Setting the spread: introduction

This article will offer an analytical account of Mughal culinary knowledge by examining Persian-language cookbooks that were produced for the elite (umarā’; singular: amīr) from the beginning of Akbar's reign in mid-sixteenth century to the end of Alamgir Aurangzeb's reign in the early eighteenth century. Here, the term ‘elite’ signifies male officers in the Mughal imperial service who were granted a mansab rank of a thousand or more zāt (personal rank), including the emperor.Footnote ¹ Piecing together this culinary history requires us to define the category of food as it was articulated during the period and wade through the archive of Persian-language cookbooks, which range from a single to several manuscript copies, and includes standalone cookbooks, culinary manuals in larger anthologies as well as food recipe sections in administrative, domestic, and medical manuals. The existence of this dense archive presents a stark contrast to the simplistic contention that, when compared to early modern Europe, China, and the Middle East, the textualisation of the culinary realm was poorly developed in India.Footnote ² Engaging systematically with this vast collection of material focused on the preparation of food, I will address the questions of why, for whom, and how these texts were compiled. Cookbooks of the Mughal elite are voluminous repositories of different recipes for a variety of food dishes, ranging from breads and dressed rice, lentils, meats, eggs, and vegetable preparations to desserts, pickles, and much more. Instead of detailing the Hindustani and Timurid roots and routes of these food dishes, I will analyse the contents of different types of recipes to reflect on the characteristic features and principles that undergirded the cuisine of the Mughal elite.Footnote ³

This approach marks a departure from the interventions offered by Divya Narayanan on Mughal culinary culture. Drawing on European critiques of structuralism and adopting a longue durée approach to study a range of culinary manuals produced in South Asia from the late-fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Narayanan articulates Mughal cuisine as an umbrella category or a term of ‘brevity’ for the ‘more accurate… cuisine represented by the corpus of Indo-Persian texts’.Footnote ⁴ According to her, Mughal cuisine did not constitute a specific cultural entity as it failed to represent the elite who belonged to diverse social, ethnic, and religious persuasions.Footnote ⁵ However, there exists a vast scholarship on how symbols and rituals, including those centred on the exchange of food, as well as akhlāqī values bound Mughal elites from diverse backgrounds into a corporate identity of imperial servants and transformed court society into an affective community.Footnote ⁶ I contend that Mughal elite cuisine was a culinary expression of this imperial identity and was entrenched in the demands of self-refinement it placed on the emperors and other members of the nobility. To draw out this argument, I engage with the intersecting discourses of akhlāq (ethics) and yūnānī tibb (Greco-Arabic medicine/science of the body) that informed the intellectual landscape of the Mughal elite. The significance of the former, particularly Nasir ul-Din Tusi's thirteenth-century text, Akhlāq-i Nāsirī, as a didactic tool that shaped Mughal political philosophy and notions of gender and sexuality has been extensively highlighted in existing works.Footnote ⁷ Similarly, the overlap between akhlāq and yūnānī has been explored in the contexts of Mughal political culture as well as Deccani courtly practices.Footnote ⁸ Building on this rich scholarship, the article pivots the discussion to akhlāqī-yūnānī expositions on food and its role as a conduit for fashioning a civilised self and a healthy body. The article will examine why this knowledge encouraged the Mughal elite to be educated patrons or connoisseurs who were invested in the consumption and, concomitantly, the preparation of food dishes that adhered to certain principles and exhibited specific gustatory, olfactory, haptic, and ocular characteristics. I will demonstrate how these concerns informed the food recipes that were executed in the kitchen-workshops (kārkhāna-i matbakh) and consumed on the khwāns (cloth spreads) of the Mughal elite on a daily basis. In doing so, the article serves up a comprehensive spread of the discursive, material-ephemeral, and sensory aspects of gastronomic experiences that animated the lives of the Mughal elite.

First course: food and connoisseurship

Discourse on food is a key feature of the ancient Greco-Arabic yūnānī tibb, which was practised across the Islamic world by the thirteenth century and continues to be a living tradition in many parts of the globe, including South Asia.Footnote ⁹ Yūnānī conceptualises the human body in terms of four humours, each identified with a natural element, a pair of qualities, and a specific temperament or mizāj, as shown in Table 1. The presence of these humours in equitable proportions is perceived to indicate a balanced and healthy temperamental state, with attributes of intellectual vigour and equilibrium between the emotions of anger-calmness, courage-timidity, pride-humility, and violence-sobriety. An excess of any humour in the body is believed to cause a diseased state of temperamental imbalance, resulting in dullness of mind, anger, greed, and lethargy. Rooted in the goals of the preservation and restoration of health, which could be achieved through the consumption of appropriate aliments (aghziyat; singular: ghizā’), yūnānī is primarily exemplified by the works of Jalinus (Galen), Al- Razi (Rhazes), and Ibn Sina's (Avicenna) enormously influential Al-Qānūn fi'l-tibb (The Canon of Medicine).Footnote ¹⁰

Table 1.

