IN THE SPRING of 1641, two Portuguese priests were taken to a gallery overlooking the principal reception room of a palace in Lahore. The palace belonged to Asaf Khan, one of the most powerful men in the Mughal Empire.
That evening Asaf Khan and his wife had invited the Emperor Shahjahan to a banquet. From their hiding place the priests looked down into the hall ‘adorned with rich carpets of silken silver and golden embroidery’. Ambergris, eaglewood and civet burned in perfume holders arranged around the room. At its centre was a fine white muslin tablecloth with cushions arranged around it. As they watched, the Mughal emperor, adorned with strings of pearls and chains of gold, entered the room, followed by his hosts and two other members of the Mughal family. The party settled themselves on the cushions and washed their hands in bowls held out to them by beautiful serving girls. Then ‘the dishes were brought in . . . to the deafening sound of instruments . . . not unlike our trumpets, but of uncertain and mournful tone’. The food was served ‘by eunuchs, richly attired in . . . trousers of different coloured silks and white coats of the finest transparent muslin’. They passed the golden bowls of food to ‘two most lovely damsels who knelt on either side of the Emperor [and] . . . placed the dishes before him, similarly handing him his drinking water and removing dishes no longer wanted’. The priests were surprised to observe that the Muslim ‘Barbarians’ possessed impeccable table manners. The meal lasted more than four hours. Once it had been cleared away dancing girls entered in ‘lascivious and suggestive dress’ and entertained the party with ‘immodest behaviour and posturing’. But Shahjahan was more interested in three vessels of jewels which were set before him. While the emperor was engrossed in examining the rubies and emeralds the eunuch, who had guided the priests to the gallery, returned to say that it was time for them to leave. ‘We got up and followed our guide, who, in order not to take us through the body of the Imperial guards, took us by subterranean passages until he put us on the road.’1
The priest who left us this description of the Mughal emperor at dinner was Friar Sebastien Manrique. His claim to have penetrated a Muslim nobleman’s palace is audacious. The private quarters at the centre of each palace complex were surrounded by high walls and guarded by soldiers. Muslim women were kept in strict seclusion and only members of the family and their servants were allowed to enter this sanctum. It seems extremely unlikely that a Portuguese priest would have been granted permission to enter to gaze upon the women of the household.
Manrique may have constructed the entire scene from stories circulating at the court. Seventeenth-century travel writers would often insert themselves into scenes as a device to assert authorial authority. Their readers derived a frisson from the sense that they, along with the author, had witnessed events that were strictly private. In this case, however, Manrique claimed that his adventure was made possible by the special relationship he had forged with Asaf Khan.
Manrique had been travelling across India on his way to Rome. He had stopped in Lahore to plead for a Jesuit priest who had been imprisoned by Shahjahan for over nine years. The nobleman who listened to his case was Asaf Khan, who, as well as being one of the most influential men at the Mughal court, was an uncle of the emperor. Manrique must have combined impressive negotiating skills with great charm. Not only did he secure the release of the unfortunate priest but at the end of their meeting the khan ‘ordered a eunuch to warn the door-keepers that I should be given free entry whenever I came to see him, which was no small favour’. As soon as Manrique heard that Asaf Khan planned to entertain Shahjahan he resolved to make the most of his advantage and sought ‘permission to exceed these limits’. Asaf Khan himself may have arranged for Manrique to watch the meal from the gallery.2 But even if he was aware of the priest’s presence, the secrecy surrounding the visit, the hidden vantage point from the gallery and the return journey through secret tunnels would suggest that the emperor had not been told.
The Emperor Shahjahan, whose dining habits so intrigued Manrique, was the fifth Mughal to rule India. The first was Babur, or ‘the Tiger’, a contemporary of Henry VIII. Babur (1483–1530) was a Timurid prince from the central Asian kingdom of Fergana in what is now Uzbekistan. His goal in life was to re-establish the Timurid line as the major power in the region. And to this end, aged fifteen, he conquered the city of Samarkand which had been the capital of Timur’s empire. It was a beautiful city, a centre of Muslim learning, where Turkish and Persian traditions blended with those of central Asia and Afghanistan to create a sophisticated Islamic culture. Known as ‘the pearl of the Eastern Muslim world’ Samarkand was the ultimate central Asian prize. But Babur was unable to hold the city and he was deposed by the Uzbeks. Many years of living rough in the mountains followed. But this experience did not crush Babur’s ambition. He set his sights on Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, and eventually gathered together a large enough fighting force to capture the city. Then, in 1526 (while Henry VIII was falling in love with his wife’s maid of honour, Anne Boleyn), Babur launched his decisive attack on Hindustan, as northern India was then known.
Babur was not the first Muslim to invade Hindustan. His ancestor Tamur had sacked Delhi in 1398, and the city had been ruled by a series of Muslim sultans since the twelfth century. During this period, Muslims from Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan had settled in northern India and the Deccan. Alongside Rajput and Jat high-caste rajas and chiefs, these Muslim warriors had established themselves as a landed aristocracy. They ruled over the peasants, village artisans and labourers, some of whom, especially the untouchables or lower castes, converted to Islam in the hope of escaping their lowly status. Northern India was thus divided into a patchwork of miniature kingdoms. Many of these paid tribute and allegiance to an assortment of Muslim sultans and Hindu kings who ruled over larger territories. In the urban commercial and trading centres, Hindu and Muslim merchant communities thrived.
