Paneer

• 1. Introduction

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  Paneer is a cheese that refuses to melt. Drop a cube into a bubbling curry and it holds its shape, soft and mild, while the sauce moves around it. It is made from cow milk or buffalo milk, curdled with acid and never aged. Across South Asian kitchens it is a staple. Yet nobody can say for certain where it began. Scholars point to ancient Sanskrit-era scriptures, to Persian-speaking courts, to Afghan travellers and even to Portuguese traders, and no single claim settles the matter. Why does a cheese this common have no agreed birthplace? And how does one simple curdling trick grow into so many different foods?

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• 2. A Name From Persia

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  Armenian panir, Azerbaijani pəndir, Turkish peynir, Turkmen peýnir and Kurdish penîr all sound like cousins, and they are. Each one descends from the Persian word panir, which itself comes from Old Iranian. In those languages the word covers cheese of every kind, not one particular style.

  English picked up the word from Hindi-Urdu, where it appears as panīr. The Hindi-Urdu form was borrowed from Persian, so the name carries a Persian passport even though, in India, it narrowed to describe one specific fresh cheese.

  That linguistic trail raises an obvious question. Did the cheese travel along with its name, or did the name land on something that already existed? Scholars answer in very different ways.

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• 3. Hints in Ancient Texts

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  Rigveda 6.48.18 is the verse at the centre of one old argument. Arthur Berriedale Keith thought a kind of cheese was "perhaps referred to" there. Otto Schrader, writing in 1890, read the same line differently. He saw only "a skin of sour milk, not cheese in the proper sense".

  The legends of Krishna offer little help. They mention milk, butter, ghee and dahi, which is yogurt, but say nothing of cheese made from soured milk. Some authors, including K. T. Achaya, Om Prakash and Sanjeev Kapoor, read Vedic literature as pointing to a possible early form of paneer. They admit the evidence is not definitive.

  Catherine Donnelly, author of The Oxford Companion to Cheese, published in 2016, takes a more specific view. She notes that Vedic literature describes making cheese with the help of bark from the palash tree, the fruit of the jujube and a creeper called putika. She also mentions Dadhanvat, a cheese-like substance made with and without pores. These plant materials may have held enzymes that act like rennet. In her words, the Vedas "may include some of the earliest known references to rennet-coagulated cheeses".

  A text called the Lokopakara, dated to the 10th century, gives two recipes that use buffalo milk to make sweets. In the first, the milk was curdled with roots of the amaranth plant or leaves of the marsh barbel, and the soft cheese that resulted was called Haluvuga. In the second, Indian mallow or country mallow did the curdling, and the curds were shaped into balls.

  The Manasollasa, a Sanskrit-language work by the 12th-century king Someshvara III, describes a similar sweet called Kshiraprakara. Cooks made it from milk solids, separating boiled milk with the help of buttermilk. Other scholars, however, look beyond India's own texts altogether.

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• 4. Rival Origin Stories

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  Persian-speaking lands anchor one theory, which follows the word itself. According to this account, paneer reached the Indian subcontinent under Muslim rule and was reshaped to suit local tastes. The cheese known today is said to have taken form during the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire.

  Afghanistan is the source in another telling. The National Dairy Research Institute states that Afghan and Iranian invaders introduced paneer into India.

  BN Mathur offers a date. Working from texts such as the Charaka Samhita, he wrote that the earliest evidence of a heat-acid coagulated milk product in India belongs to 75-300 CE, the Kushan-Satavahana era. Sunil Kumar and colleagues, in 2011, interpreted that product as present-day paneer. They described paneer as native to the north-western part of South Asia, carried into India by Afghan and Iranian travellers.

  The Portuguese enter in a fourth theory, set in the 17th century. They may have brought the technique of "breaking" milk with acid to Bengal. On this view, Indian acid-set cheeses such as paneer and chhena were first made in Bengal under Portuguese influence.

  The Portuguese certainly left one cheese behind there. Bandel cheese, a smoked variety introduced in Bengal, is a distinct product and not paneer. Whatever the true origin, the method cooks use today is far better documented.

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• 5. Curds, Cloth and Cold Water

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  Lemon juice, vinegar, citric acid or a spoonful of dahi: any of these will do the work. A cook adds the acid to hot milk, and the milk splits into solid curds and liquid whey.

  The curds are drained through muslin or cheesecloth, and the excess water is pressed out. The fresh paneer then goes into chilled water for 2-3 hours. This cold soak improves both its texture and its appearance.

  After that bath the process forks. How long the cheese is pressed, and what is done to it next, depends on how it will be used and on the region where the cook lives.

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• 6. Three Regional Methods

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  In north Indian kitchens, the curds are wrapped in cloth and set under a heavy weight, such as a stone slab, for two to three hours. The firm block is then cut into cubes for curries. Pressing for only about 20 minutes gives a softer, fluffier cheese.

  Bengali, Odia and other East Indian cooks start from chhena. They beat or knead it by hand into a dough-like mass, salt it heavily and let it harden. The result is called ponir. People eat it in slices at teatime with biscuits or breads, fry it in a light batter or cook with it.

  Surat, a city in Gujarat, has a method of its own. Around the city, cooks drain curds made from buffalo milk and ripen them in whey. The result is known as surti paneer.

  Wherever it is made, paneer ends up in the kitchen, where its range is wide.

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• 7. Paneer on the Plate

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  Paneer is the most common cheese in the traditional cooking of the Indian subcontinent. It is used mostly in north Indian dishes, and cooks across India value its versatility. Its dishes can run sweet, as with shahi paneer, or hot, as with chilli paneer.

  Matar paneer pairs it with peas, and palak paneer with spinach. Kadai paneer cooks it with bell peppers and spices. Paneer makhani brings butter, tomatoes and cashews into the pot. Shahi paneer sits in a Mughlai curry.

  Some versions leave the curry behind. Paneer tikka is a vegetarian take on chicken tikka, with the cheese placed on skewers and roasted. Paneer tikka masala builds a sauce around it. Paneer pakora turns it into fritters, and chilli paneer is an Indo-Chinese preparation with spicy chilies and a garnish of spring onions.

  Khoya paneer goes furthest. This curry combines paneer with khoya, a second soft cheese, and it is eaten with bread.

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