Humours and their temperamental properties.

For the benefit of elite non-specialist readers, Mughal physicians compiled and translated this yūnānī scholarship from Arabic to Persian with frequent recourse to Hindustani vocabulary. Some of these texts conveyed the basics of tibb in a manner that was easy to memorise and simple to understand. For instance, Fawā’id al insān, a versified materia-medica written in 1590 by Akbar's court physician Ain al-Mulk Shirazi, follows the muwashshah or taushīh (single acrostic) technique, whereby adding the first letter of each distich gives the name of the aliment being described.Footnote ¹¹ This work, in Shirazi's words, ‘captures the specificities, qualities, essence and benefits of what is usually and habitually consumed by the noble, illustrious and erudite people in Iran, Turan, and Hindustan’. Highlighting the pedagogical nature of the text, he noted:

Each aliment recorded in the Fawā’id was associated with a pair of humoral qualities and the congruent temperamental property, as noted in Table 1. For instance, spinach is attributed cold-moist or phlegmatic properties, ginger and cloves are ascribed hot-dry or bilious characteristics, lemon is noted to be cold-dry or melancholic, and a banana is regarded as hot-moist or sanguine.Footnote ¹³ These and other such single or simple (mufrad) aliments, ranging from vegetal, animal, and mineral produce, could be combined in different quantities to yield compound (murakkab) aliments with distinct humoral properties. Depending on their composition, on being consumed, these aliments were believed to act in four ways. They functioned as poisons (samm) by causing irreparable damage to the body; as medicines (adwiya, singular: dawā) and medicinal food (ghizā’-i dawā’i and dawā-i ghizā’) by curing the temperamental imbalance of a diseased body; and as food (ghizā’-i mutlaq, at‛ima; singular: taʻām, and ma'kūlāt, singular: ma'kūl) by not producing any harm or undesirable changes in the body. Medicine and medical food were designed as imbalanced humoral compounds that worked according to the principle of contraries; that is, cold-moist aliments were administered to fix disruption caused by a predominance of hot-dry humour and so on. Their consumption was prescribed in specific quantities for a stipulated period of time with an overdose harbouring the risk of aggravating the illness by reversing the healing benefits. Food, on the contrary, was envisaged as a humorally equitable compound aliment that, upon digestion, neither cured nor caused disease. Meant for everyday consumption, it was designed to prevent the onslaught of diseases by providing nutrition to the body and maintaining its temperamental health.Footnote ¹⁴

This definition of food is reinforced in ‛Ilājāt -i Dārā Shukūhī (‛Ilājāt henceforth), a seventeenth-century multi-volume medical encyclopedia authored by Shah Jahan's court physician Nur al-Din Shirazi for the patron Prince Dara Shikoh. ‛Ilājāt is a treasure-trove that contains condensed information on all the topics covered by the yūnānī tibb, and most of these discussions are followed by capsules of ayurvedic knowledge as professed by the physicians of Hindustan (atibbā i-Hind).Footnote ¹⁵ This text conceptualises at‛ima as a compound aliment that is cooked in the matbakh and consumed to satiate hunger and maintain health.Footnote ¹⁶ Mentioning its equivalent Hindustani terms—bhojan with the sub-category pakwān for fried food and sweetmeats—‛Ilājāt teaches readers how to pronounce these and other related words by breaking them down phonetically in the Persian language.Footnote ¹⁷ This didactic strain is further seen in the inclusion of colour diagrams in the section on aliments to allow readers to identify the plants and animals being described.

The learner-friendly renditions offered by Fawā’id, ‛Ilājāt, and other Mughal yūnānī texts about aliments, temperament, and bodily humours aligned with the demands of ethical fashioning put forth by the bio-ethical akhlāqī discourse.Footnote ¹⁸ Enshrining the science of soul or self (‘ilm-i nafs), akhlāq laid out a programme for elite men to become civilised or complete beings (insānī yi tāmm-i mutlaq).Footnote ¹⁹ It presented a homologous scheme of empire-household-man wherein the health or success of the former two realms was contingent on a man's ability to embody the virtue of equilibrium (i‘tidāl).Footnote ²⁰ This overlap between the akhlāqī and yūnānī ideal of balance derived from the understanding that the non-corporeal self uses the physical body as a tool for manifesting its unhinged drives of anger, greed, and desire.Footnote ²¹ Explicitly reinforcing the connection between ethical and temperamental self-fashioning, Tusi stated that the science of the soul comprised limited knowledge unless it was supported by the science of the human body.Footnote ²² He exhorted disciplining the unruly urges of the self and distilling them into a state of temperamental balance. This required men to exercise rationality (‘aql) and cultivate wisdom (hikmat) by acquiring practical intelligence (‘aql-i ‘amalī) about the factors that conditioned the body's humoral disposition.Footnote ²³ Akhlāq also foregrounded the need to display this civilised self through virtuous outward behaviour or ādāb.Footnote ²⁴ Concomitantly, it mandated awareness about and the practice of consuming food that would adorn the self and provide the body with temperamental health. These concerns were believed to enable a mindful quest for pleasure which, unlike irrational decadence, was guided by intellect and rooted in the concern for maintaining a balanced self. By pleasing and not diseasing the body, ethical pleasure was believed to facilitate a man's ability to perform imperial, domestic as well as spiritual duties.Footnote ²⁵ This akhlāq-ādāb syntax encouraged men to be educated patrons or connoisseurs of food. Alternatively, food connoisseurship was conceived of as an intellectual and action-oriented project of ethical self-refinement and pleasure.