‘Hindu’ was originally simply the Persian name for a person who came from Hindustan, which lay east of the River Indus. The Mughals lent the term religious meaning as they used it to refer to any Indian who had not been converted to Islam. But Hinduism was not an organised religion with a clear doctrine. The Indian population in the early sixteenth century was made up of a medley of sects and communities, most of whom loosely subscribed to a number of central beliefs such as the endless cycle of life and the need to propitiate a pantheon of gods. But religion in India at this period was more a matter of orthopraxy, or, in other words, how the individual behaved, rather than a matter of orthodoxy which implies subscription to a defined set of beliefs. This allowed for a certain fluidity of practice across the Hindu and Muslim communities. Muslims joined Hindus in ceremonies to appease Sitla, the goddess of smallpox. Hindus worshipped at the shrines of Sufi saints, although they were not necessarily prepared to share food with their fellow Muslim worshippers.3
Babur was disappointed by his new conquest. ‘Hindustan is a place of little charm,’ he wrote, ‘the cities and provinces . . . are all unpleasant’. Despite the Muslim influence in the region for over three centuries he was surprised to discover how different India was from central Asia and Afghanistan. ‘Compared to ours it is another world . . . once you cross the Indus, the land, water, trees, stones, people, tribes, manners, and customs are all of the Hindustani fashion.’ The people paraded about naked apart from grubby loincloths and lacked beauty; society was devoid of grace or nobility, manners or etiquette. No one possessed any poetic talent, a sign of the highest cultivation in his homeland. He and his lieutenants retreated to the bathhouses to escape ‘the heat, the biting wind . . . and the dust’. The one good thing about Hindustan was that it was ‘a large country with lots of gold and money’.4 Babur planned to consolidate his hold over India and then return, saddlebags bursting with treasure, to his beloved homeland in central Asia where he intended to recapture Samarkand. His plans came to nothing and he died in India. Instead of re-establishing the Timurids in central Asia, he founded a new dynasty of Indian rulers: the Great Mughals. This was the name given to them by the Europeans who were hazily aware that on his mother’s side Babur was descended from the great Mongol, Ghengis Khan. Babur, who held the Mongols in contempt as barbarians, would have been horrified.5
One of Babur’s chief complaints against Hindustan was that the food was awful. ‘There [is] no good . . . meat, grapes, melons, or other fruit. There is no ice, cold water, good food or bread in the markets,’ he grumbled.6 Babur came from a culture which took great pleasure in eating. One of the earliest Muslim cookery books from Baghdad described food as ‘the noblest and most consequential’ of the six pleasures (the others were drink, clothes, sex, scent and sound).7 Having spent much of his life after he lost Samarkand hiding out in the mountains, Babur was used to the hearty meat-based diet of the nomadic horse-riding shepherds of the central Asian steppes. This consisted of dishes which could be prepared easily over a campfire. At a garden party at Khyber in the 1920s, a British civil servant sampled the sort of kebabs Babur would have eaten in the early sixteenth century. The local Afridis, a warlike nomadic mountain people, had invited the British to watch a display of guns, fireworks and ‘an exhibition of how they attack an enemy’s position’. As the guests stood around in a marquee, genteelly sipping cups of tea, an ‘old Afridi came up and offered us lumps of sheep’s flesh strung along a skewer and freshly roasted. These had to be pulled off and eaten in the fingers.’8 Pilau was the other dish essential to any central Asian cook’s repertoire. It made good use of the fatty tails of the local sheep. Arminius Vambery, a Hungarian professor of oriental languages who travelled widely in central Asia in the 1860s, described the method of preparation:
A few spoonfuls of fat are melted (. . . the fat of the tail is usually taken) in a vessel, and as soon as it is quite hot, the meat, cut up into small pieces, is thrown in. When these are in part fried, water is poured upon it to the depth of about three fingers and it is left slowly boiling until the meat is soft; pepper and thinly sliced carrots are then added, and on top of these ingredients is put a layer of rice, after it has been freed from its mucilaginous parts. Some more water is added, and as soon as it has been absorbed by the rice the fire is lessened, and the pot, well-closed, is left over the red-hot coals, until the rice, meat, carrots are thoroughly cooked in the steam. After half an hour the lid is opened, and the food served in such a way that the different layers lie separately in the dish, first the rice, floating in fat, then the carrots and the meat at the top, with which the meal is begun.9
Vambery pronounced it excellent, although Eugene Schuyler, an American diplomat who dined with the Muslims of Tashkent, had his reservations: ‘pleasant but . . . too greasy and insipid to be long agreeable to an European palate’.10
In central Asia meat was strongly associated with masculinity. Hunting for game was regarded as a way of keeping fit and well trained for battle. In India, too, meat was associated with strength and valour. In the Indian epics such as the Mahabharata, the gods sit down to gargantuan meals of roast meat, and Ayurvedic medical thought regarded meat as the prime form of sustenance and the most efficacious medicine. It was considered that environmental essences contained in the soil were transferred from plants and then into herbivores, which, in turn, were eaten by carnivores. Each transference created a more powerful distillation of essences. Meat was thus the most intense of foods. Kings, who were expected to excel as hunters and warriors, to display sexual prowess with their numerous wives and concubines, and to deal decisively with the burdens of government, all relied on a meaty diet.
One of the best records of Hindu courtly cuisine has been left to us by the twelfth-century King Somesvara III. He belonged to the Western Chalukyan dynasty of kings who ruled over parts of present-day Maharashtra and Karnataka. Unusually for a king, he was more interested in the arts and literature than in waging war. Although parts of the kingdom were slipping out of Chalukyan hands, he busied himself with writing an encyclopaedic account on the conduct of kingly affairs. Delightfully entitled Manasollasa, meaning refresher of the mind, it paid some attention to the conduct of affairs of state and the qualities needed by a king. But most of the space was devoted to kingly pleasures and enjoyments, from hunting, massage and sex, to jewellery, carriages, royal umbrellas and, one of his favourite preoccupations, food.11 Meat-based aphrodisiacs and concoctions to promote youthfulness in kings often featured in Ayurvedic medical treatises.12 Somesvara had paid attention to such texts and noted that a king needed to eat a ‘suitable, healthy and hygienic’ diet. This might include lentil dumplings in a spicy yogurt sauce, fatty pork fried with cardamoms or roast rump steak. Some of Somesvara’s other favourite dishes sound less appetising: fried tortoise (said to taste like plantain) and roasted black rat.13 Five centuries later the habit of eating fabulous meats was still being kept alive by the kings of Vijayanagara, one of the largest and most powerful Hindu kingdoms in the south. Alongside mutton, pork and venison, ‘sparrows and rats, and cats and lizards’ could all be found on sale in the markets of the capital city.14
The rats which are strong black, born in the fields and river banks are called maiga; these are fried in hot oil holding with the tail till the hair is removed; after washing with hot water, the stomach is cut and the inner parts are cooked with amla [sour mango] and salt; or the rat is kept on iron rods and fired on red hot coal, till the outer skin is burnt or shrinks. When the rat is cooked well, salt, jeera [cumin] and sothi [a flour made from lentils] are sprinkled and relished.15
However, this positive attitude towards meat had been complicated by a counter-movement towards vegetarianism. Both Buddhism and Jainism, which were founded in the fifth century BC, promoted vegetarianism as a way of demonstrating compassion.16 The practice of vegetarianism had been given an additional boost by the Emperor Asoka, who ruled a large proportion of the Indian subcontinent from 268 to 231 BC.17 Asoka, influenced by Buddhist teachings, exhorted his subjects to adopt the path of dharma, which can loosely be translated as humanitarian conduct.18 He communicated with his subjects by the unusual method of engraving a series of edicts on rock faces and specially constructed rock pillars. One of these regretted the wanton slaughter of ‘several thousands of animals’ which had been made into soups in the ruler’s kitchens and declaimed: ‘Here no animal shall be killed or slaughtered.’ Various other rock messages reminded Asoka’s subjects which animals it was prohibited to slaughter or castrate, on which days fishing was banned, and urged them to remember that it was meritorious to abstain from slaughter.19
By the time Babur conquered Hindustan, vegetarianism had become a powerful statement of one’s position in Indian society. Brahmans, who as the priestly caste had once performed rites of sacrifice, were now firmly vegetarian. They condemned meat because it heightened the passions and encouraged the virile, animal side of human nature. Orthodox Brahmans avoided all foods which were thought to stimulate the passions (which were known as rajasic). These included meat, onions and garlic. Instead, they made a virtue of their light, nutritious and easily digestible, vegetarian (sattvic) diet which enabled their bodies to channel the energy that would otherwise have been used to digest food into the improvement of the mind.20
Vegetarianism introduced a new principle into the Indian social hierarchy. Unlike political power (which was based on physical strength and violence, sustained by an impure diet rich in meat), religious power was predicated on the principles of purity symbolised by vegetarianism. This conveniently placed the now strictly vegetarian Brahmans firmly at the top of the social pile.
