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The best Korma Pulao is, of course, made at home, but a few nondescript Guwahati restaurants also have it on their menu. It’s a festive dish made mandatorily on Eid and for other celebratory meals in many Assamese Muslim homes. The meat-laden pulao was eventually adapted to the region’s palate and resources.

The dish is said to have stayed behind with Mughal soldiers who were captured and later settled in the region and married local women.

#Beyond juice series

Many believe that the Korma Pulao came to Assam with Mughal soldiers who launched a series of attacks on the Ahom kingdom of Brahmaputra Valley. It’s the poster child of what is known as Assamese Muslim Food. Korma Pulao is a simple but delicate one-pot dish made with the aromatic, sticky, short-grained Joha rice and either chicken or beef, braised with spices and caramelised onions that give the dish its brownish tint.

As food historian Colleen Taylor Sen documents in her book, Food Culture of India, one royal cook is said to have prepped 65 pounds of meat to make broth for one serving of rice (to ensure maximum concentration of flavours), while another cooked his rice in stock made from chicken that were first fed musk and saffron pills to perfume their meat. Awadh’s matchless rakabdars were known to have taken great pains to prepare the stock. Pulaos cooked in yakhni were much coveted at the nawab’s table. The rice, fragrant and long-grained, is then cooked in this stock, so that it soaks up the broth and fluffs up with its goodness.

The backbone of a good yakhni pulao is, of course, the yakhni or meat stock, painstakingly prepared by cooking down meat on the bone with whole aromatic spices in water for long hours, until the bones have rendered all their flavours and umami richness into the stock.