Uttara Khan is an alumna of the Delhi College of Art, which produces artists, not chefs, but she is famous for her ‘Murshidabad biryani’ today as she has transitioned seamlessly from Fine Art to the finer art of cooking.
Maybe she was destined to become a home chef, having Subir Bhowmick, a well-regarded Taj executive of his time, as her father, and having spent some of her formative years at the Rambagh Palace in Jaipur, where she got to savour the Continental dishes coming out of the iconic hotel’s kitchen. And of course, her mother made sure their home cooked meals were never ordinary.
Growing up in a setting that has been synonymous with the good life, Uttara was naturally curious to learn more about cooking, so she started digging into cookbooks that used to be the staple before the Internet took over our lives. The weights may have been pounds and ounces, but these did not deter Uttara as she understood the instructions and got down to work.
Even her first sponge cake, which was anything but spongy, did not stop her from trying constantly to get better. She would throw surprise birthday parties for her mother, for starters, and she kept getting better at managing the kitchen and feeding her family and, after she got married, her and her husband’s expanding circle of close friends. And the seeds of a home chef were sown.
“I realized I like cooking, but I love feeding other people,” Uttara said on ‘Food Talk with Sourish Bhattacharyya’ for the YouTube channel of We The Chefs. “During festive occasions such as Id, we would entertain a lot of people. On such occasions, one would have to walk through a sea of people in order to meet me in the kitchen,” she recalled. Cooking has never been a chore for Uttara; it is an expression of love.
It was Covid that finally made Uttara take the leap from cooking for family and friends to becoming a home chef, reaching out to a bigger market and preparing food commercially. Remembering her early days in the business, Uttara said a friend of hers, who had attended some of her Id parties, encouraged her to start cooking on a commercial scale. When she replied that she had never done it before, he countered her, saying: “You said the same thing about art. You said you could never sell art, but that is what you have been doing!”
These words were the sparks that turned her passion into a second profession. But it was not easy to make the transition because becoming a home chef means mastering the science of scaling up, and dealing with issues such as timing orders and pricing. Quantities, of course, were never a challenge for Uttara because she was used to cooking more than six kilos of her famous ‘Murshidabad biryani’ for the parties she hosted – and, as she put it, “we are used to finishing up three kilos of biryani just within the family!” But she needs a 48-hour notice and only accepts orders for four people or more.
Talking about her famous biryani, Uttara clarified that there’s nothing officially known as the ‘Murshidabad biryani’, but because she got the recipe from her mother-in-law, who was from that former princely state tucked away in northern West Bengal. Her biryani, Uttara pointed out, is closer to the one created in the kitchens of Awadh’s Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, but with her mother-in-law’s unique touches.
From ‘Murshidabad biryani’, the discussion veered to the nawab’s exile to Metiabruz, Kolkata’s ‘Little Lucknow’, which led to the invention of the biryani famously associated with the eastern metropolis. And far from being so poor that his cooks had to add potatoes to the biryani, the nawab chose to include the tuber because it was then still a novelty and therefore only a prince could afford them.
The pension the nawab received from the East India Company was, in fact, a minor fortune, which allowed him to build the Sibtainabad Imambara in Metiabruz inspired by Lucknow’s historic Bada Imambara. And the Kolkata biryani’s potatoes absorb all the flavours, making each one of them an umami bomb. So, why was the egg added to the biryani? Uttara doesn’t find any reason for the addition of the egg, which is unable to soak in flavours and offers no visual relief as the egg wedges do in Caesar’s salad. Maybe the addition of the egg was seen as just a novelty by a cook in the nawab’s kitchen and it became a part of the storied biryani for all time to come.
Tracing her culinary evolution, Uttara said she started with Continental dishes, putting only the ones that her children loved on her menu (and of course her cheesecakes inspired by her visits to The Oberoi in Mumbai every Thursday, her father’s off day). Later, she went on to master Awadhi preparations when she was training the cooks she had employed at a resort she ran for five years in Uttarakhand.
Over the years, she believes she has learnt to roll out great chicken koftas, acquired the patience and the skills needed to make keema kaleji (it requires the slow frying of chopped onions for two hours so that they get caramelised and release the natural sweetness that gives the dish its distinctive taste), and prepare shami kababs just the way they do them in Lucknow. Her philosophy is to serve people the food she enjoys eating.
Being a home chef gives Uttara the freedom to let her menu mirror her personal favourites and surprise people with her choices. That is what she loves about how she earns her bread and butter. “Because I love feeding people, my food is indulgent,” Uttara said in conclusion. “There’s no room for it being zero oil, zero sugar, zero fat – my food has everything: oil, sugar, fat, all the things that people may not want in their bodies, but once in a while it’s OK for them to indulge themselves.”