A high place in the caste system was not always based on a vegetarian diet. The aristocratic Italian wanderer, Pietro della Valle, noticed that the Rajputs, the ruling warrior caste of Rajasthan, ate meat ‘without thinking themselves prejudic’d, as to degree of nobility’. Hunting was an important part of Rajput culture. The essences of the landscape were thought to be found in even greater concentration in the flesh of undomesticated animals. Game was therefore highly valued. Rajasthani cuisine still has an important branch of shikar (hunting) recipes such as boar cooked with fried onions, coriander, cumin, garlic and ginger over an open fire.21 And wild meat is still said to increase a man’s ‘virility by helping him acquire semen, and with it, the qualities of courage and strength’.22
However, the majority of Indians appeared to newcomers to be vegetarian, either through religious conviction or poverty. European visitors to Mughal India were as disgruntled as Babur had been about the quality of the available food. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a French jeweller who travelled through India buying precious stones, found that in the large villages with a Muslim governor it was possible to find ‘sheep, fowl and pigeons for sale’ but in villages populated by the Hindu merchants known as Banians stores were very limited. Pietro della Valle grumbled, ‘I found much trouble in reference to my diet . . . as these Indians are extremely fastidious in edibles, there is neither flesh nor fish to be had amongst them; one must be contented only with Rice, Butter, or Milk, and other such inanimate things.’23
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Hindustan the staple food of the rural peasants, who formed the majority of the population, and also of the urban artisans and labourers, was khichari, a simple dish of two grains, usually rice and lentils, boiled together in a little water. Every region had a variation on the recipe according to which grain they grew as a staple crop. Thus, millet sometimes replaced the rice, or chickpeas were used instead of lentils. Tavernier noticed that Indian soldiers made the meal more luxurious by dipping their fingers in a bowl of melted ghee (clarified butter) as they ate. Pickles or salt fish also went well with khichari. The very wealthy displayed their purchasing power by employing cooks who were heavy-handed with the spices. Tavernier wrote of the food prepared for the princes of Aurangabad: ‘Their rice and vegetables, which constitute, as I have said, all their dishes, were so full of pepper, ginger and other spices that it was impossible for me to eat them, and I left the repast with a very good appetite.’24
For all ‘Hindus, of whatever station of life’, there was a taboo on the consumption of beef. The Venetian Niccolao Manucci described how to eat beef was regarded as ‘a very low thing, a defilement, and sinful beyond all imagination’. This had not always been the case. Ayurvedic medical texts discussed the qualities of cow’s flesh and warned that it was ‘heavy, hot, unctuous and sweet’, difficult to digest and to be eaten with caution. Yet beef broth was considered the most effective of medicines, especially for emaciatory diseases, and people with active occupations were advised to eat a beef-rich diet.25 Well into the first century AD, Indians routinely sacrificed cows and ate the meat. The Mahabharata even mentions Brahmans enjoying good beef dinners, though it also includes a passage where ‘a cow complains about the wanton carnage committed on her relatives’. This was an early sign of growing uneasiness about the killing of cows. The epics were originally oral folk tales but they were set down in writing by Brahman scholars who inserted religious and didactic sections. The resulting contradictions in the text reveal the way attitudes towards the consumption of beef altered over time.26 A practical explanation for this change is that as the country became increasingly agrarian, Indians relied more heavily on cows as draught animals and producers of milk and became more reluctant to slaughter them.27
By the time Babur conquered Hindustan, the cow had become a sacred animal. Manucci was astonished to discover that not only did ‘these people hold it an abomination to eat of the cow’, they held the products of the cow sacred and would drink a mixture of milk, butter, cow dung and urine in order to drive out sin. He was disgusted to find that ‘they hold out two hands and receive the cow’s urine of which they take a drink. Then, turning the cow’s tail into a sort of holy-water sprinkler, they immerse it in the said liquid, and with it they daub their faces. When this ceremonial is over, they declare they have been made holy.’28
The Mughals’ hearty appetite for beef and mutton clashed with the dietary habits of many of their new subjects. Muslims regarded food as a pleasure. According to the Koran one of the activities the pious could look forward to in the gardens of paradise would be eating and drinking with relish.29 This attitude was in conflict with the solemn approach that many Hindustanis took to their food. For them, eating was more a medico-moral activity than an enjoyable bodily pleasure. Food was an integral part of man’s relationship with the gods. Propitiatory food offerings were customarily made before a meal and men were thus seen as eating the leftovers (prasadum) of the gods. In the villages, the position in the caste hierarchy of each particular occupational group was determined by which neighbours the group would accept food from and whether they would consent to eat in each other’s company. Within the family, the superior position of the oldest male was demonstrated by the fact that he was served meals first and often ate on his own. On an individual level, Indians attempted to keep their bodies in balance with the environment by adjusting their diet to the climate, the season and their occupation. When he ate, what he ate and who he ate with was thus a significant statement of a Hindu’s position in the natural, moral, familial and social order.30
In the kitchens of the Mughals these apparently mismatched culinary cultures came together to produce a synthesis of the recipes and foods of northern Hindustan, central Asia and Persia. The result was the superb Mughlai cuisine which, for many people outside India, is synonymous with Indian food. The Mughal encounter with Indian food got off to a bad start, however. Although Babur was disappointed with the provisions in the markets he decided, ‘since I had never seen Hindustani food’, to keep on four of the Hindustani cooks who had worked in the kitchens of India’s defeated sultan, Ibrahim Lodi. Babur was to regret his curiosity. In his memoirs he described how he began vomiting after a Friday-evening meal of rabbit stew, saffron-flavoured meat and one or two titbits from a Hindustani dish of meat dressed in oil, served on a thin chapatti. Worried that he had been poisoned, he forced a dog to eat his vomit. The dog soon showed signs of feeling unwell, as did the pages who had shared Babur’s meal. It was discovered that one of the Hindustani cooks had been bribed by the ousted sultan’s mother to sprinkle poison on the meat. Everyone survived, including the dog. But the cook, having confessed under torture, was skinned alive and the taster was hacked to pieces. Given the brutality of these punishments, the instigator of the plot, the sultan’s mother, got off very lightly. She was simply imprisoned. The incident did Babur little harm, merely renewing his zest for life. His memoirs do not tell us whether he continued to employ Hindustani cooks in his kitchens.31
We know, however, that Humuyan, Babur’s son and the second Mughal emperor, did employ Hindustani cooks. When he was in Persia he entertained the shah in Indian style, providing Hindustani food at his request. The shah particularly liked the Indian ‘dish of rice with peas’, a version of the ubiquitous khichari.32 Humuyan was in Persia because he had lost the Indian throne to the Afghan ruler of Bengal, Sher Shah. He spent fifteen long years in exile in Afghanistan and Persia, before he mustered enough strength to reclaim the Indian throne for the Mughals in 1555.
