Rajma Chawal Is More Than (Everyone’s) Comfort Food
Text by Sohel Sarkar
In the culinary imagination of North India, rajma chawal is a stand-in for care. Photo courtesy: Kishi Arora
My memories of the time I spent in Delhi as a young journalist are peppered with the image of my landlady, Mrs. K, asking me over for a meal each time we crossed paths. A decade later, I remember this friendly, if somewhat domineering, matriarch and her generosity with great fondness. What I also recall quite distinctly is the language in which this suggestion was made. It was worded not as a simple invitation to lunch or dinner but instead as a very specific offer of rajma chawal — a plate of kidney beans and rice.
For anyone who has spent time in north India, especially in and around Punjab, or Delhi with its sizeable post-Partition Punjabi community, or had some exposure to Bollywood movies where “maa ke haath ka rajma chawal” (rajma chawal cooked by one’s mother) is the pinnacle of the mother-child love language, the wording of Mrs. K’s invite would not come as a surprise. For me, born and raised in a Bengali household in Kolkata and, until then, a relative foreigner to the quotidian delights of this north Indian culinary behemoth, it was always a source of mild amusement.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that my years in Delhi were my first proper introduction to the joy that is a plate of piping hot rajma chawal with (if you dared) rivulets of butter running through it. It is from Mrs. K that I learnt to make a functional version of the dish, though I glossed over her slow cooking prompt to reach straight for the pressure cooker. In the culinary imagination of the region, rajma chawal was a stand-in for food and care. In many parts of the country, it was, and continues to be, a quintessential comfort food.
Dire times induce a craving for the familiar, and the pandemic—with its discomfiting jostle between grief and consumption—found us looking for solace in familiar “comfort foods.” As we reached for Parle-G biscuits, Maggi noodles, and pizza, the cult of kidney beans and rice also spread and grew. Chef Vikas Khanna called rajma chawal “your quarantine comfort food” and chef-restaurateur Nikhil Merchant made it for a Covid-relief fundraiser cookalong during India’s harrowing second wave.
In the U.S. too, where kidney beans were long considered “bunker food”—with some exceptions like the Louisiana red beans and rice emblematic of the Creole food tradition—they became prize hoarded goods popular in home cooking recipes. Perhaps responding to this popularity, The New York Times’ restaurant critic Tejal Rao offered her own recipe of “Punjabi-style red beans.” As it happens, her well-meaning suggestion of using mozzarella or string cheese instead of heavy cream, or cannellini or pinto beans if kidney beans were nowhere to be found, did not go down too well with the self-styled vanguards of the “authentic” Punjabi rajma chawal in India and in the diaspora.
The notion of one authentic recipe for kidney beans, however, begins to falter when we consider the origin stories of recipes and their ingredients, and trace their centuries-long travel across the world. Rajma chawal, and more specifically, the Punjabi-style rajma chawal, may have become synonymous with north Indian food, but its star ingredient is not indigenous to the country. Nor is the tomato, which, along with onions of Asian origin, serves as the base of the dish. There was no mention of rajma in any Indian text, ancient or medieval, until about a century ago, food historian K.T. Achaya points out in Indian Food: A Historical Companion. As with much of the “staples” we now find on our plates, it made its way over to India through colonial pathways.
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Even though several varieties of rajma are now cultivated in India, the bean is not indigenous to India. Photo courtesy: Rushina Munshaw Ghildiyal
The red kidney bean, as well as other varieties such as the white navy bean, the mottled pinto bean, and the black bean, collectively referred to as “common beans,” are descendents of a common ancestor that originated in the Americas. Known scientifically as Phaseolus vulgaris, this wild ancestor spread from present-day northern Mexico all the way to Argentina. It was domesticated independently in the Peruvian Andes as well as in Mexico, Ken Albala writes in Beans: A History.
“Remains of P. vulgaris from a cave in the Peruvian Andes have been radiocarbon dated at about 6000 BCE and they may have been domesticated well before that [...] Their domestication, again independently, occurred in Mexico only a few thousand years later,” he notes.
Beans were one of the principal crops of the early so-called New World, and in combination with maize, that other staple grain of Mesoamerica, formed a “fairly complete protein package”, according to Albala. From Central and South America, these crops travelled to Asia (and India) after making a longish pit stop in Europe.
The eastward journey of the kidney bean and its cousins began in the year 1492 when Spain’s Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas while voyaging in frantic search of lands to colonise, people to civilise, and spices and gold to take back home. Over the next two centuries, the Spaniards and Portuguese took the lead in transferring to Europe a number of plant species they encountered in the New World as potential sources of food and/or medicine.
