This Spring Colour Your Rice Yellow

The first time I had to describe tehri to someone, I was at a loss. More difficult than explaining the simple dish was accepting the fact that there was someone who did not know what tehri was. After all, I had grown up eating it every other day.

As luck would have it, in the years to come, I had to describe the dish many times over, to many people. And so I adopted a simple shortcut: I called it “yellow pulav”. It is another matter altogether that tehri and pulav are as different as chalk and cheese; their only similarity is that they are rice dishes. The differences I usually leave for my culinary skills to explain.

A staple of vegetarian households in the dusty small towns of Uttar Pradesh, tehri is a potent one-pot meal that owes its origin to the vegetarian employees of the Nawabs of Awadh…