On his return, Humuyan brought with him a strong preference for Persian culture and a large number of Persian cooks. These cooks imported into India a Persian cuisine, developed five centuries earlier under the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad. Between the eighth and tenth centuries, when they were at the height of their power, the caliphs had lavished vast sums on their kitchens. Their expenditure on food was matched by their gluttony – Caliph al-Mansur (754–775) is supposed to have died of overeating.33 Cooks from all over the Muslim world – Turkey, Arabia, Egypt – gathered at Baghdad and incorporated their own local dishes into the courtly culinary repertoire. Even Indian cooks arrived from Sind (the southern part of what is now Pakistan) which had been conquered by the Arabs in 713. They were known for their trustworthiness, their ingenuity and their extremely spicy dishes.34
The pièce de résistance of Persian cuisine was pilau. At the caliphs’ court, the pilau that the nomadic shepherds prepared over their campfires was transformed into an exquisite and delicate dish. In Persia, barley and wheat were the staple crops while rice, often imported from India, was relatively expensive and regarded as a luxury. Tavernier remarked in the seventeenth century that the Persians particularly liked the rice that grew south-west of Agra. ‘Its grain is half as small again as that of common rice, and, when it is cooked, snow is not whiter than it is, besides which it smells like musk, and all the nobles of India eat no other. When you wish to make an acceptable present to any one in Persia, you take him a sack of this rice.’35 When rice was eaten in Persia, it was therefore prepared as the centrepiece of the meal rather than as a side dish.36
The Persians judged the quality of a pilau by the rice, which was supposed to swell up completely, but without becoming sticky and forming clumps. A good pilau was also highly aromatic, filling the room with the delicate scent of its spices. Their cooks developed numerous variations: fruit pilaus, turmeric and saffron ones, chicken pilaus for special occasions; some varied by the addition of onion and garlic, or with raisins and almonds, and others varied by the colour of the rice. The Persians would soak the rice in salted water for many hours to ensure that, when it was cooked, the grains were gleaming white, providing a striking contrast to coloured grains which ranged from coal black to yellow, blue, green and red.37 All, as John Fryer, a seventeenth-century East India Company surgeon, scornfully put it, so that ‘you may know their Cooks are wittie’.38 An echo of their wit lives on in the stray grains of pink and green rice mixed into what Indian restaurants today call pilau rice. From Persia, pilau spread throughout the Muslim world. In Turkey it was called pilav; in Spain, with the addition of seafood and an emphasis on saffron, it became paella; in Italy, butter transformed it into risotto.39 In India, where Persian and central Asian culture fused with that of Hindustan, pilau was to undergo yet another transformation in the kitchens of the next Mughal emperor.
Akbar, the third Mughal emperor (1555–1605), was the first to feel at home in India. Unlike his grandfather, Babur, he found the manners and customs of the Indian people pleasing. Rather than continually looking over his shoulder towards his lost homeland in central Asia, he focused on consolidating Mughal rule over Hindustan. In order to achieve this, Akbar implemented a policy of inclusiveness which sought to integrate his Indian subjects rather than simply impose Muslim rule upon them. Central Asians and Persians dominated the government, as they had done under Babur and Humuyan, but Akbar greatly increased the number of Indian ministers. He abolished the jiyza, a discriminatory tax on non-Muslims, and the Rajasthani princesses he married were allowed to worship their own gods behind the walls of the harem. He even joined his Indian wives in celebrating their religious festivals, such as Diwali. While Babur strengthened India’s cultural links with central Asia and Humuyun introduced Persian influences, Akbar ensured that the two were melded together with Hindustani culture to create a Mughlai culture which was a synthesis of all three. At his court, Sanskrit epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana were translated into Persian. The poet laureate was an Indian, and the Rajasthani musician Tansen entertained the emperor after dinner. In Akbar’s atelier the Persian artist Abus Samad, whom Humuyan had brought to India from Persia, trained over one hundred Indian painters in the art of Persian miniatures. The geometric designs of the Persians merged with the bright, vigorous northern Indian painting style to produce an elegant Mughlai school of miniature painting.40
The same process of synthesis went on in the kitchens. Here, the delicately flavoured Persian pilau met the pungent and spicy rice dishes of Hindustan to create the classic Mughlai dish, biryani. One of the most distinctive Persian culinary techniques was to marinate meat in curds (yogurt). For biryani, onions, garlic, almonds and spices were added to the curds, to make a thick paste which coated the meat. Once it had marinated, the meat was briefly fried, before being transferred to a pot. Then, following the cooking technique for pilau, partially cooked rice was heaped over the meat. Saffron soaked in milk was poured over the rice to give it colour and aroma, and the whole dish was covered tightly and cooked slowly, with hot coals on the lid and around the bottom of the pot, just as with pilau. The resultant biryani was a much spicier Indian version of the Persian pilau. Nowadays, it is a favourite dish at Indian wedding celebrations.