Elaborating on the pleasure to be derived from food,‛Ilājāt drew attention to the aspect of taste. It equated men (mardum) who did not actively and intentionally seek refined taste (zā’iqa) in their food with irrational animals (haiwān) that eat to address hunger pangs but lack the mental ability to curate a civilised existence.Footnote ²⁶ This exposition helps contextualise Emperor Jahangir's self-portrayal as the sāhib-i zā’iqa ʿālī (grandmaster of taste), who could gauge even the slightest of variances between flavours. In fact, Mughal autobiographical and biographical accounts consistently highlight the theme of mindful gastronomic engagement through detailed descriptions about the patrons’ preferences for the flavours as well as smells of different fruits, fish, meats, and other dishes.Footnote ²⁷ Much like taste, the olfactory dimension of food also had a bearing on the search for ethical pleasure. The seventeenth-century Mirzānāma, a comportment manual detailing the codes of Mughal gentlemanliness, urges elites to employ akhlāqī sensibilities in their lifestyle choices, including being selective about the smells that were infused into and allowed to envelop their food.Footnote ²⁸ Flavours and smells, as will be detailed in the third course of the article, were perceived as yielding powers that had an impact on the consumer's temperamental state. Consequently, Mughal elites were required to make informed decisions as they navigated these sensory realms. This notion, emerging from the relationship between intelligence and pleasure, is succinctly captured by the Persian word dimāgh that was primarily used to signify the brain but was also used in a secondary sense for the palate as well as the nose.Footnote ²⁹ The motif of gustatory, olfactory, and mental sagacity mirroring one another plays out aplenty in the Mughal sources. For instance, Alamgir Aurangzeb's wazīr (prime minister) Jafar Khan was described as a refined man with a sublime intellect and the capacity to discern flavours and smells of food.Footnote ³⁰ Baqir Najm Sani, Mirza Abu Said, Asaf Khan, and Itiqad Khan Mirza Shahpur, elite men renowned for their service to the empire during the reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan, were commended for their bright intellect, ability to appreciate flavours, and penchant for sourcing exquisite-smelling ingredients for their kitchens.Footnote ³¹

If the gastronomic route to civility entailed consuming food that ensured a temperamental balance and ethical pleasure, it also necessitated the preparation of dishes that would serve that goal. This involved exhibiting wisdom by organising functional kitchen workshops that employed professionals trained in the science of the body and aliments.Footnote ³² To implement the complicated science of designing food recipes, which required knowledge about the inherent qualities of ingredients, flavours, and smells, physicians were appointed as the superintendents of the Mughal elites’ kitchen workshops. These kitchen superintendents were bestowed with the title of Niʻmat (blessing/delicacy/pleasure) Khān, or Khāsa (special)—an apt appellation for the officer who bore the responsibility of supervising the process of food preparation.Footnote ³³ This would have mandated remembering quantities and combinations of ingredients specific to each recipe, an assignment that could only be accomplished by writing down recipes—either directly or by dictating them to a scribe. Consequently, the production and compilation of cookbooks can be attributed to the demands of the kitchen superintendent's job to efficiently administer the task of cooking. That food preparation was guided by written recipes can also be gleaned from the structural organisation of Ā’īn-i Akbarī. Encapsulating details about the administration of an imperial household, it places the chapter on food recipes right after the chapter on the management of the imperial kitchen.Footnote ³⁴

