Haleem Period COrigin theory CVerified

When and where it took shape

Haleem is cracked wheat, mutton and lentils cooked for hours and stirred until the ingredients lose their edges and collapse into a thick, porridge-like mass. It is a signature dish of Hyderabad, on the Deccan plateau, and it is eaten above all to break the daily fast during Ramadan.

The wheat and mutton at its heart, and the lentils that go in alongside them, are all local ingredients, readily found in this region. What gives haleem its shape is the labor of making it. The meat and grain are simmered for hours and stirred without pause, so that the contours of each dissolve and everything binds into a single sticky whole. This patient cooking is what separates haleem from an ordinary stew of meat and wheat.

The settings in which it was served also speak to its standing. What was once food served at the court of the Nizams, the rulers of Hyderabad, spread until it was sold on the streets during Ramadan. In 2010 Hyderabadi haleem was registered as a Geographical Indication of India, and its method was set down in official terms, down to the use of goat meat and long hours of cooking in a copper pot over a wood fire.

Haleem's origin often comes with a grand backstory. Its ancestor, harees, was supposedly already established in the seventh century, as a dish the Umayyad caliph Mu'awiya asked for. The anecdote rests on a story preserved in the version of the Kitab al-Tabikh attributed to Ibn al-Karim.

That seventh-century date cannot be offered as evidence of the dish's origin. The anecdote was written down some three centuries after Mu'awiya's lifetime; it is an attribution made long afterward, not a contemporary record showing that the dish existed in the 600s.

Harees can be confirmed in a reliable text in a tenth-century Baghdad cookbook. The Kitab al-Tabikh written by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq is the earliest surviving Arabic cookbook, and it records harisa as a dish of cracked grain and meat cooked long and pounded together. That shows the dish existed by the tenth century at the latest. This is a date by which it already existed, not the year it was born.

How did this old Arab stew take root in Hyderabad, far away on the Deccan plateau? The usual account points to people from the Hadhramaut region of Yemen. In the time of the sixth Nizam, Mahbub Ali Khan (1869 to 1911), Yemeni soldiers and traders known as the Chaush are said to have come to Hyderabad and brought the harees of their homeland. Their dish is said to have taken on local cumin, coriander, turmeric and garam masala, along with ghee, and to have grown in time into a distinct haleem unlike the Arab harees.

Haleem is said to have taken its recognized Hyderabadi form, and to have become widely known, under the seventh Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan. A nobleman from Mukalla in Yemen, Sultan Saif Nawaz Jung Bahadur, is remembered as having served it at banquets and spread it. In 2010 Hyderabadi haleem was registered as a Geographical Indication of India, the first non-vegetarian food in the country to be registered, and the specification even fixes the method: goat meat, meat and grain combined at a ratio of ten to four, and twelve hours of cooking in a copper pot over a wood fire. Between the old Arab stew and its formal registration as a Deccan specialty lay many generations and much coming and going of people.