In the kitchens of Akbar’s court, the chefs were expected to be able to serve up a meal of a hundred dishes within an hour. This army of cooks came from all over the Islamic world and northern India.41 Each brought with him his own regional techniques and recipes. The cooks learned from each other and out of this vibrant synthesis of culinary styles, emerged a core repertoire of dishes which constituted a new Mughlai cuisine. Our information about Akbar’s kitchen comes from the Ain-i-Akbari, an extraordinary book written by the courtier known as Abu’l Fazl. It is a gazetteer of the Mughal Empire, detailing every aspect of Akbar’s government. Among the intricate expositions of the workings of land revenue and bureaucracy is a fascinating chapter devoted to the imperial kitchen. In it Abu’l Fazl provides a list of recipes for some of the most common dishes, which show that the Mughal cooks relied heavily on rice, gram (legumes such as lentils and chickpeas), crushed wheat and sugar. Supplies of these staples were increased by improvements in agriculture. Under the Mughals the amount of cultivated land was extended. Reservoirs were cleaned, new wells were dug and irrigation systems were improved. Sugar production rose and many areas were now able to harvest two crops of grain a year. A French visitor to Delhi in the seventeenth century described how the shops were stacked high with ‘pots of oil or butter, piles of baskets filled with rice, barley, chickpeas, wheat, and an endless variety of other grain and pulse, the ordinary aliment not only of the Hindoos, who never eat meat, but of the lower class of Muhammedans, and a considerable portion of the military.’42
The Persian and central Asian influence on Mughlai cuisine is evident in the Ain-i-Akbari recipes. They called for large quantities of saffron and asafoetida, favourite Persian flavourings, and the Mughals cultivated these plants in India to provide their cooks with a ready supply. Hing (the Indian name for asafoetida) became popular with the Indian vegetarian population. When it was cooked in oil it took on a garlicky flavour which made it a good substitute for onions and garlic which were avoided by devout Hindus. Asafoetida was also known for its digestive properties and was therefore compatible with the vegetarian staples of pulses and beans which are difficult to digest. European visitors to Mughal India complained that the Indians ate so much hing that it made them smell ‘odiously’.43
Many of the recipes, like the one for zard birinj, used large quantities of raisins and pistachios. Combinations of meat and dried fruit were common in Persian dishes. Cartloads of sultanas, dried apricots, figs and almonds were imported into India along the new roads which were constructed to facilitate trade throughout northern India, central Asia and Persia. Indeed, the development of Mughlai cuisine was sustained by the availability of a wide variety of new and imported ingredients, such as ducks and green vegetables from Kashmir.
10 seers of rice; 5 seers of sugar-candy; 3½ seers of ghee; raisins, almonds and pistachios, ½ seer of each; ¼ seer of salt; ⅛ seer of fresh ginger; 1½ dams saffron, 2½ misqals of cinnamon. This will make four ordinary dishes. Some make this dish with fewer spices, and even without any: and instead of meat and sweets, they prepare it also with meat and salt.fn1
The meat dishes relied heavily on qima (minced meat), a favourite ingredient among Persian cooks. Mincing meat was a good way of dealing with it in hot countries where it tended to be tough because it had to be cooked soon after the animal had been slaughtered. The Muslim roots of many of the dishes can be seen in their heavy-handedness with onions and garlic. Abu’l Fazl gives a recipe for dopiaza, now familiar on British Indian restaurant menus, which calls for two kilograms of onions to ten kilograms of meat. Dopiaza is said to mean ‘twice onions’ in Bengali and the key to the dish lay in the preparation of the onions: one portion was sliced then sautéed, and the other was ground into a fine paste. Thus, although the dish tasted overwhelmingly of onion, it combined two strikingly different textures.44 The quantity of spices in the recipe given by Abu’l Fazl suggests that the Hindustani cooks had made an important contribution to the Mughlai dopiaza. The recipe calls for 125 grams of fresh pepper, twenty-one grams each of cumin, coriander, cardamoms, and cloves, plus an additional forty grams of pepper and a large quantity of salt.
Besides synthesising the different cuisines by creating new dishes, Mughlai cuisine brought together the cookery of central Asia, Persia and Hindustan by combining different dishes from each of these traditions in one meal. In the pantry of the imperial kitchen, bakers made thin chapattis of Hindu provenance as well as the thick wheat breads, stuffed with honey, sugar and almonds, loved by the Persians. Persian cooks prepared sugar-coated almonds, pastries and quince jams, while Indian cooks made pickles and chutneys, sweet limes, curds and green vegetables.45 These accompaniments of varied provenance were served with the main dishes to create a Mughlai meal.
Although large quantities of fine food were produced in his kitchens every day, Akbar himself ate very little. For a man who had been a glutton in his youth, as emperor he demonstrated a surprising level of restraint. His friend and faithful courtier, Abu’l Fazl, tells us that Akbar ate only once a day, and then ‘leaves off before he is fully satisfied’. As he grew older Akbar ate less and less and devoted an increasing number of days to fasting. He also developed a distaste for meat and became virtually vegetarian.46 Babur and Humuyan had occasionally renounced meat or alcohol as a sign of the purity of their intent when going into battle, but such levels of renunciation were unusual in a Muslim ruler. Akbar’s asceticism betrayed his growing affinity with the religious sensibilities of his Indian subjects. Every Friday Akbar held religious gatherings when a selection of holy men were invited to discuss religious subjects. These were initially confined to Islamic scholars, but he soon widened the invitations to include Brahmans, Jains, Parsees and even Portuguese Jesuits. To the dismay of the Muslim holy men at his court, it became clear that Akbar was falling under the sway of the Brahmans and Jains. It was rumoured that each night a Brahman priest, suspended on a string cot pulled up to the window of Akbar’s bedchamber, would captivate the emperor with tales of Hindu gods. Akbar, in acknowledgement that his subjects held the cow sacred, renounced beef and forbade the slaughter of cows. He even banned the sale of all meats on certain holy days and advised his subjects to avoid onions and garlic.47 Indeed, Akbar gradually adopted a diet more suitable for a Hindu ascetic than for a Muslim ruler.
The emperor even began to look a little like a Hindu. Rather than cropping his hair short in the Muslim style he wore it long in the fashion of his Indian subjects. He allowed Brahman priests to ‘tie jewelled strings round his wrists by way of blessing and, following his lead, many of the nobles took to wearing rakhi (protection charms)’.48 Akbar’s religious tolerance, his acceptance and interest in Hindustani religion and customs, and his eating habits, did much to make the Mughals into Indian rather than foreign rulers. Both his son Jahangir and his grandson Shahjahan maintained many of Akbar’s concessions, such as the ban on cow slaughter. They also continued to restrict themselves to vegetarian dishes on specified days of the week.49 One particularly Indian habit that all the emperors maintained was to drink only Ganges water.