By now, the devastating consequences of this colonial endeavour, euphemistically called the “Columbian exchange”, are well known. Along with the transfer of plants and animals, these transoceanic voyages also resulted in the transmission of pathogens. As white settlers and traders poured into the New World and departed with local foods, they left behind diseases that killed millions of Indigenous people. A series of epidemics wiped out anywhere between 80 to 95 percent of the Indigenous populations across the Americas in the first 100-150 years. As such, these ‘exchanges’ are inextricable from the general pillage wrought by Columbus and other ‘explorers’.
From Europe, ships carrying the products of these colonial exploits travelled along spice routes to prospective colonies in Africa and Asia, including India. The dense, protein-rich nature of beans, which could be used after the fresh food ran out, made it particularly conducive to sea travel.
The first European to arrive in India for trade was the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, who landed in Calicut on India’s Malabar Coast in 1498. But it’s unlikely that the kidney bean came with him. That voyage took place well before most New World food products made it to Europe, and more than four centuries before rajma was mentioned in any Indian text. Achaya credits French colonisers with introducing the bean to India. The French set foot in India as early as the 1680s but the bean likely came only after the Second French intervention in Mexico in 1860. At the time, it landed not in its current ‘home’ in north India but in the French colonies of Pondicherry, Karaikal, and Mahé in the south.
“The English in India found them an agreeable foodgrain, and the beans were raised first as garden crops till the 19th century, and as commercial crops only thereafter,” Achaya writes. Commercial cultivation facilitated the northward travel of the beans over time.
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Explaining the contemporary ubiquity of rajma, journalist Vir Sanghvi writes, “Wherever there was a tradition of black dal [...], households took to rajma and it soon became a kitchen staple. But despite the speed with which it became part of the north Indian diet, rajma did not travel well, which is why you are unlikely to be served rajma at homes outside of the north.”
Sanghvi’s second assertion, however, does not quite square off with the use of kidney beans in a wide variety of cuisines and dishes elsewhere in India. Even in the north, the Punjabi version—made with a base of pureed onions and tomatoes, whole spices like cumin and bay leaf, and ground spices like red chilli, coriander, and the aromatic spice blend called garam masala—may dominate the culinary imagination. But it is only one of the many ways in which rajma is cooked.
The Kashmiri rajma (pronounced razmah in the local language) masala, for instance, is typically made with yoghurt instead of tomatoes. Razmah gogje is another local dish that uses tomatoes and adds sweet turnips to the beans. Both versions usually use the Jammu rajma that is smaller in size than the red kidney bean and more aromatic. The Himachali rajma madra is a curd and legume-based curry that uses a combination of red kidney beans, chickpeas, and black-eyed beans and skips the onion and garlic. The madra is typically a part of a communal feast called Dham that is specific to the region and is likely inspired by the Kashmiri wazwan.
In the Tons Valley in Uttarakhand, rajma is spiced with chora pisyun-loon, a spiced salt flavoured with a local herb called chora. Pictured above are the ingredients that are ground together to make chora pisyun-loon. Photo courtesy: Anand Sankar / Kalap Trust
In parts of Uttarakhand, a local herb called gandherin (also pronounced gandrain or gandrayani) or chora replaces the garam masala in Punjabi rajma masala. A dry root, scientifically known as Angelica glauca, gandherin is used to temper most lentil and bean-based dishes in the region, says culinary chronicler and consultant Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal.
In Tons Valley in Uttarakhand, the herb is used primarily to spice rajma, according to Anand Sankar, who runs the Kalap Trust and the Tons Valley Shop, an online platform based in the valley that aggregates and markets produce grown by local communities. Chora has an intense flavour and only a small quantity is sufficient to lend flavour, Sankar says.
To make sure that first-time users get the proportion right, the platform sells chora ground with Himalayan rock salt, a seasoning they call chora pisyun-loon (pisyun-loon in the local language means a spiced salt). Also on offer are several varieties of rajma—the long red, the small red, the white (harshil), and the chitra—grown by local subsistence farmers in the state.
In the Garhwal district, a protein-packed dish called chainsoo, made by simply roasting and grinding black urad dal, occasionally uses rajma. With kidney beans, the dish acquires a more complex and robust flavour, Ghildiyal says. She also points to the Gujarati kathol (the local word for beans/legumes), a distinct style of cooking that typically uses one or a combination of lentils but can also, albeit rarely, include chickpeas and rajma.
Venture out of north India into the northeastern states, and the vegetarian stronghold over rajma gives way to hearty medleys with a range of meats. Ki baa, a smoked pork and kidney bean salad, is a traditional recipe of the Khiamniungan community in Nagaland.
