The flavours of old Delhi

If you are one of those staying away from Delhi and missing the delicious food cooked at home, you should head straight to the food festival, designed and conceptualised by Delhi-based food connoisseur Osama Jalali at Le Jardin, The Oberoi.

Jalali has thoughtfully crafted the menu along with his mother Nazish Jalali and wife Nazia Khan. Curated under the banner of ‘Purani Dilli ki Dawat’, he has brought to the table not exotic dishes but food that he has grown up eating in his home in the by-lanes of Urdu Bazar near Jama Masjid in Old Delhi. “People find it hard to believe when I tell them that every dish in this festival is what I grew up eating and what my mother made in our house everyday,” he explains with a smile.

He prefers to call himself an experimental cook and shares that every dish that he has cooked till date has had no benchmark whatsoever. “All the recipes were born from watching my mother cook, stories that I heard from the streets of old Delhi and my search for what I call the lost recipes,” he states.

A food critic himself, he hopes to revive the lost recipes of the country, through the many food festivals. For starters, you can dig into ‘shammi kebab’, ‘seekh kebab’, ‘fish fry’ and ‘qeeme ki goli’. Vegetarians need not feel lost for they have ‘aloo palak ki pakodiyan’, ‘dahi phulki’ and ‘French bean ki shammi.’ The main course has interesting variations in chicken, lamb and mutton.

All the dishes on the menu whether ‘hari mirch qeema’, ‘urad daal gosht’, ‘saag kofta’ or ‘aloo ka zarda’, are those that you will not find at any restaurant because they were conceived in the Jalali household and prepared zealously by the family.

The ‘urad daal gosht’, for instance, reflects the taste of Rampur where Jalali’s mother spent her initial years. The emphasis of this food festival, explains Jalali, is home-style, comfort food without any extra additions. The ‘hari mirch qeema’ and ‘aloo gosht’ are dishes that most Delhites would relish and people from the South would also love just as much after they’ve tasted it.

The ‘biryani’ is tempered with the right amount of spice and doesn’t leave you feeling heavy and uneasy. There’s also the ‘Nihari’, which is chicken dumpling dipped in mashed spinach.  

No meal is complete without a topping of dessert and the Jalalis have excelled here as well. The ‘aloo ka zarda’ looks exactly like a carrot ‘halwa’ but Jalali politely lets you in on the secret of how potatoes can be shredded to transform into a dessert.

It’s hard to believe that you can make dessert from raw meat but the Jalalis show the way. “In ‘gosht ka halwa’, the meat is cooked in milk and sugar for at least four hours and then ground into a fine paste. The whole process takes at least four hours,” states Jalali.  
The festival is on till November 24.