The Mughals did bring with them to India Persian sherbets of crushed ice mixed with fruit juice but they were drunk between meals. Food was accompanied by plain water. Akbar referred to Ganges water as ‘the water of immortality’, and he insisted on drinking it alone, no matter how far away from the river he was.50 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier observed a string of camels which did nothing but fetch water from the river in order to supply the court. Even when Akbar was in the Punjab, about two hundred miles from the Ganges, the water was sealed in large jars and then transported to the court by a series of runners. Tavernier did not share the emperors’ high opinion of Ganges water. He described how a glass of wine mixed with water drawn from the river ‘caused us some internal disturbance; but our attendants who drank it alone were much more tormented than we were’.51 When it arrived at the court the water was cooled by means of saltpetre. Water in long-necked bottles was placed in another vessel where water mixed with saltpetre had been stirred about until it became cold. When the court was at Lahore the water was cooled with ice, brought by runners from the foothills of the Himalayas.52
The noblemen at the Mughal court formed a large group of adventurous eaters. In their palaces cooks from a wide variety of countries could be found experimenting with new dishes and refining old ones. In their restless search for social mobility, the courtiers did their best to ape and outdo the imperial kitchen. Thus they encouraged and spurred on the invention and discovery of new dishes and delicacies.53 When Asaf Khan entertained Shahjahan he provided ‘European style . . . pastries, cakes, and other sweet confections made by some slaves who had been with the Portuguese at Ugulim’.54 No doubt the khan obtained these novelties in an attempt to demonstrate the inventiveness of his own kitchen.
A description of a Mughlai banquet given by Asaf Khan has been left to us by one of his guests, Edward Terry, chaplain to Sir Thomas Roe. Roe was in India (from 1615 to 1619) as the ambassador of King James I. He had been sent at the instigation of the recently founded British East India Company to plead with Emperor Jahangir to grant the company a royal firman which would regulate their trading rights in India. In competition with the Portuguese and the Dutch, the British were trying to gain control of the valuable East Indian spice trade.
The food was served on a dastarkhwan (tablecloth) around which the three men sat in a triangle. Roe, as the honoured guest, was presented with ten more dishes of food than his host. Terry, as the least important person present, was served with ten less. Nevertheless, fifty silver bowls were placed before him. Terry possessed a curious nature and he tasted a little from each one. He was particularly impressed by the rice which came in a variety of fantastical shades, including green and purple. He observed that Indian cooks were far better at cooking rice than the English, ‘for they boyl the grain so as that is full and plump and tender, but not broken in boyling; they put to it a little green Ginger and Pepper, and Butter, and this is the ordinary way of their dressing it, and so tis very good’.
Not all the food served at the banquet would have been unfamiliar to Terry. Medieval European cookery was strongly influenced by Arab food and, like Mughlai cuisine, featured ground almonds, lots of spices and sugar in both sweet and savoury dishes. However, the Hindustani method of preparing meat was novel to Terry. He observed that, rather than eating large joints of boiled, baked or roasted meat, the Indians preferred to cut it into slices or small pieces and then stew it with ‘Onions and Herbs and Roots, and Ginger (which they take there Green out of the earth) and other Spices, with some Butter, which ingredients when as they are well proportioned, make a food that is exceedingly pleasing to all Palates’. This is one of the first European descriptions of what we now think of as curry. Sadly, Terry did not differentiate between the different curries he was served. He was delighted by the sophisticated gastronomic skills of the Mughal cooks, and concluded that although the dinner lasted ‘much longer than we could sit with ease cross leg’d . . . all considered our feast . . . was better than Apicus, that famous Epicure of Rome, with all his witty Gluttony . . . could have made with all the provisions had from Earth and Air, and Sea’.55
It was under Akbar’s successors, Jahangir (1605–27) and Shahjahan (1627–58), that Mughal power and wealth reached its zenith. Shahjahan was the wealthiest of all the emperors, with an annual revenue in 1647 of 220 million rupees, 30 million of which was spent on his private household. Painting, poetry and architecture (most famously Shahjahan built the Taj Mahal as his wife’s tomb) all prospered. In this atmosphere of opulence and conspicuous consumption, huge sums were spent on the imperial kitchens. Jahangir’s Persian wife, Nur Jahan, is credited with having invented some very fine dishes and Jahangir himself introduced Gujarati khichari into the Mughal repertoire.56 While travelling through the province of Gujarat, he sampled a local version of this dish which used millet instead of rice. He pronounced that it ‘suited me well’ and ordered that on his vegetarian days ‘they should frequently bring me this khichari’.57 No doubt a Gujarati cook was immediately recruited to work in the imperial kitchen. In this way a simple regional peasant dish was integrated into the courtly cuisine. Other more elaborate versions of khichari were incorporated in to the Mughlai repertoire. During the reign of Shahjahan, Sebastien Manrique was served a ‘far more costly’ khichari which he was told the Bengalis ate at their feasts. It was flavoured with expensive ingredients such as ‘almonds, raisins, cloves, mace, nutmeg, cardamom, cinnamon and pepper’.58
Jahangir discovered Gujarati khichari while travelling around his empire, something the Mughals did a great deal to remind their subjects of their power and authority. When they travelled, the imperial kitchen travelled with them. ‘It is the custom of the court when the king is to march the next day, that at ten o’clock of the night the royal kitchen should start.’ This ensured that the kitchen was set up, and breakfast already prepared, by the time the emperor arrived the next morning. Fifty camels were needed to carry the supplies and two hundred coolies, each with a basket on his head, to carry the china and the cookware. Fifty well-fed milch cows made up part of the procession, to provide sufficient milk, cream, butter and curds.59 One of the Mughals’ favourite destinations during the hot weather was the mountainous province of Kashmir. There they escaped from the unrelenting heat of the plains in enchanting lakeside gardens. The presence of the Mughals encouraged a blossoming of Kashmiri cuisine and it was here that rogan josh, familiar to all customers of Indian restaurants, was perfected.
Rogan josh originated in Persia. In Persian the name implies a stew of meat cooked in butter (rogan means clarified butter in Persian) at an intense heat (josh means hot). In Kashmir the dish is flavoured with regional spices. These vary according to the religion of the cook. Kashmiri Brahmans are unusual in that they eat meat without any qualms but they do avoid onions and garlic, so their version of rogan josh uses fennel seeds (commonly used in Kashmir) and asafoetida to flavour the lamb. The Muslim version uses lots of garlic and onion and the dried flower of the cockscomb plant (maval). This is a plant indigenous to Kashmir which produces a furry red flower shaped like a cockscomb. Kashmiri Muslims have a particular liking for this herb and it imparts a bright red colour to the food. Some food historians claim that this redness is the source of the dish’s name as rogan in Kashmiri means red.60
One of Babur’s main disappointments with India was that there was no decent fruit. Towards the end of his life he discovered that it was possible to cultivate sweet grapes and melons in India but the taste of a melon made him feel so homesick that it reduced him to tears.61 Akbar set up an imperial fruitery, staffed with horticulturists from Persia and central Asia.62 Jahangir wrote at tedious length on the merits of apples from Samarkand and Kabul; exactly how many cherries it was possible to eat at one sitting; his uncle’s apricot trees; and the astonishment of the sheikhs of Ahmadabad at the superiority of Persian melons over those grown in their native Gujarat.63 Both Jahangir and Shahjahan took particular delight in having fruit weighed in front of them.64 This obsession was more than mere gluttony. These fruits invoked the Mughals’ lost homeland in central Asia. Their discussions were a coded expression of their homesickness. The delicate flavour of a Persian melon, the sweetness of a Samarkand apple symbolised the sophisticated culture which was their birthright and which they could no longer enjoy in its rightful setting. Their introduction of these fruits into India were exquisite reminders of the central Asian civilisation they had bequeathed to barbarous India.
