Heirloom Recipes

There's a sense of royalty and grandeur in a heritage recipe! Gautam Anand brings us traditonal fare that spells richness of culture.



With Partition, KC Badshah had no choice but to leave behind home and his ancestral properties in Lahore and Peshawar. He arrives now in Shimla. The storied town of Mashobra to be exact. Famous for housing the Presidential Retreat, once visited by India's last Viceroy. Other notable addresses in or near the town include Wildflower Hall, and Carignano, the villa of Victorian baker-hotelier-photographer Peliti, whose eponymous restaurant finds mention in Rudyard Kipling's The Phantom Rickshaw and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day.

Perhaps this is the kind of wistful retreat Badshah's past seeks out for a sense of continuity; given the idyllic past he has had to surrender, it is a refuge, a sanctuary. So it is here in Mashobra, in a sprawling mansion vacated by the erstwhile colonisers, that his family settles down to a charmed routine that recreates the air of their past life in a new setting sheltered by mountains and trees of the Himalayas.

Here the Badshahs came into their own, in the company of Lolly, KC's comrade-in-arms from their days as engineering students in London. Their cosmopolitan spirits draw distinguished guests who, like them, had also chosen Mashobra as their retreat. Prominent personalities including the Bogas, Oberois, Cruikshanks, Maneckshaws, Bedis, Asaf Alis, and a retinue of formerly titled civilians who had fled Peshawar.

The KCs would keep an equally distinguished winter home in the capital– in Nizammudin East, right next to the historic Arab Sarai (built in the 16th Century by Emperor Humayunu00b4s chief consort, Hamida Banu Begum).

At the Badshah's mansion in Mashobra, guests would gather, leaving behind the upheaval of recent history, looking ahead to a future of promise. While such privileged residents of the town had an active social calendar, the most anticipated event of the year would be an invite to the Badshah's annual dinner held in June. The dinner would lay out closely-held heirloom dishes.

The Badshah's summer dinners were a feast of roasts, chops, and morrel pulao. The heirloom dishes gave guests a moment to ponder and relish the romance of the past as it had been, and even what it could be.

That social calendar has long since been erased by time, but through their recipes, we can still savour the grace and style of the heirlooms once held by the Badshahs and their close friends.Here we share a few standout recipes from KC's close circle of friends. The most celebrated of these recipes are the brioche and bread pudding, plum elixir, and Himalayan plum wine. While every dinner was a feast at Badshah's table, we have chosen three to contribute to the festive season.