Karahi Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Karahi is also the name of the pan itself: a heavy, two-handled, hemispherical iron vessel. The word goes back through the Prakrit kataha to the Sanskrit kataha, and it appears in the old medical treatise the Sushruta Samhita. Deep and wok-like, this iron vessel is an old tool that has long been used in South Asian kitchens.

As a dish, karahi means setting that iron pan over the fire, dropping in bone-in mutton or chicken, and searing it quickly and hard together with chopped tomato, ginger, garlic and green chili. Unlike korma or handi, which simmer slowly on a base of onion, karahi uses no onion; its whole character lies in bringing the acidity of tomato and the fat of the meat together at high heat in a matter of minutes. The ingredients are pared down to meat and tomato, and the result has a robust look, the sides of the pan glossy with fat and reduced tomato.

Along the roads of Lahore, Peshawar and Karachi stand the eateries called dhabas. When an order comes, the cook sets the iron pan over a high flame, sears the meat before the customer in a few minutes, works in the tomato, and carries the whole steaming pan to the table. The tomato itself came into the Indian Ocean world from the New World, and, as the food historian Lizzie Collingham notes, it entered South Asian cooking as a relatively late foreign arrival; only after tomatoes crossed the sea and took root in South Asian kitchens could the tomato-driven karahi of today come into being. Where an old iron vessel met a red fruit brought from abroad, karahi in its present form spread in modern times as a signature dish of eating out.

The riddle of karahi is not "when" but "where." The name of the pan reaches back to an old medical treatise, yet on the question of when the present dish, meat and tomato seared hard together, spread as a signature dish, the accounts largely agree: it was in the twentieth century. Where they part is on the place of its birth.

One view makes the Punjab, and above all Lahore, its home. In the eatery culture of the great city of Lahore, chicken karahi was refined and came to be known as a signature dish.

The other view places its origin in the North-West Frontier Province, today's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In this colonial-era borderland, at Landi Kotal at the foot of the Khyber Pass, the Shinwari and Afridi people are said to have made it as a practical dish, fresh meat cooked quickly with the barest ingredients of meat, tomato, garlic and green chili; from there, by way of Peshawar and through the dhabas and eateries, it spread to Lahore and Karachi and changed shape from place to place. The bone-in gosht karahi in particular carries this frontier account of its origins.

In recent years a food-history piece in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn took up this frontier origin, drawing on the food historian Lizzie Collingham's book Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (Oxford University Press, 2006) to present the reading that the dish began with the Shinwari and Afridi of Landi Kotal and passed on to the Punjab. That the dish took its name from the pan is told alongside it. An origin story that had leaned on Wikipedia now had a named work of food history behind it.

The two views share the same twentieth-century span and part only over the land of its birth. Yet the two are not necessarily exclusive; they can be read as a difference of emphasis, placing the place of origin in the frontier and the place of its rise to fame in the Punjab. There is not yet enough primary evidence to rule decisively for either side. An old iron pan and a young dish, and an unsettled birthplace: karahi carries all three, and is still being seared over the iron pans of the eateries today.