The many ways to warm up with paya this winter

Few things can warm you up on a cold winter morning like a steaming bowl of mutton paya—a stew of lamb trotters, cooked on a lazy flame for hours together. Food historian Charmaine O’Brien writes in her book, Flavours Of Delhi: A Food Lover’s Guide, that nihari made with sheep’s trotters or knuckles, or a goat’s head, considered “very nourishing and a great source of energy”, was the “dish that the Mughal armies marched on”. Annemarie Schimmel writes in her book, The Empire Of The Great Mughals, “For gentlemen of the seventeenth century a barley soup prepared with lemon juice, rose water, sugar and herbs was recommended, and also sarpacha, ‘head and feet’ of a sheep, which was prepared with vinegar, mint and lime juice.” This light, restorative broth of Persian descent is perhaps the predecessor of the sumptuous paya shorba of the Indo-Islamic kitchens of the subcontinent. But there is much more to trotters than shorbas and salans—be it pulaos and tahari cooked in spiced paya yakhni or the Parsi kharia ni jelly, jellied goat-trotter broth sweetened with sugar and flavoured with warm aromatic spices like cardamom and nutmeg. In 2018, chef Thomas Zacharias combined masala puri—a street snack in Bengaluru comprising crunchy poori and curried vatana, or white peas—with goat trotters and bone marrow to create the Paya masala puri for The Bombay Canteen’s Canteen Nose-to-Tail Feast.