kheema

Persian qīma meant minced or chopped meat — the noun form of the verb qīmidan, to chop finely. The word appears in 15th-century Persian culinary manuscripts as a general term for any finely cut meat preparation. From Persia it moved into Ottoman Turkish as kıyma, where it named the minced meat used in börek, stuffed vegetables, and a dozen other preparations. The word was a tool for categorizing technique, not a single dish: wherever Persian administrative culture spread, qīma traveled with it as a culinary concept.

The Mughal court in Delhi received qīma in the mid-16th century as part of the broader adoption of Persian as the language of government, culture, and cuisine. In Hindi-Urdu, qīma became qīmā and then the anglicized kheema — the long vowel shifting, the final consonant softening. Keema matar, minced meat with peas, appears in Mughal-period cookbooks as a practical preparation used to stretch expensive meat further. The British Army in India encountered kheema in this context — as an economical minced-meat curry that fed large numbers efficiently.

Anglo-Indian cookbooks of the late 18th and early 19th centuries transcribed the word variously as keema, kheema, kima, and quema, each spelling a different attempt to render the Hindi-Urdu pronunciation in Roman letters. Mrs. Isabella Beeton's 1861 Book of Household Management included an Indian Mince recipe that followed the kheema tradition closely, though without naming the word itself. The word entered standardized English dictionaries in the 20th century, settling into keema and kheema as the most common spellings in South Asian restaurant contexts.

Today kheema is the standard English term for any spiced minced-meat preparation from the South Asian culinary tradition. The word appears on menus from Manchester to Melbourne. In South Asia it remains a vehicle for remarkable variety: dry-cooked kheema with onions, kheema biryani, kheema-stuffed parathas, and the lavish Hyderabadi kheema dum, where minced meat is sealed under dough and cooked slowly in its own steam. The Persian word for chopped became one of the most flexible culinary terms in the South Asian kitchen.