Rampur cuisine is not just food, it is a distinctive aroma. It is the aroma of dry spices and rose. It is the aroma of charred kebabs and leavened breads. It is a fine balance between all the cuisines it is inspired from. It is not as spicy as Delhi’s cuisine, nor as delicate as Lucknow’s Awadhi cuisine. It is not as rich as Mughlai cuisine, nor as sour as Hyderabadi cuisine.
The dominant flavours are of onions, ginger and whole spices. Onions, in fact, may be the single-most important ingredient in this cuisine, forming the base of gravies as well as halwa.
Important ingredients also include bottle gourd, lotus stem, jackfruit, figs, pineapple, khus roots and amla. The use of locally grown ingredients like the unique Rampur yellow chilli gives Rampur cuisine its distinctive flavours.
In this article, I have researched some recipes of Rampur cuisine. Due to the secrecy of the cuisine, the exact recipe is not available, but given below are some close-to-authentic recipes I was able to find. If you get as hungry as I did while reading this article, you may want to try out one or two recipes. 🙂