The first time I ate biryani in Bengaluru, I knew what was missing before the plate even arrived.

The same thing happened in Delhi.

Last year, during a reporting trip, I sat inside the much-talked-about Karim’s near Jama Masjid and waited for the familiar absence. The meat was good, so I did not complain. The spices were louder than thebiryani I had grown up eating in Kolkata, and, as expected, the potato was missing.

For someone raised in Kolkata, biryani without potato feels incomplete. You notice it immediately.

Growing up, my college was near Nakhoda Masjid and Esplanade, where every second conversation somehow drifted towards biryaniplans. Before that, my school was close to India Restaurant. So,biryaniwas never a rare indulgence. It was a big part of the city’s food memory.

And so, when people outside West Bengal dismiss the potato as a “cheap filler”, Kolkatans tend to react with unusual defensiveness.

For us, the potato is part of the emotional architecture of the dish.

And strangely enough, history suggests we may have been told the wrong story about it all along.

The exile who brought Lucknow to Kolkata

In 1856, Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh, was dethroned by the British and exiled to Calcutta (now Kolkata). He settled in Metiabruz along the Hooghly, carrying with him musicians, dancers, poets, hakims (traditional physicians) and, crucially, royal cooks trained in the Awadhi dum pukht (slow-cooking in a........

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