©2003 Ashy Macbean. All rights reserved
Now, before we begin, I have to point out that I discovered this dish in a restaurant in Rajasthan. My friend Anil cooked it and he didn't use a 'dum' which, I think, is a kind of earthenware cooking pot. I could imagine top Kashmiri chefs getting all indignant, saying, 'Where the hell does a Rajasthani think he gets the right to tell people how to cook Kashmiri food', but I'm sure Anil wouldn't claim that this is an authentic Kashmiri dish. Anil runs a restaurant and 'Kashmiri' in general Indian restaurant terms usually just means a dish has a few raisins in it and maybe a cashew nut or two. Sometimes a couple of slices of banana are used. The main idea is that the dish is slightly sweet and doesn't have much chilli in it. I don't know if that's really how Kashmiris do things, but even if they do, I suspect they don't do every dish that way.
I was in Kashmir for a few weeks one summer. If you look at an Indian map, all of Kashmir is in India and India shares a border with Afghanistan. If you look at a Pakistani map, Kashmir is in Pakistan and the border with India is down around Himichal Pradesh. In reality, the line of control follows mountain ridges through the middle of Kashmir. I crossed from China into the north of Kashmir and it was Pakistanis who met me at the border and it was a Pakistani visa they were looking for in my passport. What I remember about the cuisine is that it was rather plain. Definitely not many chillies - not many spices at all in fact. I don't remember cashew nuts or raisins, although dried apricots seemed to play a big part, especially in the Hunza valley area. And while we're on that subject, why not check out my Hunza apricot custard sometime. That's a cracker. I just remembered how good it tasted after being out trekking all day working up an appetite. But let's not stray too far from our current recipe.
To return to Kashmiri dum aloo, this dish involves cutting holes in raw potatoes and stuffing them. If you find yourself particularly adept at this you might also want to try my recipe for potatoes stuffed with spinach and walnuts, in which the same technique is used.
It's probably best to peel your potatoes and make holes in them before you do anything else. If you leave them in a pan of cold water they will keep until you need them. Like so many of the recipes in the cookbook, you should use a large deep frying pan for this one. Try to select potatoes of similar sizes and lay them in the pan your going to use to find out how many you'll need. They shouldn't be too tightly squeezed in, as you need to leave space for the sauce. Leave at least 2 or 3 cm between each potato. Note which side of each potato faces upward when they come to rest in the pan. That's the side you make the hole in.
As you can see from the list of ingredients, this recipe is anything but simple. However, most of the things on the list are spices, so it's not actually as bad as it looks.
Ingredients
70-80g of paneer
Around 7-9 small to medium potatoes
1 onion
1 tomato (or a tsp. of tomato puree)
1 dessert spoon of raisins
2 dessertspoons of desiccated coconut
A good handful of cashew nuts
4 or 5 dessertspoons of yoghurt
1 tsp. of jam
2 or 3 cloves of garlic
A small piece of root ginger
1 tsp. coriander seeds
A few black peppercorns
A pinch of aniseeds
3 cloves
A piece of cinnamon bark
2 cardamoms
A pinch of dried methi leaves
Vegetable oil
Salt
Once you've prepared the potatoes, move on to the stuffing. Mash the paneer with two teaspoons of coconut, a few crushed cashew nuts, the jam, most of the raisins, a little salt and enough yoghurt to bind everything together (a dessertspoon should do it). Drain the potatoes and stuff them with the mixture.
Peel the onion, ginger and garlic. Chop everything including the tomato but keep them separate. Heat the pan and when it is really hot, throw in all the whole dry spices and roast them for half a minute or less - until you can smell them. Transfer the roasted spices to a mortar, put some oil in the pan and add the chopped onion. Turn the heat down and while the onion is softening, grind the spices then add the garlic and ginger and pound everything to a paste. Add the paste to the pan and stir. Fry for a few minutes then add the tomato, two or three cups of water and some salt. Sit the potatoes in the pan, holes facing upwards and when the sauce starts boiling, turn the heat down quite low and cover the pan. Let the pan simmer gently for fifteen minutes.
Smash up the rest of the cashew nuts with the pestle and mortar until they begin to form a paste, then mix in the rest of the yoghurt and coconut, the methi and the few raisins you saved from the stuffing. Thin this sauce with water until it has the consistency of pouring cream. When the potatoes have been simmering for fifteen minutes, pour over the yoghurt sauce and simmer for a further ten minutes.
To serve, lift two potatoes on to a plate for each person and spoon some sauce over them. You could serve some plain boiled rice along with them.