The local Naga kidney bean, known as kholar, is also used in thick stews made with smoked meats such as pork and beef and fermented bamboo shoots. The recipe typically uses no oil, instead utilising the pork fats to add a distinct flavour and texture, says Bangalore-based food blogger Vizo Achet. Most Naga communities have their own distinct ways of preparing these multi-hued or light pinkish beans, she adds, including a version made with local basil called napa. In neighbouring Manipur, red kidney beans are simply boiled and seasoned with red chilli flakes, a powder made of roasted sesame and chickpea powder, and salt.
Rajma is one of several beans/legumes used to make the popular southern Indian snack sundal, a dry lentil-legume preparation flavoured with curry leaves and fresh coconut. Mangaloreans make a spiced gravy called thamdi beeya kolombo that uses red kidney beans in a variation of the south Indian sambar, typically made with lentils like toor dal. The Coorg district of Karnataka is home to the Kooru curry, which uses curry leaves, tamarind, and coconut in addition to onions and ground spices like coriander, turmeric, and red chilli to flavour the rajma.
The dominance of the Punjabi-style rajma in the nation’s culinary imagination crowds out these regional iterations. The surge of multi-cuisine restaurants in India since the 1950s, which popularised Punjabi fare, and the emergence of highway eateries called dhabas which, at least in north India, became synonymous with the cuisine, can perhaps partly explain this dominance. That said, this regional diversity is proof that there is no straightjacketing the versatile kidney bean.
The Brazilian feijoada, a smoked meat and bean stew, travelled to Portuguese colonies like Goa, Mozambique, Angola and Macau. Photo credit: Bradleyzm, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
It is also proof that food and recipes exist in a state of flux, continually (re)shaped by their multi-directional migrations and carrying within them the potential for constant adaptation. They are as much the outcome of nostalgia for home as they are products of colonial violence. Take for instance, Jamaican rice and peas—Jamaicans refer to kidney beans as peas—which is potentially a throwback to the waakye, a dish of rice and beans that originated in Ghana and the Ivory Coast in West Africa. Waakye likely travelled during the transatlantic slave trade, when enslaved African people were forcefully transported to the cotton and sugar plantations in the Americas.
The national dish of the former Portuguese colony Brazil is a black bean stew made with salted and smoked meats called feijoada. The name is derived from the word feijão, which is Portuguese for beans. Some accounts suggest that the dish originated in the slave quarters of colonial Brazil where baked beans were added to the undesirable cuts of meat discarded by plantation masters. Others credit the dish to European settlers. Over time, the feijoada wound up in Goa, Macau, Mozambique, and Angola, all former Portuguese colonies. As for the origins of chili con carne—did it come from Spain, or did Texas invent it from scratch; does it have Mexican influences, and did the “original” version contain kidney beans, tomatoes or neither—the debate still rages on.
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Against this backdrop of complicated, disputed and often violent origins and histories, claims to authenticity and anxieties that any departure from that one true recipe will spell doom, are hard to reconcile with. To be fair, the Punjabi rajma chawal is hardly the only culinary behemoth that comes attached with these claims. The French, who introduced India to kidney beans, find themselves perpetually embroiled in heated contests over authenticity of their own countryside bean stew, the cassoulet. But if the hectic travels of the kidney bean, raw or cooked, make one thing clear, it is that authenticity is not a hermetically-sealed concept.
When it comes to “the cult of food,” the insistence on authenticity both follows from and is driven by a sense of nostalgia, writes culinary historian Tanushree Bhowmick. Nostalgia drives our search for comfort in food that evokes childhood or familial memories or transports us back to our roots. Seen in this light, both Rao’s critics, appalled by her suggestion of using mozzarella or cannellini beans in Punjabi rajma, and Mrs. K, with her slow cooking persuasions, perhaps reflect a desire to freeze certain memories they hold dear.
But at the other end of these comforting memories are geographically-influenced histories behind particular dishes, outcomes of capitalistically-driven colonial travels. When we factor in mainstream and dominant food biases and add in the food and plant varieties brought in by travellers who came and settled here, asking what authentic food might be is “...an absurd project: authentic in which century, for which community?” asks Nilanjana S. Roy, editor of A Matter Of Taste: The Penguin Book Of Indian Food Writing.
Wedged between colonial collisions and the search for comfort, a plate of kidney beans and rice is a distillation of culinary cross-pollinations. Its various iterations are proof that recipes are invariably adopted or adapted from somewhere else. As such, any claims to and demand for authenticity will always be partial and contested. This is not to say that we should not pay attention to the origin stories of food. But, if anything, these origin stories are a reminder that what is considered authentic itself is constantly shifting in time and space. Surely, comfort can be found in food that evokes, rather than simply replicates, familiar tastes. And surely, going beyond the obsession with the one true recipe can only enrich both our palates and our plates.
