Fragrant treasures. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Marinated meat in layers of semi-boiled rice, the Persian import has proved more durable than the foreign dynasties that brought it to Delhi. Cooked in earthenware pots – the lids sealed with dough – biryani releases an exquisite scent that streams out when the cover is removed. If eaten with the hand, the heat could burn your fingers. Like a treasure hunter, the meat lover impatiently digs for the ‘piece’, but clearing off the intervening basmati is as flavoursome an experience. Matured with the fragrance of spices, the rice is infused with the flavor of the meat, which leaves a lingering aftertaste in your mouth. After the few ‘pieces’ are devoured, the meat

The choice of the intellectuals. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] This is a special dish in Delhi’s most exclusive cultural space. The honey & fig ice cream is made for the members-only dining room of the Indian International Centre (IIC), a club for novelists, historians, professors, journalists, publishers and out-of-work bureaucrats and politicians. While it is fashionable for the restaurant’s ancient patrons to whisper that the ‘service has slipped’, the honey & fig ice cream continues to be admired. According to the management, everyday more than half of the diners end their meals with this sweetened course, though there are choices, including the delicious ginger pudding with hot custard sauce. The elderly regulars talk of the honey & fig with

Chill of the lemon. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The simplest things in life are the most exquisite. As you walk in the scorching heat of Connaught Place, the sun is white, and the air is still and dusty. You are sweating and your throat is dry. Suddenly you come across a water cart, the one that sells a glass for Re 1 and the lemonade version for a rupee more. The vendor is sitting listlessly behind a row of glass tumblers, which are filled with green-yellow lemons. The scene is tempting but you are reluctant to approach the bhayya. What if the water is not clean? But your foolish companion insists on having a glass of shikanji (lemonade)

Heat relief. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Delhi food is laden with butter gravies and tandoori meats offering no respite to the digestion. Relief is to be found in cut vegetables, served raw with a sprinkle of masala salt. In summer, the street hawkers fill their carts with cucumbers and their slimmer cousins called kakdis. In winter, they sell tender, sweet carrots and radish, especially at congested traffic lights and railway crossings. Child-boys run up and down carrying the freshly peeled veggies, the green leaves (sometimes retained) contrasting with the virginal white and bright orange. In Delhi’s difficult weather, this is one of the greatest comfort foods. At Kasturba Gandhi Marg, next to the Hindustan Times building, a woman sits in the summer months

A strange dish. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Really, it oughtn’t to be allowed, to make dosa like that. The South Indian staple is a crepelike pancake of fermented lentil-rice flour batter stuffed with mustard seed-flecked potato mush. Accompanied with mild coconut chutney and fiery sambhar curry, masala dosa should be crisp, brittle and thin. What if the same potato mush is filled inside an omelet, with sambhar and coconut chutney as side dishes? In the South Indian Café, an open-air eatery in the North Campus of Delhi University, this fabrication is called egg dosa (Rs 40). In successful instances of fusion cuisine experiments, flavours from different schools of cooking unite to give something new and delicious. But in egg dosa, egg and

Delhi’s best-kept secret. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] If Bihar were a country, Delhi should be its capital and litti chokha its national dish. The capital is home to a large migrant population from Bihar, but... ‘Just what is litti chokha?’ Smoked brinjal and baked dough. A rustic two-dish combination symbolizes the resurgence of a region that has been vilified for too long as wretched, lawless and corrupt. Litti chokha began as the food of the poor in what is now known as Bihar, and rarely appears on roadside carts or restaurant menus of big cities. Instead, it has largely remained confined to the home kitchens of Biharis. The Delhi Walla once had home-made litti chokha here. Litti chokha is soul

The secret of the mutton. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] If you love mutton curry, you cannot ignore gular. The leaves of this tree are the food of goats. Gular, the common fig (Ficus carica) native to West Asia, is cultivated in North India. Delhi gets its supply from the farmlands of western Uttar Pradesh. The truck carrying gular leaves from Bulandshahar arrives in Delhi shortly after midnight. It stops at the traffic light outside Turkman Gate, one of the four surviving Mughal-era gateways leading to the walled city of Shahjahanabad. The waiting traders crowd around the truck; the leaves are priced at 700 Rs for a quintal and sold on for 10 Rs per keg. Most gular leaf stalls

The magic leaf. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] A foreign art critic visiting Delhi’s Connaught Place may be forgiven for thinking its red-splattered corridors are a form of abstract expression. Although the dirty white pillars of the colonial-era arcade were repainted in time for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, every column is again stained blood red. If you are looking for a culprit, it’s paan, the edible betel leaf stuffed with supari (betel nut), tobacco (optional), lime paste, catechu and other piquant flavours. The oozing liquid fills up the mouth, and is either swallowed or—as is evident across the city—spit out. In Connaught Place’s F-Block, the wall that was temporarily white after the hasty makeover in 2010 is marked with the red