As a type of kārkhāna record, cookbooks were repositories of standardised food recipes that could be executed consistently by the cooks who worked under the command of the kitchen-superintendent. The scientific expertise and skilled labour of these professionals resulted in dishes that were not only consumed on the elite khwāns but also garnered wide appreciation for the patron's kitchen establishment. For instance, the taste of the karhī (yoghurt and chickpea stew) prepared in the kitchen workshop of Mīrān sadr Jahan al-Husaini of Pihani, who served during the reigns of Akbar and Jahangir, was noted to be unrivalled in the whole of Hindustan.Footnote ³⁵ The household kitchen of Mahabat Khan, a Jahangiri and Shah Jahani elite, was associated with delicacies such as pulāv, khichrī, and khushka prepared with a fragrant rice variety called Kamod.Footnote ³⁶ Baqir Najm Sani's kitchen establishment was credited with the invention of a specific type of bread (nān) called the Bāqir Khānī.Footnote ³⁷ Recipes for qabūlī pulāv, khichrī Mahabat Khānī, and nān Bāqir Khānī as well as yakhnī pulāv Shāh Jahānī, khichrī Bahādur Khānī, khichrī Dāud Khānī, and khandvī Shāh Jahānī, attributed to the kitchens of these different elite patrons, appear frequently in the Mughal culinary manuals that we will now examine.Footnote ³⁸

Second course: culinary manuals

Two whole and one fragmented Persian-language Mughal cookbooks—Nuskha-i Shāh Jahānī (Recipes of Shah Jahan, henceforth Nuskha), Risāla-i- anwā‛-i taʻām (Treatise on Variety of Cooked Food, henceforth Risāla), and Khwān-i ni‘mat, respectively—can be traced in the archives across the world. Before engaging with their specific details, I will point out their common features. To begin with, they provide the names and exact measurements of ingredients and explain the procedures for preparing different variations of each dish, including the time required to accomplish each cooking step, the utensils to be used, and the number of portions it would yield. This information is conveyed in simple, instructional language, reinforcing the role of these culinary manuals as practical and pedagogical tools for training the cooks in the elite kitchens. Each subsequent cookbook records new recipes while also reproducing recipes from the preceding manual. These transmissions highlight the circulation of culinary knowledge within the elite network and the existence of a coherent set of principles that undergirded the cuisine of the Mughal elite. Commenting on a similar trend of the borrowing of recipes in Safavid culinary manuals, Bert Fragner observes that the writing of cookbooks was, to a certain extent, structurally related to the well-known and highly respected science recognised in Islamic culture as ‘ilm al-hadīth.Footnote ³⁹

The earliest extant Mughal cookbook is associated with Shah Jahan's imperial kitchen and it exists in the form of three identical manuscript copies bearing different titles—Nuskha, Dastūr-i pukhtan-i at'ima kih dar sarkār-i Bādshāh Shāh Jahān (Manner of Cooking Food in/at the Household of Shah Jahan), and Nān wa namak (Bread and Salt).Footnote ⁴⁰ Lacking information regarding the compiler's name and the date of composition, an important feature of this cookbook is the use of the Shāh Jahānī weights for measuring ingredients. Introduced during Shah Jahan's reign, this new system marked an increase in the weights of the units of measurements (man, āsār/ser, dām, tola, misqāl, dramcha, māsha, and rattī/surkh) from the previously instituted Akbarī system. However, the man-i ‘Ālamgīrī, introduced by Alamgir, remained the same as man-i Shāh Jahānī in terms of absolute weight.Footnote ⁴¹ This explains why subsequent cookbooks do not necessarily affix appellations to the measurements that accompany the list of ingredients. Risāla, attributed to the household establishment of Nawab Islam Khan Bahadur, is an example of the same. The single existing manuscript of Risāla neither mentions the original date of composition nor does it elaborate on the identity of its patron.Footnote ⁴² However, subjecting the internal textual evidence to external corroboration offers a resolution. Reproducing recipes from Nuskha and adding newer ones to the repertoire, Risāla contains a distinct biryānī recipe that calls for the mixture of rice, vetch or seeds of broad beans, sorrel flowers (gulān ashkhuwān), and meat to be cooked with a variety of spices. Praising the unparalleled taste of this preparation, the anonymous compiler of Risāla credits Nawab Islam Khan's kitchen establishment for its invention.Footnote ⁴³ Interestingly, in a letter, Alamgir compares the flavour of khichrī-biryānī (fried mixture of rice and any kind of legumes) cooked in his son Prince Azam's kitchen with the delectable taste of the famous biryānī prepared at Islam Khan's household.Footnote ⁴⁴ Bringing these aligning pieces of evidence together, I identify Nawab Islam Khan Bahadur as Mir Ziya ul-Din Husain Badakhshi, who was an eminent member (wālā shāhī) and revenue minister (dīwān) of Prince Aurangzeb's household establishment during Shah Jahan's reign. He earned the titles of Himmat Khān and Islām Khān for helping Aurangzeb secure victories during the war of succession against Dara Shikoh. The inscription of the mosque constructed by him in Kashmir referred to him as Nawāb Islām Khān Bahādur (brave, a synonym of himmat). From 1661 to 1663, he was the governor of Kashmir, a region where sorrel grows and is used abundantly in cooking. In 1663, he hosted Alamgir in Kashmir and, probably as an act of hospitality, served the biryānī speciality that the emperor used as a point of reference in the letter to Prince Azam.Footnote ⁴⁵ Consequently, Risāla must have been compiled between 1658 to 1664, that is, the period between the war of succession and Aurangzeb's accession to the throne and the year of Islam Khan's death.

