Danbauk Period COrigin theory CVerified

Danbauk is a dish of rice scented with ghee, combined with chicken and spices, then sealed in the pot and cooked slowly over a low flame. Rice is a local crop grown across Southeast Asia for thousands of years, and chicken and ghee are both available within the region. The ingredients themselves had long been present in Myanmar's kitchens.

Then a way of cooking crossed the sea. Spices and other elements are cooked into the rice, and the pot is sealed with dough or cloth so no steam escapes as the heat works through, the method that belongs to the biryani tradition of the Indian subcontinent. The name itself tells of its origin: danbauk comes from the Persian dum pukht, meaning to steam-cook under a sealed, low fire. Until this style of cooking, refined in Mughal India, crossed the sea and was brought into the kitchens of Rangoon, danbauk had no way of coming into being.

Those who carried it were the Indian people who poured into the country during the colonial period. After the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-26), Burma was absorbed into British India, and following the full annexation of 1886 some one million people from the subcontinent came across. In the port city of Rangoon, the Indian population swelled from sixteen thousand (16 percent of the city) in 1872 to sixty-six thousand (44 percent) by 1881. With this movement of people, biryani-style cooking settled into the city's tables and grew into a dish native to Myanmar, a festive dish and the signature of Muslim eating houses.

Just when, and by which route, danbauk entered Myanmar has still not been narrowed to a single answer.

The stronger view holds that Indian Muslim migrants of the colonial period carried it. The clues cross from two directions. One is the word: danbauk goes back to the Persian dum pukht, showing that the sealed, low-fire cooking refined in the Mughal era was carried over intact as its very name. The other is population: the Indian residents of Rangoon surged from 16 to 44 percent of the city between the 1870s and 1880s. The name that carries the method's origin and the era when its bearers filled the city point to the same colonial period.

There is also a view that looks earlier, before British rule. Through the trade and ports of the Bay of Bengal, Indian Muslim traders and settlers had lived in the coastal cities from before colonization (broadly, the eighteenth century), and biryani-style cooking could have been brought over through those communities well before then. But no contemporary record directly shows danbauk being eaten in the pre-colonial period, and the timing of any first arrival cannot be confirmed that far back.

The two views differ over when to place the first arrival. Even so, they do not conflict on the point that the mass migration of the colonial period is what settled the dish and made it a national food. Whichever path one follows, danbauk took shape as a dish of Myanmar only after the biryani cooking method crossed the sea and took root in this land.