into the dinner pot 4500 years ago.
Examining the human teeth and the residue from the cooking pots, archaeologists spotted the telltale signs of turmeric and ginger, two key ingredients, even today, of a typical karahi. This marked the first time researchers had found unmistakable traces of the spices in the Indus civilization. Wanting to be sure they got traditional recipes and cooked dishes, then examined the residues to see how the structures broke down. The results matched what they had unearthed in the field and knew they had the oldest record of ginger and turmeric. Dated to between 2500 and 2200 BC, the finds are the first time either spice has been identified in the Indus. They also found a carbonized clove of garlic, a plant that was used in this era by cooks from Egypt to China.
They found additional supporting evidence of ginger and turmeric use on ancient cow teeth unearthed in Harappa, Pakistan. Why would cattle be eating karahi? Archaeologists note that in Harappan times, people often placed leftovers outside their homes for wandering animals to munch on. There are numerous ancient Indus images of cattle on terra-cotta seals, suggesting that during Indus times, people may have regarded cows as sacred. The Harappan ruins also contain evidence of domesticated chickens, which were likely cooked in those tandoori-style ovens and eaten.
And what would a proto-karahi be without a side of rice? Many archaeologists once thought that Indus peoples were restricted to a few grains like wheat and barley. But Cambridge University archaeologist Jennifer Bates has been examining the relative abundance of various crops at two village sites near today’s Masudpur. She found that villagers cultivated a wide array of crops, including rice, lentils, and mung beans. Finding significant quantities of rice was a particular surprise, since the grain was long thought to have arrived only at the end of the Indus civilization. In fact, inhabitants of one village appear to have preferred rice to wheat and barley (though millet was their favourite crop).
What does this mean for how we think about Pakistani cuisine today? Thanks to archaeologists, we know that karahi is not only among Pakistan's most popular dishes; it also may be the oldest continuously prepared cuisine on the planet. This latest discovery demonstrates that the Indus civilization pioneered not just good plumbing and well-planned cities, but one of the world's most loved cuisines.
Where did this famous Pakistani dish originate from?
It turns out we’ve been eating this spiced dish for a LOT longer than anyone ever imagined. Karahi (کڑاہی) describes a bewildering number of spicy meat stews from Pakistan and, until recently, when the first karahi appeared was a culinary mystery.
The word karahi actually defines a type of thick, circular, and deep cooking-pot that is used not only in Pakistani cuisine, but also in Afghan, Bangladeshi, Indian and Nepalese cuisine. Traditionally made out of cast iron, karahi look like Chinese woks with steeper sides. Today they can be made of stainless steel, copper, and non-stick surfaces, both round and flat-bottomed. The word has also come to describe the famous meat stews which are prepared in these pots. But where does the word karahi come from? This is still a mystery, however, it could have possible origins from the Tamil language word "kari", which means sauce.
In the 18th century, English traders began coming across this stew and pronounced karahi as "curry". A curry, as the Brits defined it, is a mélange of onion, ginger, turmeric, garlic, pepper, chilies, coriander, cumin, and other spices cooked with various types of meat such as chicken, beef, mutton and dumba (lamb). These karahis that we have become accustomed to are actually a byproduct of more than a millennium of trade between the Indus Valley and other parts of Asia, which provided new ingredients to spice up traditional Indus stews.
People living at the height of the Indus Valley Civilization used three key ingredients—ginger, garlic, and turmeric—in their karahi...or shall we say "proto-karahi". You may be wondering how on earth anyone can know what people were cooking 4500 years ago? While the ancients left behind plenty of broken pots and mud-brick house foundations, they generally didn’t leave us their recipes. And foodstuffs, unlike pots, rapidly decay. But thanks to technological advances, scientists can identify minute quantities of plant remains left behind by meals cooked thousands of years ago. It is no easy task; researchers must gather crumbling skeletons and find ancient dirty dishes before using powerful laboratory microscopes to pinpoint the ingredients of ancient meals. But the effort is paying off, in the form of evidence that karahi may be far, far older than previously thought.
The Indus society began to flourish around the same time that the ancient Egyptians built their pyramids and Mesopotamians constructed the first great cities. However, unlike the hieroglyphic and cuneiform writing of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian scribes, the strange symbols left behind by their Indus counterparts have not yet been deciphered by today’s scholars. Deciphering their food traditions has, until recently, been equally challenging.
Archaeologists have long known how to spot some ancient leftovers. The biggest breakthrough came in the 1960s, when excavators began to drop soil from their sites—particularly from places where food likely was prepared—onto mesh screens. The scientists then washed the earth away with water, leaving behind little bits of stone, animal bones, and tiny seeds of wheat, barley, millets, and beans. This flotation method allowed scientists to piece together a rough picture of an ancient diet. But spices are absent in macro-botanical record. Archaeologists applied new methods for pinpointing the elusive remains of spices that don’t show up in flotation tanks. Instead of analyzing dirt from Indus kitchens, they collected cooking pots from the ancient town of Farmana, a modest settlement that prospered in the late third millennium B.C. They also obtained human teeth from the nearby cemetery from the same era.
Back in their lab, archaeologists used what is known as starch grain analysis. Starch is the main way that plants store energy, and tiny amounts of it can remain long after the plant itself has deteriorated. If a plant was heated—cooked in one of the tandoori-style ovens often found at Indus sites, for example—then its tiny microscopic remains can be identified, since each plant species leaves its own specific molecular signature. To a layperson peering through a microscope, those remains look like random blobs. But to a careful researcher, they tell the story of what a cook dropped into the dinner pot 4500 years ago.
Examining the human teeth and the residue from the cooking pots, archaeologists spotted the telltale signs of turmeric and ginger, two key ingredients, even today, of a typical karahi. This marked the first time researchers had found unmistakable traces of the spices in the Indus civilization. Wanting to be sure they got traditional recipes and cooked dishes, then examined the residues to see how the structures broke down. The results matched what they had unearthed in the field and knew they had the oldest record of ginger and turmeric. Dated to between 2500 and 2200 BC, the finds are the first time either spice has been identified in the Indus. They also found a carbonized clove of garlic, a plant that was used in this era by cooks from Egypt to China.
They found additional supporting evidence of ginger and turmeric use on ancient cow teeth unearthed in Harappa, Pakistan. Why would cattle be eating karahi? Archaeologists note that in Harappan times, people often placed leftovers outside their homes for wandering animals to munch on. There are numerous ancient Indus images of cattle on terra-cotta seals, suggesting that during Indus times, people may have regarded cows as sacred. The Harappan ruins also contain evidence of domesticated chickens, which were likely cooked in those tandoori-style ovens and eaten.
And what would a proto-karahi be without a side of rice? Many archaeologists once thought that Indus peoples were restricted to a few grains like wheat and barley. But Cambridge University archaeologist Jennifer Bates has been examining the relative abundance of various crops at two village sites near today’s Masudpur. She found that villagers cultivated a wide array of crops, including rice, lentils, and mung beans. Finding significant quantities of rice was a particular surprise, since the grain was long thought to have arrived only at the end of the Indus civilization. In fact, inhabitants of one village appear to have preferred rice to wheat and barley (though millet was their favourite crop).
What does this mean for how we think about Pakistani cuisine today? Thanks to archaeologists, we know that karahi is not only among Pakistan's most popular dishes; it also may be the oldest continuously prepared cuisine on the planet. This latest discovery demonstrates that the Indus civilization pioneered not just good plumbing and well-planned cities, but one of the world's most loved cuisines.
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