Biryanis, pulaos and the mandi mystery

Pratibha Karan, in her book Biryani, briskly explains the difference between biryani and pulao. Biryanis layer rice with other ingredients before cooking them together — they are strongly spiced and moist. Pulaos mix rice with other ingredients before cooking — they are mildly spiced and dry.

In A Quest for the Perfect Rice, Zubin D’Souza considers the question from the eater’s point of view. Biryani is for celebrations, so an excess of ingredients is expected, all coming together in one delicious meal. A pulao can be eaten on its own, or with a curry or chutney, so the spices are mild and added ingredients less dominant.

Even simpler is tehari, often just rice cooked with vegetables for a nourishing, yet digestible dish. “A tehari ends up with the rice clumping together in most cases because of the reduced amounts of fat being used,” writes D’Souza.


Into this mix comes mandi, a rice dish that’s trending in Kerala and Hyderabad and spreading to other places too. It came from Yemen, which gives it a link to Hyderabad, which has had a Yemeni community since the Nizam’s days. But the Kerala version follows the trend of the Gulf states, where Yemeni mandi has become a popular dish.

In Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land, he describes eating “a tray of rice and mindi, kid half roasted, half smoked over the embers of a lidded fire-pit”. The word he uses for this tandoor-like dish refers to the meat, but now includes the rice as well. Some descriptions of the original dish suggest that the pot of rice was suspended in the pit to cook along with the meat.

Mandi has evolved in the Gulf, but in essence remains meat and rice, usually not cooked together like biryani and pulao, but united by a smoky, subtly savoury taste. In Feast: Food of the Islamic World, Anissa Helou gives a recipe adapted from the Gulf, where the juices of the roast meat are added to the water used to cook the rice. In Razique Hosain Shaikh’s Great Gulf Cookbook, the rice is cooked in chicken stock and the meat roasted separately. A coal is lit, placed on an onion and put in the pan with the meat, which gets infused with the fumes. Mandi is presented with meat laid out on top of the rice, which absorbs flavours that way.

Mandi’s meaning in India is also evolving, but what diners usually get is well-cooked meat and a very large amount of mildly flavoured rice. It is a rather dry dish, especially for those used to biryani, but here, one innovation from the Gulf is useful. At some point, mandi was paired up with toum, a Lebanese sauce made by crushing garlic with salt, oil and lemon juice into a creamy paste. Another solution, which Indian restaurants seem to be following, is to use garlic mayonnaise. The Europeans who popularised mayonnaise never imagined eating it with rice, but it works surprisingly well, the intense garlicky taste tempered by the mild taste of the rice, and the creamy texture coating the grains perfectly.

Mandi is definitely a dish for hardcore rice lovers, but why has it taken off when Indian cuisine has so many varieties of biryani and pulao that could be better known? Perhaps it’s the presentation, with meat upfront, rather than buried in the rice. Perhaps it’s the novelty of eating it with garlic mayonnaise. Or perhaps it’s the allure of the wealth of the Gulf, which endures despite current turmoil.

It does suggest opportunities for other rice dishes. Mujaddara, for example, where rice is cooked with whole lentils that stay separate, unlike melding with the rice, as dal does in khichdi. There are Indian dishes like Hyderabadi qabooli or Tamil kaima kichadi choru, where rice is cooked with whole lentils, but these have never become well-known. Perhaps with a foreign name, these could start trending, like mandi .