Shimmering history of edible gold in global cuisine

Gold is the default idiom here in Dubai. Buildings wear the precious metal like armour, the Gold Souk is a top tourist attraction, gilt-flecked canvases are an art gallery cliché. It’s all par for the course in the City of Gold. But we like our food, so this piece looks at how the emirate’s restaurants have mined the Instagram-apposite trend.

Take your pick, then, from gold-dusted cappuccino at the Burj Al Arab’s Sahn Eddar; gold karak tea at Boho Café, a glittering baklava cheesecake at alara, Jumeirah Emirates Towers; shiny tomahawk steaks at Nusr-Et, or, dine at the edge of excess with an entire menu of 24-carat gold dishes for just Dh1,500 per couple at Palazzo Versace’s Enigma restaurant.

It’s tasteless, but makes a strong impression – as we’ve known for millennia.

“Gold has long been a symbol of luxury and opulence, particularly in recent decades. Gold leaf, in particular, has found its way into various culinary creations, starting with caviar and expanding to coffee, cakes, lobster and truffles, and is widely used to garnish and decorate food,” says Reiner Lupfer, Executive Chef at Jumeirah Emirates Towers.

The newest reason to wear shades indoors is what’s being marketed as the UAE’s tallest kulfa lassi. Dhaba Lane restaurant’s 22-inch-high glass of the yoghurt drink comes blended with mangoes and topped with 200g of kulfi – a type of Indian ice cream – covered in edible gold. The 700ml serving is available for Dh30 with unlimited refills until April 28 and at Dh30 per serving thereafter. Its launch comes ahead of the Akshaya Tritiya festival next Wednesday. The event is one of the two most important days on the Hindu calendar for buying gold.

Chef Harangad Singh says the timing of the launch builds on Dhaba Lane’s success with gold stick kulfi over the past two summers. He also wants to find new ways to continue serving up the best Indian culture has to offer. “The timing around Akshaya Tritiya is a coincidence – and I don’t think consuming gold has ever been part of the festival,” he laughs. “But edible gold is not something new in Indian food. It has a long history going back to the Mughals and before that to Ayurveda.”

The alternative medicine system is thought to date back at least two thousand years. Here, gold shows up as swarna bhasma, a compound of gold ash that is sometimes sold as a colloid. It is prescribed as an age-defying treatment, an immune booster and a therapy for diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, among others.

The celebrity chef Sanjeev Kapoor – you know him from the long-running TV show Khana Khazana and his restaurants Signature and Yellow Chilli – tells me how as a young boy, he was fascinated with chyawanprash, a traditional herbal health tonic packed with herbs and antioxidants.

“Gold was listed as an ingredient on the jar,” he says. “It was the first time I realised you could eat gold!” Kapoor has been using edible gold in different forms – leaf, flakes, powder – since his early days cooking for diplomats and heads of state. The precious metal also features regularly on dishes at Signature restaurant.

Pure gold, 24-carat, is inert and does not react with the body, making it safe to eat. It’s best consumed in flake or sheet form. Liquid gold is now popping up in health and fitness drinks. Unless described as colloidal, where nanoparticles are suspended in a liquid, these may be little more than ultra-processed edible paint.

The majority of gold’s healthy halo claims are yet to be proven. The body doesn’t easily absorb the metal and it does not dissolve in gastric acid, so any gold you consume is likely to be eliminated with other waste products, making for some very expensive excretions. Eat it for 90 days in a row and it may trigger gut dysbiosis, putting your microbiome out of whack, French researchers found in 2023.

Paired with other vectors, however, it may have a shiny new role in medicine. Scientific research now indicates that tiny swarma bhasma particles could soon play a role in cancer treatment: as drug delivery vehicles because they can enter cell nuclei within the body under specific conditions, and in supressing tumour cell migration. More research is needed before your GP will prescribe gold in any form (though you could always risk asking).

Nevertheless, that longstanding medicinal association may be one reason that edible gold came to be used in imperial Indian cuisine, whether at the Mughal court or on other royal tables across the subcontinent. Kings and princes wanted gold added to their food, Kapoor says, because it was thought to improve their virility. Or maybe those health claims merely justified conspicuous consumption.

Gold and silver foil adorned different kinds of Indian pilafs and biryanis; Varq –thin, beaten sheets of these precious metals – remains a way to elevate festive dishes to this day. But a contemporary restaurant has yet to recreate pearl pilaf.

Urdu-language journalist and novelist Abdul Halim Sharar described how the dish was served to the Nawab (or prince) of the state of Awadh. In Guzashta Lucknow (English: Lucknow’s Past), a collection of articles serialised between 1913-19, he tells us how gold and silver foil were carefully weighed and beaten together with egg yolk, then stuffed into the cleaned gullet of a chicken prepared for roasting. Once it had been baked, the chicken was taken out and sliced open, revealing how the yolk and foil mixture had solidified into bright, pearl-like spheres. Perhaps not quite the four and twenty singing blackbirds of the English nursery rhyme, but certainly no less than impressive culinary alchemy.

Across the oceans, gold was first used to make an impression of a different kind nearly five thousand years ago. The ancient Egyptians believed the metal represented the flesh of the sun god, Ra, and ascribed to it sacred powers. It was thought to cleanse the body and spirit and bring them closer to the gods. Alchemists in Alexandria were reputed to have made drinkable gold elixirs, hoping to refresh and heal the body. Scholarly research here is hard to find – although there is an unsubstantiated Wikipedia entry – so take this with a grain of salt. Or gold.

But we do know that Taoist alchemists in ancient China recommended eating gold to promote longevity, according to the writings of Wei Boyang, who lived around 140 BCE. He discusses making potable gold powders and liquids, something that he and other alchemists thought of as a different kind of gold, the authors Cathy Cobb and Harold Goldwhite write in Creations of Fire, their lively history of chemistry. “Gold is incorruptible and eternal; therefore those who manage to incorporate gold into their bodies achieve an immortal state,” they write.

By the Middle Ages, gold had made its way to European tables.

In 1386, Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Lord of Pavia and Duke of Milan, celebrated his daughter Violante’s wedding with a banquet featuring 30 courses of gilded sturgeon, duck, partridge and other fish. Three centuries later, we know of gilded oysters and bread being served at noble feasts in Venice and of nuns at the Convent of Santa Maria Celeste adding gold to traditional biscuits. In Padua, the opulence reached such extremes that civic regulations were introduced, allowing no more than two gold-covered courses at weddings. Apothecaries, however, were allowed to coat medicines with gold leaf to cover up their taste.

Elsewhere, Queen Elizabeth I of England was known to enjoy her marzipan gilded with edible gold leaf.

We lose the trail here and are only able to pick it up again amid the excesses of the 1980s – in Milan again. Fittingly, for a decade when everything was big, bold and burnished, Gualtiero Marchesi served up saffron risotto topped with gold lead. The Milanese chef is considered the founder of Italian nouvelle cuisine, but perhaps he should be equally celebrated for his groundbreaking work with edible gold.

The precious metal remains synonymous with extravagant dining experiences. Kapoor channelled its storied legacy at his daughter’s wedding here in Jumeirah two years ago with a Gold Souk-themed menu. He put together more than a dozen courses, including a 24-carat lobster bisque, a gold-coated Parmesan cheese wheel for pasta alla ruota, golden galouti kebabs, gold-crusted rack of lamb, his very own take of pearl pilaf, golden charcoal ice cream and an assortment of Indian mithai.

“Using gold as an ingredient is about creating something out of the ordinary,” he says. “You come to Signature to celebrate something or for a special evening, and you want something different.”