Qorma: A short history of a long journey in the making of this South Asian staple
From its Turkish origins, to its Persian rendition, Afghan adaptation, and its Rajput variant—we trace the roots of the king of Indian curries.
The qorma is the king of Indian curries. The word ‘qorma’ has its etymological root in the Turkic ‘qavirma’—which denoted a method of frying—and was adapted in Persian, Arabic and Urdu. Turkic ‘qavirma’ is also the source of the Turkish ‘qavurma’. The qavurma (or kavurma) is a fried and braised meat dish found in Turkish cuisine. It is a dry meat dish which sometimes uses preserved meat chunks or mincemeat and is served with pilaf (pulao) or yoghurt. There are several variations of qavurma. ‘Sabzi qavurma’, or lamb stew with herbs, is a blend of Persian and Turkic cooking; ‘Turşu qavurma’ combines lamb with preserved lemons and dried apricots and is flavoured with turmeric; while ‘Nur qavurma’ features lamb and pomegranate. 'Qovurma', a similar meat stew found in Azerbaijani cuisine, often includes dry fruits, sour grape juice (verjuice) and sometimes vegetables.
Persian cuisine has khoresh, khormeh or ghormeh—a basic stew with vegetables, herbs and kidney beans. The Persian khormeh uses yoghurt and almonds. It has a mild flavour, a thick, creamy texture and base tones of spices and herbs. Across the border, Afghan cuisine has kormeh, a meat curry that gets a slightly sour taste from the use of the limu omani or dried lemons. Incidentally, the use of lemon juice is also advocated in old Rampur cookbooks. It is difficult to trace precise culinary trails of the qorma, which meander and weave through regions and times.
Food historian Neha Vermani writes: ‘In the Mughal context, the earliest reference to qorma which I am aware of, comes from aristocratic cookbooks produced during Shah Alam’s reign. Thus, sometime in the 18th century in Mughal kitchens, the meat stew from Persian cuisine assimilated spices, yoghurt, almonds, garlic and other ingredients. This resulted in a thick, spicy curry with fried onions, giving it a classic aroma. Even today, fried and crushed or ground onions with whole spices form the foundational flavour of the Indian qorma. Thus, ‘qorma’ is named after a style of cooking in which meat is braised over high heat followed by long, slow cooking. In India, the technique of dumpukht—slow-cooking the meat in a dough-sealed pan—is traditionally used to prepare the qorma.
Some food writers claim that a Persian meat curry dish (possibly khormeh) was imbued with Indian masalas through the collaboration of Rajput cooks and Mir Bakrawal, the superintendent of Mughal kitchens. It is sometimes even said that the dish was named after a Rajput clan—Kurma. This origin myth for qorma is questionable as no reference to qorma is found in the Ain i Akbari or the Nuskha e Shahjahani written during the time of Mughal emperors Akbar and Shah Jahan respectively. There are, however, a number of qaliya recipes to be found in these accounts. Possibly, the qaliya and do pyaza curries—containing both fried and chopped or ground onions at different stages of cooking—metamorphosed over the years into the Indian qorma in Mughal kitchens, making qorma a dish created in the Indian subcontinent.
It would be safe to assume that by the end of the 18th century, the qorma was on the royal menu. The quintessential curry certainly graced the dastarkhwan, the royal table, of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Munshi Faizuddin Dehlvi, writing with startling detail about the court of Bahadur Shah Zafar in Bazm e Akhir, mentions the qorma in the list of dishes at the royal tables. Even before the final disintegration of the Mughal Empire, the qorma was carried to cultural centres of the Indian subcontinent—like Awadh, Hyderabad, Kashmir, Rampur—and amalgamated into the local cuisines.
There are essentially three main variants of the qorma in the subcontinent—the north Indian qorma with yoghurt, almonds, cashews and/or cream; the Kashmiri version that uses fennel seeds, turmeric, tamarind and dried cockscomb flowers; and the south Indian qorma with a pronounced coconut taste. Under the rubric north Indian qorma, there are two styles: Mughlai and Awadhi. According to Lizzie Collingham, the author of Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, Awadhi cooks added cream to the Mughal qorma and turned it into a sumptuous ‘shahi qorma’.
This is an extract from Tarana Husain Khan's latest book, Degh to Dastarkhwan: Qissas and Recipes from Rampur Cuisine, with Penguin Random House India.
Feature image: @desiiapron/Instagram
