Submitted on Friday, 5/29/2020, at 12:20 PM

For a New York Times series on comfort food, writer and Times contributor Aatish Taseer ’01 shared a family recipe for chicken biryani, a favorite since his days growing up in Delhi.

“When I was 18 and on my way to college at Amherst, I thought ‘I could do without pretty much everything else except this,’” he said. He learned the recipe then, and has been making since.

It’s not a 30-minutes-and-done dish by any means, he explained.

“If you cook it too fast, it can get out of control before you even know it,” Taseer said. “With biryani, in its purest or finest iteration, it’s sometimes cooking all night on a very low heat. What I really recommend is to slow things right down.”