The Uzbeki Plov Recipe My Parents Brought Back from the USSR

Anisha Tiwary shares a recipe for mutton pulao that traveled back from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, with her parents who were young medical students in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The recipes is now a household favourite — recreated a decade after they left Tashkent.

When my parents moved to Tashkent in 1977, they moved to Brezhnev’s version of the Soviet state; a time when the power of the Soviet Union was on the decline, a period before reform and the end of the Cold War. Seven years in the USSR meant exposure to a different standard of living, an opportunity to become (great) doctors, a chance to get to know each other and finally, to build a life that reflected this unique experience. 

My parents and their friends found the comfort of home in an Uzbek dish served across restaurants and street vendors in Tashkent called plov (or pulao, as they came to call it). It was closest to the food they ate in India — with a little bit of spice, rice and more, much like a pulao. Russian food heavily featured potatoes, carrots, and mutton soup — limited, given that temperatures didn't allow for more crops to grow. Through the seven years my mother spent in the USSR, she watched her Uzbek and Syrian friends making the dish; too shy to try it out herself until she returned to India, afraid it wouldn’t do justice to the real one.

Plov includes rice, thinly chopped carrots, boiled chickpeas, whole-roasted garlic, a few dried berries and succulent pieces of mutton all cooked together in a deep handi, spiced only with shah jeera and salt. In Uzbekistan, a kazan is used to make plov, but any deep vessel will do. It is usually made for lunch and is commonly available on the streets as well as in restaurants. 

Only after moving back to India, when they missed the dish that wasn’t much like anything we ate here, did my mother attempt recreating — from sheer memory of the recipe her friends would recite while making it! This was a time before the internet, and a decade after they’d already left the country. But much to her surprise, it was quite precise, and an instant favourite at home ever since her first attempt.

We’ve eaten Uzbeki plov at home ever since I can remember. For almost 30 years, this meal has been a slow and laidback Sunday lunch, where my parents would share stories of their time as students in a communist state, discussing how often they ate plov (at least once a week), what they ate it with  (a salad with apricot or pomegranate juice, tea from a samovar), and reminisced about whose version of plov they liked best (my father’s Uzbek roommate’s or my mother’s Syrian roommate’s or their Uzbek professor’s). They talked about the inconveniences of living with everything centralised and government-owned — from just a single ‘brand’ of bread that would be available until stocks ran out, or until 7 PM; the choice of soft drinks were limited to those owned and distributed by the government; to eating mutton plov that was priced equally across street vendors who were paid a salary from the government My sister and I listened earnestly, too young to assimilate or interpret the reality they once lived. We loved the lingering remnants of their experience, which reflected joyfully in the food we ate at home and so many habits that were upheld and instilled within us.

Over the last 40 years, a lot of people have tried mum’s plov and loved it — from extended family, to my parents friends’ and mine. They all took different versions of the recipe home and tried to recreate it. In Uzbekistan itself, more than a hundred versions of this dish exist today.

My sister and I have barely tried making this ourselves, afraid we won’t do justice to the real deal. While I do hope to change that in the Netherlands where I now live, for the moment it continues to be a homecoming favourite.

It’s common to see people love very specific things about plov — for my mother, it’s the thinly sliced carrots; for me it’s the succulent bone marrow; for my sister and another friend it’s the whole garlic; and for my father, it’s the fresh salad served on the side.

The unspoken rules of making plov in our house include — everyone who eats plov gets one whole roasted garlic. (My mother often throws in a couple more, which is always a pleasant surprise). It is always served with salad. We do sliced cucumbers, tomatoes and spring onions. And there must always be some leftovers. My mother’s rituals to making this meal include —

• Using a deep vessel

• Frying the mutton and onions just right

• Slicing the carrots very thin, almost (but not) julienned 

• Whole garlic — one for each person eating, a couple more if you’re generous, like my mother

• Adding dry fruits — we use raisins or dried cranberries, similar to what the Uzbeks add

• A hard truth: the oilier, the tastier (though mum is quite proud that she mastered cooking it with less oil over the years

Anjana Tiwary with her legendary Uzbek plov | Image credit: Anisha Tiwary

ANJANA TIWARY’S UZBEK PLOV

Serves 4

Ingredients
6 tbsp vegetable oil
1 kg mutton
4 cups of rice
4 cups of water
Shah jeera, or caraway seeds 
750g carrot
250g onion
1 cup of soaked chana or chickpeas (after soaking)
1 tbsp salt (add more as per taste)
1 garlic pod per person consuming, unpeeled and whole (this recipe calls for 4 to 5)
A fistful of raisins 

Method
Heat the oil in a deep wok
Once the oil is heated, add mutton and fry for 3 minutes on a high flame. Now, add onions and continue to fry for a minute
Reduce the flame to simmer, cover the fried onion and mutton, and cook for 30 minutes. The water from the mutton and onions should evaporate. In the meantime, rinse 4 cups of rice and keep it spread out on a plate
To the mutton, add thinly sliced carrots, soaked chickpeas, whole garlic, 4 cups of water and salt. Cover and let it cook for 45 minutes
Add the rice, if possible, as a heap. The bottom part of the rice is submerged in water while the top is not
Make a hole with a knife at the centre that goes through from the top to let the steam pass through and cook the rice 
Add cumin and dried fruits. Keep it closed on dum for 30 minutes, to stop the steam escaping
Once the plov is ready, serve with fresh cucumber, tomatoes and onions just like the Uzbeks eat it and enjoy a good nap after!

Anisha Tiwary builds software products in the Netherlands. Outside of work, she loves exploring food’s intersections with culture, history, and politics. You can follow her on Twitter.

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