Ammi’s Kitchen: A Culinary Inheritance from Rampur

By Pernia Quereshi

Ammi's Kitchen by Pernia Qureshi

Editor’s Note:

Recipes are more than instructions; they are archives of identity, memory, and inheritance. In Ammi’s Kitchen: Heirloom Recipes from Rampur, Pernia Qureshi pays tribute to her grandmother, Mushsharaf-ul-Nissa Begum, who carried with her the flavors of Chandausi into the kitchens of Rampur. It is a world where love was measured in ghee and slow-cooked mutton, and culinary tradition became a quiet language of care, passed from one generation to the next. Excerpt from the book:

Musharraf Begum, Rampur

Musharraf Begum’s beginnings were humble. She was from a small town in Uttar Pradesh called Chandausi. Due to the financial hardships faced by her family, they agreed to marry her off to a rich, much older gentleman from Rampur as his fourth and only surviving wife then. To this day, the tales of how my grandfather’s first three wives died are vague and come in several versions. One story goes that my grandfather’s wife was travelling to him on a ship after the nikah and they were caught in a storm where she passed away. The bottom line was that here was this nobleman with the worst luck when it came to his wives, so much so that no established family was willing to marry their daughter to him. The ‘jinxed’ Abdul Majeed Qureshi had to then seemingly settle for a fair, young uneducated girl from a family that was in desperate need of his financial support. She would later boast that she was chosen based on her beautiful hands and feet since that was all her in-laws saw before her marriage was arranged.

Soon enough, her staff, children and townspeople began to call her Ammi – a moniker she earned early on, likely because of the authority she wielded at home and in the kitchen. Around 1946, when she was a young new bride who had entered Rampur, a princely town much bigger than what she was used to, she had a lot to prove and a significant role to take on. Her biggest assets proved to be her passion for food and her ability to cook. As women of her generation often did, she controlled the kitchen, and her dazzling personality began to reflect in her food. With the influences of her hometown mixed with her newfound exposure to Rampur’s more modern cuisine, Ammi created a food language that was uniquely her own. For instance, keema khichdi, a meal in itself made by slow-cooking mutton keema with rice and spices and eaten with a cube of yellow butter, cold dahi and mint chutney, is one of our most popular household staples, and has its origins in Chandausi.

When Ammi just got married, a young boy was employed in the kitchen named Israil Bhai who went on to become her sidekick and together they created magic. I can still hear them bantering over why something was missing from the fridge and Ammi calling him tokri ke (basket case), as the most terrible insult she could muster because it was her worst-kept secret that he was too dear to her to rebuke him seriously.Despite a fairly large kitchen, they would often set up a choolah (stove) outside, using bricks and wood to slow-cook dishes. With eight children and several grandchildren, there were always people to feed. Cooking and eating seemed to be the central point of Ammi’s world. Be it hosting daawats (feasts) on behalf of her husband for the Nawab and itinerant dignitaries, or a langar or family wedding, Ammi’s kitchen was always feeding.

Rampur cuisine, with its infusion of Mughlai, Awadhi and Afghani influences, when combined with Ammi’s sensibilities and the Chandausi culture, resulted in a rather mutton-heavy offering. When most think of Rampuri cuisine, the first dishes that come to mind are kebabs like seekh and chapali. But for me, the most representative Rampuri dish is our family staple taar gosht—mutton cooked in a masala gravy where the ghee is meant to be so generously used that when you dip your roti in it, there should be a taar (line) of ghee connecting your bite to the plate. Ammi used taar gosht as her go-to dish for all occasions, whether it was a wedding or a funeral. To her, the dish was rich enough that no one could criticize her for not doing enough while also satisfying the large appetites of our food-loving people.

Kaddu Bharta with Pyaaz ki Sabzi

Another reason Ammi was an exceptional cook was that she was extremely adaptive. Due to my grandfather’s ill health in his later years, he was advised to eat light meals. Together, they used to travel to Calcutta frequently and Ammi quickly picked up how to make lighter, British dishes for him during her stints there. This was the best thing about her—food was her love language. She knew exactly who needed and loved what in her family. By 2010, she was living with us in Delhi and every time I would come back from a trip, I would magically have my favourite gobi gosht with bina happa (black dal khichdi) on the table for lunch.

She was also the queen of combinations. She knew exactly the dishes that complemented one another—knowing instinctively to pair a kaddu bharta with a pyaaz ki sabzi and besan roti—the perfect summertime meal with just the right balance of flavours. Even now, we don’t dare to switch out any of her combinations.

In 1997, when my family opened the Rampur Kitchen—a restaurant in Delhi’s Khan Market, meant to bring our cuisine to tables in our capital, Ammi and Israil bhai personally arrived to train the chefs in the recipes of our kitchen, like the chapli kebabs and the chicken kaali mirch. The food soon garnered a cult following, with lines around the block even for takeaway orders.

Rampur Dal

With our family, Ammi wielded the same authority as she did in the kitchen. My best memories of her in Delhi include her sternly telling me off for counting my rotis and watching my diet, of her taking my nazar off almost daily, kissing her head while she prayed namaz, and finding her in splits with my sister over family gossip.

During that golden period of our lives, my sister, Sylvia, had the brilliant idea of starting a home food delivery business for Ammi. We thought it would be something she would enjoy, and it would keep her occupied, but it became so much more than that. Ammi became an entrepreneur at the age of ninety. Sylvia would take the orders and Ammi would do everything else. From arranging for groceries to overseeing the cooking and packaging, she was immersed. She would put her earnings of the day in a pouch and sleep with it under her pillow. It often made me think that with her talent, charm and elephantine memory, Ammi would be ruling the world if she was given the opportunity.

She lived to be close to a hundred years old and passed on this talent and passion for cooking to two of my aunts and my father. During the Covid lockdowns, my father had the opportunity to truly indulge in his first love, food. He perfected the softest chicken seekh kebab, and after many tests, the best shoestring fries. Like his mother, my father’s love language, too, I noted, was cooking and feeding. During my recent pregnancy, when the doctor asked me to up my protein intake, he made me at least twenty-five variations of eggs. Incidentally, Israil bhai, too, passed on his love for food to his son, Mazhar, who has now taken over the kitchen in our family home with a practiced familiarity from growing up having watched Ammi and Israil bhai at it.

As spoilt as we are with the best when it comes to what we eat, I worry about the culinary legacy of my family after my parents’ generation. So far, Ammi’s recipes have been preserved through oral histories because there were people in the family with the same passion for cooking as Ammi, people who wanted to keep her traditions alive. This book is my gift to future generations of the family, so they can feel Ammi’s love in their lives even though she is no longer with us. The greatest inheritance we have from her is her recipes, which are wrapped in all her love and memories. This book is also for everyone belonging to Rampur and Chandausi, so that they can have a piece of their home wherever they are in the world. Lastly, it is for all lovers of food, who can discover and create what, according to me, is the best cuisine in the world. Most importantly, this book is an ode to all grandmothers who carry with them the treasures of our history, of who we are and the foods that define us.

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This excerpt is from Ammi’s Kitchen: A Legacy of Rampur’s Flavours & Love by Pernia Qureshi, published by Roli Books, and available on Amazon.

About Pernia Qureshi

Pernia Qureshi is a fashion entrepreneur, Kuchipudi dancer, and now food writer. With Ammi’s Kitchen, she turns to her culinary inheritance—the recipes, stories, and sensory memories of her grandmother’s Rampur kitchen. The book is both a family archive and an invitation to experience cuisine deeply rooted in history, intimacy, and flavor.

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