The entire Mughal court was conversant with the political language of fruit. Foreigners were astonished to discover the proportion of their income that the Mughal noblemen and administrators spent on fruit.65 Thomas Roe, always prickly about his dignity, failed to recognise the compliment he was paid when Asaf Khan sent him a basket of twenty musk melons. Instead, he complained that the Indians must ‘suppose our felicity lyes in the palate, for all I have ever received was eatable and drinkable’.66 In fact, so important and powerful a metaphor of power and prestige was fruit within the Mughal world, that it was one of the best gifts one could send or receive. When the King of Balkh sent ambassadors to Shahjahan’s son, the Emperor Aurangzeb, they brought with them one hundred camels loaded with fresh and dried fruit and nuts. (They also, intriguingly, gave him a seventeenth-century form of Viagra: boxes of rancid fish which were said to increase desire.)67
All the Mughal emperors were misty-eyed about central Asian fruit. But Jahangir and Shahjahan both demonstrated a love of Indian fruit which suggested that, while their homeland had not lost its romantic image, their hearts now lay with their empire in Hindustan. After all, neither man had ever set foot in central Asia. Their favourite fruit was the Indian mango. Babur had been willing to admit that mangoes were the best fruit in Hindustan but he did not think they warranted much praise. Jahangir, eighty years later, declared that ‘notwithstanding the sweetness of the Kabul fruits, not one of them has, to my taste, the flavour of the mango’.68 On one occasion, when Shahjahan was angry with his son, he accused him of eating the best mangoes from Shahjahan’s favourite tree in the Deccan, rather than sending the fruit to him.69 The conversion to mangoes is a telling sign that the Mughals were now Indians at heart. This became clear during the wars Shahjahan waged on the Uzbeks, the same people who had driven Babur out of Samarkand and deprived him of what he saw as his birthright. In contrast to Babur and his men who had felt unhappy and homesick in Hindustan, Shahjahan’s soldiers, about a hundred years later, felt completely out of their element in central Asia. A contemporary chronicler of the Mughal regime described, in language reminiscent of Babur’s first reaction to Hindustan, how ‘“the natural love of home, a preference for the ways and customs of Hindustan, a dislike of the people and manners of Balkh, and the rigours of the climate, all conduced to” a desperate desire among the Mughal nobles to return to India’.70
Shahjahan’s campaign in central Asia was spectacularly unsuccessful. According to European observers this was due to the Mughals’ decline into a luxurious and corrupt despotism which had thoroughly undermined their authority and military might. They argued that the rot had begun with Shahjahan’s debauched father, Jahangir. Thomas Roe had never ‘seen a man so enamord of drincke’. On the rare occasions when he was able to gain an audience with the emperor, the British ambassador was frustrated by the fact that Jahangir was often so far gone in his cups that he was incoherent, and would fall into a befuddled sleep half way through the conversation.71 In his memoirs Jahangir frankly admitted to his debauchery and cheerfully detailed his destructive and uncontrollable addiction to alcohol. After his first taste of wine on a hunting trip he progressed to arrack, Indian schnapps distilled from toddy, the sap of the palm tree. He was soon greedily imbibing twenty cups a day of this distilled spirit, and became so permanently inebriated that his hands shook uncontrollably. William Hawkins, an Englishman who was a favourite with Jahangir for a short while, described how by the end of the day the emperor was so drugged with liquor and opium that his supper had to be ‘thrust into his mouthe by others’.72 It was only after the strongest of warnings from his physician that Jahangir found the will-power to wean himself down to a relatively healthy six cups a day of arrack diluted with wine, supplemented by generous doses of opium.73 His jade drinking cup can now be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Jahangir frequently indulged in drinking parties with his courtiers, and throughout the reign of the next emperor, Shahjahan, the vice of drinking continued unabated. Little is known about the character of Shahjahan. He checked everything the chroniclers of his reign wrote about him, thus ensuring that few indiscretions were recorded for posterity. Niccolao Manucci, who was an artilleryman in the army of Shahjahan’s son, commented that although he did not drink he ‘left everyone to live as he pleased, contenting himself with passing his days among women’.74 The French doctor François Bernier claimed that his ‘antics and follies’ with his troupe of dancing girls transgressed the bounds of decency. He was even said to have had an incestuous affair with his daughter, Jahanara. Bernier claimed that she loved her father passionately and took great care of him, even personally supervising the preparation of all his food.75
Shahjahan’s love of luxury ensured that Mughlai culture flourished. Artisans were busily employed constructing the jewel-encrusted peacock throne which he commissioned on his accession; builders and architects created the beautiful city of Shahjahanabad (now known as Old Delhi) as well as the Taj Mahal at Agra; in Shahjahan’s ateliers Mughal artists painted the exquisite series of miniatures known as the Padshahnama. His chefs concocted banquets consisting only of dishes with white sauces. For these they used white cumin which cooks in Delhi refer to nowadays as shahi jeera (royal cumin).76 The culinary culture of the court filtered down to ordinary people, and in all the major towns there were bazaars filled with cookshops. When Manrique visited Lahore in 1641 he found that the court had spread out into the countryside: ‘more than half a league of the adjoining country was covered by a handsome, well laid out, moving town, composed of a variety of tents and pavilions of many colours’. This city of tents contained Shahjahan’s beautiful buildings, his peacock throne, his glorious banquets, were all paid for by an increasingly hard-pressed Indian peasantry.78 In 1630, a terrible famine struck the inhabitants of Gujarat. European merchants from Surat observed with horror Indians scrabbling for food in dunghills. The villages were desolate and corpses piled up on the outskirts of the towns.79 In response, public kitchens were opened, and revenue collection from the peasants was suspended.