Unlike Risāla, multiple copies of Khwān-i niʻmat (Spread of Delicacy/Bounty/Pleasure/Blessing)—with Khwān-i alwān-i niʻmat (Spread of Variety of Delicacies/Bounties/Pleasures/Blessings) and Alwān-i ni‘mat as alternative titles—are present in archives across India and Europe and can be attributed to Alamgir's imperial kitchen.Footnote ⁴⁶ These include the Khwān-i niʻmat transcribed by Muhammad Beg in 1793–1794 and the nineteenth-century transcription made for Charles Wilkins, the founding member of the Asiatic Society. The first line of Beg's copy reads: ‘Nuskha-hā-i jamī‘ at‘ima ki Niʻmat Khān ‘Ālī tālīf namūda musammī ba Khwān-i niʻmat karda’ (Collection of food recipes that Ni‘mat Khān ‘Ālī compiled under the title Khwān-i ni‘mat).Footnote ⁴⁷ While Wilkins’ copy of Khwān does not carry an in-text attribution, the corresponding catalogue entry describes it as a selective reproduction of Niʻmat Khān ‘Ālī's cookbook.Footnote ⁴⁸ Niʻmat Khān‘Ālī was Mirza Muhammad, a physician by training who wrote poetry under the pen name ‘Ālī. Upon being appointed the superintendent of ‘Alamgir's imperial kitchen in 1692, he was granted the title of Ni‘mat Khān.Footnote ⁴⁹ In fact, during his time at the office, he corresponded with Mughal officers stationed in Deccan, explaining to them the correct technique for making coffee.Footnote ⁵⁰ This reinforces the point made previously in the article about kitchen superintendents’ involvement in designing and compiling of the recipes. Perusal of the Wilkins copy of Khwān establishes further links with Alamgir's reign for it contains recipes for khichrī Muhtasham Khānī and Ja‘far Khānī (a mixture of rice and legumes cooked in the kitchen workshops of Muhtasham Khan and Jafar Khan).Footnote ⁵¹ Jafar Khan, as mentioned earlier, was the wazīr of the empire during Alamgir's reign and a seasoned epicurean. Muhtasham Khan was also an eminent member of Alamgir's courtly elite and he served as the faujdār (military commander) of Langarkot, Shaharanpur, and Mewat and as the qila‘dār (commandant of the fort) of Naldurg.Footnote ⁵²

The methodology of identifying patron-specific recipes leads us to three other manuscripts from Alamgir's reign. These include two identical copies of Khulāṣa-i ma'kūlāt wa mashrūbāt (The Essence of Foods and Beverages), transcribed in 1765 and 1829, and a copy of Khwān-i niʻmat that was transcribed in 1785. The anonymous author of Khulāṣa-i ma'kūlāt wa mashrūbāt, a self-proclaimed food enthusiast, describes his work as a bayāz, or anthology, of food recipes and consumption etiquette.Footnote ⁵³ Excluding the introduction, the text is divided into two main sections. The first section is dedicated to etiquette and draws on the prophetic tradition, a theme that is beyond the purview of this article.Footnote ⁵⁴ The second section, for which an index of recipes is provided at the beginning of the text, is a cookbook titled Khwān-i alwān-i niʻmat.Footnote ⁵⁵ The scribe has shortened this title to Alwān-i niʻmat in the copy made in 1829 and it appears at the end of the text.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the preface to the second section, the author specifies that he borrowed this culinary knowledge—from the order of recipes to the amount of water and heat required to prepare them—from a master of the craft of cooking.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, the identity of the said master is not revealed. The Khwān-i alwān-i niʻmat cookbooks reproduced in the Khulāṣa-i ma'kūlāt wa mashrūbāt manuscripts are the same as the Khwān-i niʻmat cookbook that was transcribed in 1785.Footnote ⁵⁸ While these manuals are not attributed to a patron or compiler, their significance lies in the internal evidence they present. Along with reproducing recipes from Nuskha and Risāla, they include newer patron-specific recipes such as nān Asad Khānī, khushka (a boiled rice preparation), khichrī Muhtasham Khānī, khichrī and gulgula (sweet doughnut), Mukhtar Khānī, pulāv (a steamed rice preparation), Rashid Khani, bara (fried savoury doughnut), Jalal Khānī, āchār (pickle), and Saif Khānī.Footnote ⁵⁹ The names evoked in these recipes correspond to the elites who were a part of the imperial service during Alamgir's reign. Asad Khan held the office of the wazīr, led campaigns in deccan, and earned the title of Amīr al-Umarā’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Between 1680–1686, Saif Khan served as the sūbadār (provincial head) of Kashmir, Bihar, and Allahabad.Footnote ⁶¹ Rashid Khan, a member of the eminent Roshanani family, served as the sūbadār of Orissa up to the nineteenth year of Alamgir's reign and thereafter held the office of dīwān i-khālisa (officer in-charge of the lands reserved as sources of revenue for the state).Footnote ⁶² He is also noted to have spent a lavish sum of 40 rupees per day to procure ingredients for his kitchen.Footnote ⁶³ Mukhtar Khan served in various capacities during Alamgir's reign, from being stationed at Malwa and Bijapur to holding the sūbadārī of Ahmadabad and Agra and holding the office of mīr ātish (head of artillery).Footnote ⁶⁴ Jalal Khan was appointed as the faujdār (military commander) of Malwa during the fourth year of Alamgir's reign.Footnote ⁶⁵

