Kabuli palaw: the rice of Afghan feasts, and rice in the Pashtun lands

At a glance

• Kabuli palaw (Qabili or Qabuli palaw) is steamed rice cooked in meat stock with lamb or chicken, spiced with cumin and cardamom and topped with fried carrot matchsticks, raisins and slivered nuts. Afghans call it their national dish, and it was once kept mostly for ceremonies. [5, 7]

• The name is old, but the recipe changed. A Qabuli rice dish with meat, ghee, split gram and spices is listed in the kitchen of the Mughal emperor Akbar's court, with no carrots, and with almonds and raisins as an extra "some add". [1]

• In Peshawar the dish is a late arrival. Peshawar's own cooks served a chickpea-and-raisin pulao and, for weddings, plain meat pulao on a tray, and Afghan refugee chefs set up qabuli palaw shops in Namak Mandi in the early 1980s. [8]

• The Peshawar valley had its own famous rice, Bara, grown south of the city. It was praised in a history written in Peshawar in 1798 and carried to Iran, and it has since disappeared. [3]

• A Pashtun rice dish with its own character is Kurram rice, cooked with black gram and served on big open platters at weddings, Iftar parties and festivals. [12]

What goes into it

The dish is built in two parts. In the version Farida Ayubi gave to AramcoWorld in 2021, from the cookbook Parwana, the rice is seasoned with cumin and cardamom and cooked with a leg of lamb. Onion and lamb are browned and simmered in stock. Basmati rice is parboiled, layered with the lamb and the spiced stock and steamed on very low heat. The topping is carrot matchsticks, raisins and slivered almonds and pistachios, fried briefly in oil and tossed with sugar and cardamom, then spooned over the heaped rice and meat. AramcoWorld calls the topping the dish's crowning glory, and says that it once took so long to make that it was mostly reserved for ceremonies. [5]

Cooks do not all agree on the method. Dawn's report on Afghan restaurants in Islamabad, in 2014, found two in the same city using different ones. The Pak-Afghan restaurant at Peshawar Mor used what the paper calls the Uzbek dump-pukht recipe, simmering the rice in a rich meat stew until it drank all the liquid. Kabul Restaurant in Jinnah Supermarket cooked the meat and the rice separately. Dawn found both rich enough to need no accompaniment. [7] Magnus Marsden, an anthropologist, describes the same split in Saudi Arabia, where northern Afghan cafes serve "Qabili palaw Uzbeki", Uzbek-style rice with meat, among their dishes. [4]

A Mughal Qabuli with no carrots

The name Qabuli appears in a document far older than any restaurant. Abu'l-Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari, his record of the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar, has a chapter of recipes for the royal kitchen. He sorts the dishes into those without meat, those of meat and rice, and meats with spices. Qabuli is the first of the meat-and-rice dishes. [1]

In H. Blochmann's English translation the entry reads: "Qabuli: 10 s. rice; 7 s. meat; 3.5 s. ghi; 1 s. gram skinned; 2 s. onions; .5 salt; .25 s. fresh ginger; cinnamon, round pepper, cuminseed, of each 1 d.; cardamoms and cloves, .5 d. of each; some add almonds and rasins; this gives five dishes." [1] The s. is the ser, a weight. Next to it come Duzdbiryan and a Qima Palao of minced meat. [1] Abu'l-Fazl gives quantities only, with no method, and he does not say why it is called Qabuli. His version has peeled gram where today's has carrots, and the raisins are optional.

So two things are true at once. A dish called Qabuli was being cooked in Mughal kitchens, and the carrot-and-raisin palaw served at Afghan weddings is not simply that recipe.

Where the rice dish came from

Ármin Vámbéry, a Hungarian orientalist who wrote Sketches of Central Asia (1868) from his travels there, says the favourite national dish of the people he calls Tartars, the Uzbeks among them, is palau, also called ash. In his chapter on house, food and dress, tail fat is melted, the meat fried and simmered, thinly sliced carrots added, and rice laid on top to steam. He ends: "From here it was introduced among the Afghans; by them to the Persians, who call it kabuli (kabul). The pilau, if I am not mistaken, has its origin in Central Asia." [2]

That is one traveller's opinion, hedged by himself. It does not mean the dish was unknown in Afghanistan before. It does show that a European who knew Central Asia in the 1860s thought of the dish as Central Asian and of Kabuli as the Persian name for the Afghan version.

Dawn's 2014 recipe feature on Kabuli pulao quotes this passage and says Vámbéry ate the dish with an Afridi tribe several times. [6] The passage in Sketches of Central Asia says nothing about Afridis. It describes the cooking of Central Asia, and the feature's version of the recipe also puts raisins in, which the printed text does not. [2, 6]

Rice, guests and ceremonies

Palaw was guest food in Pashtun country before the refugees reached Peshawar. Pashtun food and the table of hospitality records the dinner of palaw that the chief's brother at Daraban sent to Mountstuart Elphinstone's officers in the early nineteenth century, and Nancy Hatch Dupree's description of a mounded platter of rice as the main dish of a feast. The guest's claim on the house is set out under melmastia, and the place where he is fed under the hujra.

A photograph from Kunar shows a feast of this kind. On 5 November 2009 the provincial leaders of Kunar celebrated the opening of the Khas Kunar truck bridge with a meal laid on a long cloth, and the platters down its middle hold rice with orange carrot strips and dark raisins on top.

