Rogan josh Period BOrigin theory CVerified

From Persia to Kashmir

Rogan josh is a mutton stew that stands as the signature dish of the Kashmir region in northern India. Mutton is fried in hot oil or ghee, then combined with yoghurt and spices and simmered slowly. The technique itself has its source in Persian cooking.

The dish took root in Kashmir in the sixteenth century, in the age of the Mughal empire. According to the food historian Lizzie Collingham, the Mughal court, escaping the heat of central India, stayed in the cool of Kashmir and brought its court cuisine along. The Persian-derived braise was thus carried into the land of Kashmir, where it took on local herbs and a character of its own. In time it became the main course of the many-dish banquet known as the wazwan, and grew into what one might call the face of the region's cooking.

The way the red colour is produced differs between the older form and the modern one. The older form is said to have drawn its colour from natural pigments, the root of a safflower-like plant (ratan jot, alkanet) and the cockscomb flower (maval), and to have added no heat. Later Kashmiri versions use a mild Kashmiri chili as well, letting it carry both the colour and a gentle warmth. The main ingredient, mutton, is a long-established Old World meat.

The very meaning of the name rogan josh has never settled into one reading. One reading takes it as Persian, oil (rogan) and simmering (josh), to cook in oil; another as Urdu or Kashmiri, red (rogan) and meat (gosht). The two stand side by side, and which is the original is undecided. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of the dish name in English to 1934, and its etymology gives both spellings, roġan još and roġan gošt.

One piece can be read as saying the dish left its name in the records much earlier. That piece is a 2023 blog post on how the spice asafoetida (hing) was used in Mughal India. It cites the Ain-i-Akbari (around 1590) of Abul Fazl, who served the emperor Akbar, as its authority for asafoetida in the Mughal kitchen, and in the same paragraph adds that there is also mention of a Mughal dish named rogan josh. The post does not say where that mention is found, though read straight on, it seems to place the dish in the same book. Had the book recorded it, the earliest written appearance of the dish's name would reach back to the end of the sixteenth century. But the chapter of that source giving the recipes for dishes lists some thirty dishes, biryani, qaliya, do-piyaza, musamman, kabab and the rest, and the name rogan josh is nowhere among them (H. Blochmann's translation of the Ain-i-Akbari, Vol. 1, 1873).

The way the red is produced is said to differ between the old form and the modern one. Modern Kashmiri versions colour the dish with a mild chili, while the classical preparation is said to have used no chili, dyeing the stew instead with a safflower-like root and cockscomb flowers. As for the lineage, the accepted account is that the dish began in Persia and was carried into Kashmir along with the Mughal court, in the age of the Mughal empire. According to Lizzie Collingham's Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (Oxford University Press, 2006), the Mughal court, escaping the heat of central India, stayed in Kashmir and brought its court cuisine there. The details, the etymology and the source of the colour, remain matters of several views.