The preceding discussion can be distilled into a few key observations. The scattered and fragmented nature of the Khwān manuscripts that can be traced to Alamgir's reign suggests the existence of a unified manual, which is probably lost.Footnote ⁶⁶ Niʻmat Khān ‘Ālī as Alamgir's kitchen superintendent, seems to have played a role in the compilation of this cookbook. Either the entire manual was put together under his aegis or it was a collaborative effort. Leaning towards the latter, he could be credited with compiling a section of it and contributing to the work of his predecessors, both of whom held the same office during Alamgir's reign as well as those who produced the earlier culinary manuals. The text might have evolved further under the supervision of those who held the office after him. In fact, this collaborative compilation process also explains the lack of authorial claim(s) in Nushka and Risāla. The exceptional association of some copies of the Khwān with Niʻmat Khān ‘Ālī and not the other superintendents of Alamgir's kitchen could, however, derive from the stature he achieved during his imperial career. These achievements included receiving a robe of honour from Alamgir for presenting a chronogram on the conquest of Hyderabad, the title of Muqarrab (intimate friend) Khān, and, subsequently, the superintendency of the imperial jawāhar khāna (jewellery workshop) as well as the custody of imperial seal.Footnote ⁶⁷

In addition to the abovementioned culinary manuals, food recipes also appear in Ā’īn, Bayāz-i khūshbū’ī, a household management manual composed during Shah Jahan's reign, and ‛Ilājāt. Footnote ⁶⁸ These texts, aimed at facilitating aristocratic civility, were authored to arm the elite with knowledge about a variety of subjects, including, but not limited to, the maintenance of horse stables, garden planning, concocting medicinal pills and syrups, perfume, candle- and paper-making, theories of colour and flavours, and cooking. Owing to their broad-stroked nature, they record sample recipes for a select number of food dishes. They furnish the list of ingredients and measurements required to prepare a dish but provide paltry instructions about how to transform them into an actual dish. While culinary manuals also stemmed from the same concern for ethical refinement, they were compiled as specialised and practice-based manuals to guide the cooks in the actual execution of food dishes. They record in detail multiple recipe variations for a wide range of dishes and truly capture the depth and breadth of Mughal elite cuisine.

Third course: features of the Mughal elite cuisine

This section will analyse how the attributes integral to the concerns of self-refinement—embodiment of temperamental balance, cultivation of mental vigour, and the experience of ethical sensory pleasure—informed recipes for food dishes recorded in Nushka, Risāla, and Khwān. For this discussion to be intelligible, it is important to take a stock of the dishes recorded in these texts. These included: dressed meat and vegetable dishes (qalya, dū-piyāza, and burānī); leavened, unleavened, grilled, fried, savoury, and sweet breads (nān, kumāch, chāpātī, and pūrī); broths, stews, and pottages (āsh, shūrba, yakhnī, harīsa, and lapsī); rice preparations (zīr-biryān, pulāv, qabūlī, khushka, kḥichrī, and pūhā, i.e. flattened rice); grilled meat (kabāb) dishes; sweet and savoury egg preparations like khāgīna, kūkū, and shashranga; stuffed dishes like gīpā, musamman, and samūsa; mash (bharta); dough-based pasta or noodle-like dressed dishes of būghrā and rishta; bara (fried lentil balls); khandvī (chickpea flour cake rolls); dāl (lentils and pulses); sweetmeats and desserts likes gulgula, mālīdā, shakar-pāra, panbhatta, laddū, khajūr, shīrīnī, halwā, fālūda, baklāva, and firnī; preservatives (murabbā); pickles (āchār); and starch jellies (harīra). The techniques of frying/sautéing (biryān), braising (mutanjan), cooking in steam over a low heat (dam), and roasting in a clay oven (tandūr) or over open coals were employed, either individually or in combination, to a range of ingredients (see Appendix 1) to prepare these food dishes. Mughal cookbooks also recorded methods for making panīr and dalama (types of cheese), māst (coagulated milk), jughrāt (yoghurt), rāīta (yoghurt dressed with spices, herbs or vegetables), coloured clarified butter and food colours, and shelling peppercorn and coriander seeds.