Dawn's Eid report from Peshawar's Namak Mandi food street in 2023 lists pulao among the dishes crowds came for on the third day, beside chapli kebab, mutton karahi and paye, and says one visitor bought three packets of Peshawari pulao for an Eid party at home. [11]

Peshawar's own pulao

Manzoor Ali, writing in Life & Thyme in 2020, reports that Namak Mandi, the salt market behind Qissa Khwani, took on a second life in the early 1980s. Afghan refugee chefs who had fled the Soviet invasion opened shops selling qabuli pulao there, with large pieces of buffalo meat, thin carrots and raisins. His informant Gul Mohammad, who came from Mazar-i-Sharif, said a refugee from Kunduz named Haji Jalal already had a pulao eatery nearby when he arrived. [8] The wider story of that exodus is in the Soviet war and the refugees.

What had Peshawar eaten before? Ali's sources are two Peshawar men. Dr Muhammad Taqi, a US-based doctor and columnist from old Peshawar, says the city's people always had chana mewa pulao, a mass-cooked pulao of meat with chickpeas and raisins, eaten especially at religious ceremonies and commemorations. For weddings and other special days, he says, Peshawar families ate meat pulao without chickpeas or raisins, served on a traditional tray called khwancha and eaten with a split-chickpea qorma. [8] Ali Awais of the Gandhara Hindko Board says he has not read of qabuli pulao in colonial or recent writing on Peshawar's food, and that the Afghan refugees brought it. [8]

Ali adds a practical reason for the old dish's survival: qabuli pulao carries more meat, so it is costly for large gatherings. [8] Taqi names Haji Lali, one of Peshawar's best-known cooks of the 1960s and 1970s, who was invited to cook for King Zahir Shah, and says he cannot recall Haji Lali ever cooking qabuli pulao. [8]

Others tell the same story. Murtaza Haider, writing in Dawn in 2012, says Afghan refugees brought Kabuli cuisine to the city, with their pulao of rice cooked with raisins, almonds, orange peel and goat meat. [9] Bahaud Din, who manages the Baba Wali Afghan hotel in Peshawar, told Arab News that his father opened the first hotel offering Kabuli pulao decades ago, when he moved from Afghanistan. The dish then cost 6 rupees and in 2017 cost 240. [10]

Dawn's Bisma Tirmizi, writing in 2014, calls Kabuli pulao an ancestor of Yakhni pulao (she spells it "Yakhi"). [6] That is her statement alone.

The rice of Bara

The Peshawar valley is not only an eater of rice. It grew some of the most admired rice in the region. Timur Khan, a PhD candidate at Leiden University who studies the Peshawar valley, writes in Ajam Media Collective in 2024 that south of Peshawar the Bara river watered fields of a long, fragrant rice that carried its name. [3]

The earliest detailed description he found is in the Tarikh-i Hussain Shahi, a history of the Durrani dynasty written in Peshawar in 1798 by Imam al-Din Hussaini. Hussaini sorts the rice into kinds used in the kitchens of nobles and sultans and lesser kinds, puts Bara at the top, and remarks on its wonderful fragrance and on how it lengthens in cooking. Khan adds that it could cost up to eight times as much as lesser rices. [3]

Its reputation travelled. The Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh, who held Peshawar in the 1820s and 1830s, took a tribute of Bara rice and gave it as a diplomatic gift. In 1837 an envoy from Kabul to Iran presented Bara rice to Iranian ministers. The Polish orientalist Alexander Chodzko wrote in 1842 that the most exquisite rice imported to Persia came from Peshawar, with a long thin grain that made an excellent pilau. The Qajar prince Nadir Mirza called Peshawar rice the best for scent and delicacy, though his book also lets a character prefer rice from Najaf. [3]

After the British annexed Peshawar in 1849, Khan says, Bara declined. The new government took no interest in it, and by 1868 the area under it had fallen more than fourfold. The Afghan ruler Abd al-Rahman Khan even bought land in the Bara area to secure a supply, the 1897-98 Gazetteer of the Peshawar District records. Iran's prime minister Mirza Aqa Khan Nuri brought Peshawar seed to Mazandaran, probably between 1851 and 1858, and it became the Sadri rice that Iranians still grow. At home, Khan writes, citing the Express Tribune, the last rice-growing in the Bara area ended in the 1980s when the river was diverted. [3]

Kurram rice and other Pashtun rice dishes

Rice has its own Pashtun dishes that are not palaw. Sher Alam Shinwari wrote in Dawn in 2017 about Kurmawaale Ruje, Kurram rice, a dish that his informants say began in Kurram long ago. Black gram is boiled for an hour, then mixed into the cooked rice, and people add ghee, curd and sometimes chicken. It is served to guests on large open platters, in local speech khaanak, and Sajid Nawaz of Sadda said it was served most often at weddings, Iftar parties and festivals. Tajir Hussain, a senior research officer in Parachinar, said a house without it is considered naive. [12]

The same report has Subhan Ali saying that Kurram rice differs in taste and cooking from Swat's Begumai and Charsadda's keechrrai ruje, and that Begumai was an old rice variety first grown in Swat. Tariq Afghan of Dir said rice is cooked in all Pakhtun areas. [12]