market-places, filled with delicious and appetising eatables . . . Among these dishes the principal and most substantial were the rich and aromatic Mogol Bringes [biryanis] and Persian pilaos of different hues . . . Nor did these bazaars lack the simple foods of the native and superstitious pagan; as to meet their taste many tents held different dishes of rice, herbs and vegetables, among which the chief place was taken by the Gujerat or dry bringe . . . Bread was not lacking . . . of the ordinary and poor people . . . entirely of flour, baked on iron plates or clay dishes which are put upon live embers; [and] a very fine bread, delicate in flavour and made from wheat flour and the purest ghi so as to come out in thin leaves . . . Of these and other kinds of food there was such abundance in this moveable suburb that the curious Reader can imagine what would be met with in the bazaar and markets within the City itself. What struck me most were the low prices at which these things were sold, for any man could fare fully and sumptuously all day for two silver reals.77
Shahjahan was a poor administrator. Rather than consolidating his power at home he waged unnecessary wars in central Asia. The empire began to fray at the edges. His ruthless and excessively pious son, Aurangzeb, took drastic steps to remedy his father’s mistakes. In an attempt to restore Islam to the court of the Mughals, Aurangzeb forbade the distillation of spirits within the city walls of Delhi, and any Muslim or Hindu found to be selling alcohol lost a hand and a foot.80 He discontinued many of the Indian practices which had crept into the Mughal emperor’s way of life and, in a characteristic spirit of self-sacrifice, he banned music, which he loved, from the court. Aurangzeb’s one indulgence appears to have been food. He spent a lavish one thousand rupees a day on the imperial kitchens and he sought out good cooks. When his son refused to send ‘Sulaiman, who cooks biryani’ to work in the imperial kitchens, Aurangzeb was frustrated and asked him to look out for a pupil of this skilful cook as ‘the desire [for eating] has not entirely left me’.81
Under Aurangzeb the Mughal Empire reached its furthest extent. But when he died in 1707, his successors were unable to prevent provincial governors from breaking away and establishing themselves as virtually independent rulers of new satellite states. It was at these regional courts that Mughlai cuisine continued to flourish in the eighteenth century.
These very simple kebabs are the sort Babur might have eaten in camp or that the Afridis would have served at the tea party they held for the British. Serves 3–4.
500–800g tender beef or lamb steak
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 teaspoon fresh ginger, finely grated
1–3 green chillies, finely chopped
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
¼ teaspoon salt
3–4 tablespoons oil (olive or vegetable)
Spices (choose according to the flavours you prefer)
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
½ teaspoon garam masala
If you prefer a creamy marinade, add
2 tablespoons yogurt
1 tablespoon lemon juice
And if you like a granular texture, add
1–2 tablespoons ground almonds
Cut the meat into small chunks. Combine the garlic, ginger, chillies, pepper, salt. Add the spices of your choice. Add the oil (use less if you want a yogurt marinade). Add the yogurt, lemon juice and (optional) the ground almonds. Mix well. Combine with the meat. Cover and leave in the fridge overnight. Thread on to skewers and roast under a grill, or on a barbecue.
Khichari is the simple peasant dish eaten all over India. The key to getting it right is to add just enough water so that the rice and lentils are well cooked without being sticky. Serves 4.
100g red split lentils
500ml water
½ teaspoon turmeric
225g basmati rice
salt to taste
25g butter
1 small onion, finely chopped
Put the red split lentils in a pan with 250ml of water and the turmeric. Bring to the boil. Skim off the scum which rises to the surface. Turn the heat very low and cook gently for about 10 minutes. Add the rice, another 250ml of water, salt to taste and bring to the boil. Then reduce the heat, cover the pan and cook over a very low flame. Once all the water has been absorbed, take the pan off the heat and wrap in a towel. Leave in a warm place for 10–20 minutes to allow the rice to expand fully.
Meanwhile, fry the onions in the butter until browned and sprinkle over the rice and lentils when it is served.
Biryani is a celebratory dish, eaten at weddings. It is the Mughal version of pilau. A pilau was supposed to be aromatic rather than spicy, allowing the sweet or nutty flavour of the rice to dominate. Mughal biryanis were extremely spicy, much spicier than biryanis tend to be nowadays. Serves 5–6.
1 whole chicken, about 1½kg, washed and jointed into 8–10 pieces
Marinade
2cm piece of fresh ginger, finely grated
6 cloves garlic, crushed
2–3 fresh green chillies, pounded in a pestle and mortar
½ teaspoon cardamom powder
1 teaspoon cumin powder
1 teaspoon coriander powder
4 whole green chillies, slit down the side
2cm cinnamon stick
2 whole cloves
salt to taste
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 tomatoes, puréed
6–8 prunes
Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl, add the chicken and mix again. Make sure all the pieces of chicken are coated in the marinade. Cover and leave in the fridge overnight.
350g red split lentils, pre-soaked in water for 15 minutes
500ml water
4–6 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 large onions; ¼ of one onion should be sliced, the rest should be chopped
400ml yogurt
¼ teaspoon saffron, crushed and steeped in 2 teaspoons hot milk
500g basmati rice, pre-soaked in water for 20 minutes
salt to taste
2cm cinnamon stick
3 cardamom pods
3 cloves
1½ litres water
6 small new potatoes, boiled until just cooked
3 hard-boiled eggs, shelled and cut in half
a few sprigs of mint
100g blanched slivered almonds
Put the lentils and water in a large pan. Bring to the boil. Turn down the heat and then simmer for 10 minutes. Drain and set aside.
Heat the oil in a pan and fry the chopped onions until golden brown.
Take the meat in its marinade out of the fridge, and add the onions with their cooking oil to the mixture.
Add the yogurt and mix well. Now pour in the saffron soaked in milk.
Drain the rice and put in a cooking pot with salt, cinnamon stick, cardamom pods, whole cloves and 1½ litres of boiling water. Simmer for 10 minutes and then drain.
Meanwhile, fry the cooked potatoes.
Take a large casserole and put the marinated meat mixture in the bottom of the pot. Nestle the hard-boiled eggs in among the meat, and sprinkle with a few sprigs of mint. Spread the red lentils over the meat. Then place the potatoes in a layer over the lentils. Spread the rice over the potatoes.
Fry the slices of onion and the slivered almonds in a little oil and scatter over the rice. Sprinkle a little water over the contents of the casserole. Close the lid tightly and put over a high heat for 5 minutes. When the contents begin to sizzle, turn the heat to low and simmer for 1 hour.
For a long time the Mughal emperors mourned their lost homeland in central Asia and pined for melons. But by the time the third emperor, Jahangir, came to the throne he had switched his allegiance and thought Indian mangoes sweeter and better than any central Asian melon. Mangoes, the Mughals found, made good sherbets. Serves 3–4.
2 raw green mangoes
6 tablespoons of sugar
1 teaspoon of salt
½ teaspoon roasted, and then ground, cumin seeds
sprig of fresh mint
250ml cold water
Roast the whole mangoes in a hot oven until they are soft. Allow them to cool and then make a hole in the skin and squeeze out the pulp. Put the pulp in a blender and process with the sugar, cumin, salt and mint. Add cold water and pour into chilled glasses.
fn1 One seer was equivalent to about 1 kilogram and a dam was about 21 grams.