Tradition · wheat & meat dish · India
Hyderabadi haleem
Also known as haleem, harees, hareesa, Hyderabadi haleem — harees out of Yemen
Wheat and meat pounded together into a paste is harees, an Arabian dish, and it came to the Deccan with the Nizam's Hadhrami soldiers under the sixth Nizam. Local spicing turned it into something else over the following century, and by the twentieth it was Hyderabadi. It is eaten at iftar through Ramzan, when the old city's trade in it is the season's chief food economy, and it took a Geographical Indication in 2010 — the first non-vegetarian dish in India to get one.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
The Chaush brought marag, murtabaq, mandi, kabsa, maqluba, shorba and aseed with them too, so a working list of Hyderabadi festive food is largely a list of Hadhrami imports that stopped being read as foreign.
Connections (3)
- TransmissionBarkas
Harees travelled with the soldiers. Wheat and meat pounded to a paste is an Arabian dish, and the Hadhrami troops brought it to the Deccan under the sixth Nizam along with marag, mandi, kabsa and maqluba. A century of local spicing made it Hyderabadi haleem, and it is now the city's Ramzan trade and the first non-vegetarian dish in India to hold a Geographical Indication. Barkas is still where it is cooked closest to the original, and the version sold there is noticeably less spiced than the city's.
- AnalogueMishkal Mosque, Kozhikode
Hadhramis reached India twice over, by sea as merchants and by land contract as soldiers, and left different things behind. On the Malabar coast they came as traders from at least the fourteenth century; the Mishkal Mosque at Kozhikode is named for a Yemeni shipowner and built in Kerala timber, and Hadhrami sayyid families married into the Mappila community and stayed. In the Deccan they came as the Nizam's infantry, and what they left was a neighbourhood, a dialect and the food. Same valley in Yemen, two entirely separate diasporas.
- Shrine within cityChārmīnār
The haleem trade concentrates in the old city around the Charminar through Ramzan, when hotels and street kitchens that sell nothing else for eleven months cook it in vats from afternoon to iftar. It is the largest seasonal food economy Hyderabad has, and it runs in the quarter Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah laid out in 1591 — so a sixteenth-century Qutb Shahi grid is the distribution network for a nineteenth-century Yemeni import, for one month a year.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Hyderabadi haleem” and “Chaush”. Geographical Indications Registry, Chennai, application 244 (2010); Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Most Popular GI award, 2022.
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