Hello and welcome to Salt, Smoke and Grandmothers. I am Aina Rosli, and in this show I follow one dish, one kitchen or one market and let the people who cook there tell the story themselves. Today we are in Hyderabad, behind a wedding hall, in an open-air kitchen with fourteen cooks and forty copper pots over wood fires. The Qureshi family has made dum biryani for weddings since 1931, and tonight they are feeding two thousand guests. I stayed with them from the first ladle of ghee at noon until the last plate went out at two in the morning. You will hear the pots being sealed, the youngest cook being shouted at, and the eldest cook explaining, with some feeling, why restaurant biryani is not biryani. Bring an appetite. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.