The two-onion trick

THE FOOD CLUB

What is a darne of fish? How do you braise scrag end of lamb? What are the ingredients for a classic tiramisu? The answers to these questions are well-known throughout the world, wherever there are hotel schools, culinary institutes or catering colleges.

On the other hand, what is a dopiaza? How do you distinguish between a qorma and a salan? And what on earth is a curry? You won't get clear answers from anyone, certainly not from trained chefs.

Surinder Singh, executive chef, Taj Bengal, Kolkata, is grateful for the diversity. "Regional Indian cooking and the unbridgeable differences between one Chettiyar family and its neighbour is the glory of India. Long may it live."

Arun Tyagi, executive chef, MBD Radisson, Noida, on the other hand, admits, between gritted teeth, that he can't wait for the day that Indian cuisine becomes as standardised as its Western counterpart.

The reason I was asking these questions was because I have been mystified by menus at a slew of restaurants that I have been visiting recently.

Chicken curry, mutton dopiaza and shahi qorma are used by restaurateurs specialising in Indian food, with glorious abandon, so that one man's curry tastes suspiciously like another's dopiaza.

Chef Tyagi dismisses the term curry as not being a culinary term at all. A dopiaza, he says, is where twice the amount of onions to meat is used. Therefore, a dopiaza is, by definition, slightly sweet. (It was this sweetness I found offensive enough to find out more about it.)

"No," asserts Chef Amrish Sood of The Park. Onions for dopiaza have to be quartered, never grated or sliced. Brown onions become caramelised, and therefore sweet, while grated onions fried in copious quantities of bubbling oil never lose their moisture content and so are fated to remain sweet. Quartered onions will never give the finished dish a sweetish taste, especially not if whole garam masalas have been added while frying.

Chef Surinder Singh, whose spiritual home is Hyderabad, where he spent many years delving into the intricacies of royal recipes, avers that dopiaza refers not only to the amount of onions "" twice that of the meat "" but also to the stages in which it is added.

According to his version, half the sliced onions are added to the pan with the meat, and braised slowly. Then, when the meat (or chicken or paneer, but classically lamb) is three-fourths done, the other lot of onions is added.

Under normal circumstances, these would have made dopiaza sweet, but in Chef Singh's spiritual home, souring agents are added to several dishes, to make them cooling. Curd is traditionally added to dopiaza, partly to cut out the sweetness of the onions, and partly because most of Hyderabadi cooking has some sourness anyway.

There's just one other thing. Chef Tyagi insists that the term dopiaza has another interpretation: adding two onions to one kilo of lamb. "That's why it's so important to regulate these terms," he mutters.

What's your dopiaza?

According to different versions, a dopiaza recipe could consist of

twice the quantity of onions to meat

two onions to a kilo of meat

cooking with quartered (rather than grated or sliced) onions

adding onions in two stages "" at the beginning, and when the meat is three-fourths done