While it is possible to calculate the proportions in which different spices, herbs, seasonings, meats, and plant produce were used to prepare each of the above listed dishes, this exercise would run into pages. Instead, I will delineate the key features of the recipes and examine their contribution to the ideal of self-refinement. The first of these includes the prominence of sweet-sour and mildly sweet flavour profiles in a number of dishes that were made with meats, vegetables, eggs, flour, rice, spices, and salt. These flavour profiles were achieved through the incorporation of lemon and sugar syrup (chāshnī), lemon and saccharine fruits, sugar and unripe and or tart fruits, sweet apricots, raisins and ripened fruits, and, in some cases, only sugar. A few examples of such recipes are āsh chāshnīdār, qalya gūsht (meat) chāshnīdār or qalya chāshnīdār, qalya shakarqand (a type of sweet tuber) chāshnīdār, shakar-līmū (sugar-lemon) qalya Shīrāzī, qalya māhī (fish) chāshnīdār, qalya māhī (fish) wa kelā (banana), qalya kharbūza khām (unripe melon), qalya anba (mango), qalya za‘farānī (saffron) khāss and chāshnīdār, qalya nargisī, qalya kelā khāsa, qalya chāshnīdār az kadū zardak (yellow pumpkin), dū piyāza kelā lu‘āb-dār, dū piyāza kharbūza (melon) chāshnīdār, anba pulāv, anānās (pineapple) pulāv, kelā pulāv, līmū pulāv, līmū pulāv chāshnīdār, shīr (milk) pulāv, shīr wa shakar pulāv, pulāv lu‘āb-dār, shashranga chāshnīdār sīb (apple) namakīn, and khāgīna chāshnīdār.Footnote ⁶⁹ Of these, anānās pulāv, for instance, was prepared using 60 dām of pineapple, 10 dām of lemon, 1 dām of salt with 30 dām each of rice and meat, and varying quantities of herbs and spices.Footnote ⁷⁰ This recipe drew its tartness from lemons and sweetness from pineapples. The latter was a transatlantic crop first introduced by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, and by the end of century pineapples were widely grown across Hindustan. Mughal sources described them as possessing the flavour and aroma of the sweet-tasting and -smelling mango.Footnote ⁷¹

The reasons for the acceptance of this new fruit and inclusion of sweet-sour as well as mildly sweet flavours in vegetable and meat preparations can be extrapolated from the manner in which these flavours were believed to act on the body. Yūnānī tibb posits the scheme of eight single flavours, each possessing either moderate or varying degrees of hot and cold qualities that impacted on the humoral composition of the body (Table 2).Footnote ⁷² These single flavours could be mixed in varying proportions and subjected to different temperatures to yield compound flavour profiles, as in the case of the example noted above.Footnote ⁷³

Table 2.

Flavours, their qualities, and their actions.

While excessive consumption of any of these flavours was proscribed, extra caution was to be exercised in the case of pungent, bitter, acrid, and astringent tasting aliments. Their inherent severe heat and cooling properties were believed to cause temperamental disorders by disrupting the body's humoral balance. Salty and sour flavours, on account of being least hot and cold, were posited as inclining towards a temperate quality. Of these, sour was believed to be a pleasing (latīf) and moderately cold and dry flavour that cleansed the stomach of excessive humoral build-up as well as encouraging equitable humoral formation by augmenting the liver's capacity to produce digestive juices.Footnote ⁷⁴ Similarly, digestive (munazzij) powers of monitoring humoral formation were associated with a sweet flavour. It was described as a temperate (i‘tidāl) flavour that induced balanced warmth and moisture in the body and nourished it. It was also attributed the power to provide pleasure (lazzat) to the tongue (zabān). This nerve-dense external organ was considered to house the faculty of taste (quwāt-i zā’iqa) and was believed to experience qualitative change as a result of the sensations produced by the heating and cooling properties of different flavours. A sweet flavour, owing to its above described properties, did not cause a harmful reaction on the tongue. Rather, it pleased the faculty of taste by lubricating the tongue which in turn aided proper mastication as well as the smooth ingestion of food.Footnote ⁷⁵ Emperor Aurangzeb could have been drawing on this understanding when he decided to bequeath the title of rasanā-vilās (pleasing to the tongue) on an unknown breed of mangoes—the fruit most celebrated in the Mughal sources for its exquisite sweetness.Footnote ⁷⁶

