Kabuli palaw Period COrigin theory CVerified

Kabuli palaw is a rice dish: rice cooked in stock, topped with carrots and raisins fried until sweet and with lamb stewed until tender. Counted as Afghanistan's national dish, it is the main course at celebrations. It belongs to the family of palaw, or pilaf, the rice dishes of Persia and Central Asia.

Rice, the heart of the dish, came to Afghanistan through Old World trade and settled onto its tables with the help of local rice farming and the grain trade. The cooking runs across several pots. The rice simmers in stock until it has taken up all the liquid; the carrots and raisins are fried sweet in another pan; the lamb is stewed until soft. Finally everything is layered over the rice and served as one dish.

There are two accounts of where Kabuli palaw was born. One comes from an article by Humaira Ghilzai, who writes about Afghan food and culture. In her telling, the dish was created by the upper-class families of Kabul, who could afford to put caramelized carrots, plump raisins and prized nuts into their rice. As people in Afghanistan grew wealthier, the dish became more common, and its name changed from Kabuli ("of Kabul") to Qabili. The Dari word qabil, she explains, means "well accomplished."

The other account is in the English-language Wikipedia. Although the dish is called "Kabuli" in English, it says, it did not originate in Kabul and more likely arose on the border between northern Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. The two accounts disagree about the place, and neither cites a source. No record supporting either has yet been found.

Going back through older cookbooks leads to the Kār-nāma of 1521, the oldest surviving cookbook in Persian. It devotes six chapters to rice dishes, but whether the Kar-nama contains this dish's name, or rice layered with carrots and raisins, has not yet been checked in the original text. For neighboring Iran, the polow (rice) recipes in sixteenth-century Safavid cookbooks are said to differ from those cooked today, and today's methods seem to have begun in the later Qajar period. That observation concerns Iranian polow, though, and says nothing about the date of Kabuli palaw.

English cookbooks have not turned up the name either. The English-language cookbooks written for the British in India between the mid-eighteenth and early twentieth centuries carry plenty of pilaf recipes and mention Kabul's apricots and raisins, yet no pilaf bearing Kabul's name has surfaced in them so far.

When and where rice first came to be layered with carrots and raisins in today's manner is a question no source found so far has answered.