Every year the coming of Muharram meant a month of haleem eating and Nani Amma made a delicious wheat, barley, lentil and meathaleem, savory and so beautifully balanced in flavour.

My first memory of eating this delicious desi delight was as a nine year old, yes it was spicy but the ice cold 7UP and a side of naan took care of the heat.

Haleem is one of the original slow-cooked dishes and according to the Time magazine, the written recipe of the Persian and Middle Eastern harisa, the food that haleem evolved from, was written in the 10th century.

'Harisa, a mixture of meat, spices and grains, is a dish worth stampeding for. People have been savoring this slow-cooked sludge for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. Today, harisa — or its Persian and South Asian equivalent, haleem — can be found from the Mediterranean, [Pakistan and India] to Kashmir, a sizable swath of the Islamic world Ibn Battuta explored,’ says Annia Ciezadlo in her article, History on a Platepublished in the Time Magazine.

Claudia Roden, a food historian and cookbook writer says that the parent ofhaleem, called harisa, is rather an Arab delicacy, and the medieval Andalusian Jews ate it on Saturdays, a day of Sabbath for them.