TIL there are gharanas for food just like music
Why do we remember music gharanas but not food gharanas?
A few weeks ago I was reading about music gharanas, and a really random question popped into my head. We all know names like Jaipur, Patiala, Gwalior. even if you don't listen to hindustani classical music, you've probably heard those names somewhere.
But then I wondered did food ever have something like that?
As it turns out, some old royal kitchens weren't just places where recipes were cooked. They had rules and certain techniques were non-negotiable. Families spent generations mastering the same dishes with ideas about why food should be cooked a certain way, not just how.
Food gharanas had aย sense of a tradition with their own language, methods, and people who spent generations refining it
For instance the gharana of Awadh. I'd always assumed dum was just an old fashioned word for slow cooking. Apparently, itโs more than a mere process. The pot was sealed with dough, heat came from below, but also from live coals placed on the lid. The whole point was to trap steam so nothing escaped. Every aroma stayed inside the vessel instead of disappearing into the kitchen. Even things like edible perfumes weren't simply there to make the food smell nice. From what I've read, they were part of a much bigger way of thinking about flavour, balance and digestion.ย
Once the royal courts disappeared, so did the world that supported these kitchens. Food that once took days had to be made in hours as ingredients became too expensive while restaurants rapidly replaced royal kitchens, and naturally the food adapted. Which isn't entirely a bad thingย but somewhere along the way, I wonder if we stopped preserving the thinking behind the food and only kept the dishes.
I believe that's why we still talk about music gharanas, but almost never food gharanas. Music had people documenting lineages, preserving traditions, naming schools, teaching students who proudly identified with them. Food mostly got reduced to geography be it Lucknowi, Chettinad, Rajasthani, Punjabi and many more. These labels tell us where the food comes from, not how people thought about cooking it.
Maybe I'm completely overthinking this or food gharana might not even be the right term to describe this.
I'm curious if anyone else has family recipes that were passed down this way. From grandparents, hereditary cooks, temple kitchens, or communities I mean recipes where there were actual rules
Sources:
https://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/Food/gharana-of-food-not-just-music/article4323212.ece
https://youngintach.org/files/gharanas7.pdfย
https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/dance/the-beauty-of-patiala-gharana/article22621825.ece
https://open.library.ubc.ca/media/stream/pdf/24/1.0073063/5