Injecting a sweet-sour or mildly sweet flavour profile into savoury preparations that were made using a range of ingredients whose individual inherent flavours could have varied from pungent to astringent, highlights a calculated decision to provide a mellow and balanced taste profile to food dishes. Moreover, the presence of such flavour profiles across a spectrum of dishes must have also ensured that the meal on the table possessed an overall moderate taste. For instance, the peppery-heat of qalya could be balanced by eating it with a variety of sweet-savoury breads or sweet-sour pulāv.Footnote ⁷⁷ This is just an example of the many ways in which elaborate yet balanced meals could have been curated for the elite spreads. In essence, the presence of these savoury-sweet-sour recipes speaks to the Mughal elites’ project of crafting refined selves by embodying temperamental refinement and pursuing ethical pleasure.

The concern for curating a delightful gastronomic experience, which preserved and did not disturb bodily health, is also signified by a range of recipes that focused on how the food felt in the mouth. As in the case of taste, the faculty of touch (quwāt-i lāmisa) was also located on the tongue and to safeguard it against irritation and corrosion, recipes in the Mughal cookbooks were mindful about the textural composition of dishes.Footnote ⁷⁸ For instance, the recipes for nān-i jawāhar (millet) narm, qalya bādinjān (brinjal) narm, būrānī palak (spinach) narm, khichrī narm, and halwā narm attest to the soft and smooth texture of these preparations.Footnote ⁷⁹ Recipes for nān warqī, nān tangī, and samūsa warqī rendered leaf-thin baked breads and fried pastries capable of dissolving effortlessly in the mouth.Footnote ⁸⁰ The viscous consistency of chāshnīdār and lu‘āb-dār āsh, qalya, and dū piyāza preparations made with a range of meats and vegetables would have lubricated the tongue, making it easier for the masticated food to travel from the mouth to the oesophagus.Footnote ⁸¹ Alluding to the moisturising properties of such dishes, Mirzānāma advises civilised gentlemen to avoid choking on dry preparations, such as pulāv and kabāb, by eating them with a spoonful of qalya.Footnote ⁸² A consideration for preventing lesions on the tongue and choking is also evident in the techniques recorded in the cookbooks to dissolve (gudāz) fish scales and bones.Footnote ⁸³

With regard to fish as well as water fowl like duck and goose, a lot of care was taken in cleaning and preparing the flesh before commencing the actual cooking process. These steps were performed to remove fetor associated with these aquatic animals. For instance, the recipe for a goose kebab specifically instructs the use of pepper, cardamom, cloves, ginger, coriander, fennel, sandal powder, and gul-i Multānī (a type of flower, presumably from Multan) to mask the strong stench of this as well as other marine meats.Footnote ⁸⁴ Fish-based recipes invariably involved washing and marinating the flesh at least two to three times. The ingredients used included fennel, aniseed and cumin waters, lemon, ginger, yoghurt, gram flour, turmeric, and sesame oil.Footnote ⁸⁵ These laborious procedures derived impetus from the understanding that food with a bad smell (bad-bū) impeded the balanced production of humours by hindering the process of digestion, weakened the heart's ability to circulate humours in the body, and prevented the brain from performing at its optimal capacity. Food with a pleasant smell (khushbū), on the other hand, contributed to the idealised state of ethical perfection. It was perceived to fortify the stomach and invigorate the heart and the brain. The faculty of smell (quwāt-i shāmma) was designated to the brain and fragrant substances were recognised as adwiya-i mufarrih (literally exhilarating and refreshing drugs) and were classified as cephalic drugs in yūnānī pharmacopoeias. Some of the fruits, spices, and herbs categorised as such, and which appeared frequently in the Mughal recipes, were lemon, citron and orange, melon, pomegranate, mango, pineapple, saffron, musk, cardamon, black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, mace, fennel, cumin, aniseed, ginger, coriander, and rose. Among these, spices were considered inherently hot in nature.Footnote ⁸⁶ They had to be used in considered quantities to channel their powers in favour of self-refinement and avert the perils of temperamental imbalance. Mughal cookbooks reserved the smallest units of measurement—māsha and surkh—for spices. For instance, the recipe for preparing zard pulāv used one āsār of rice, half an āsār of sugar, one-fourth of an āsār each of raisins, almonds, pistachio nuts, and rose, two māsha of saffron, and two surkh of musk.Footnote ⁸⁷ The recipe for dū piyāza nargisī utilised only two māsha each of cinnamon and saffron and one māsha each of clove, cardamom, and black pepper for one āsār of meat, five eggs, and one-fourth āsār each of spinach and onion.Footnote ⁸⁸

The key element of the nargisī recipes for dū piyāza, qalya, and pulāv was to recreate a narcissus (nargis) flower on the top of the food by placing sliced boiled eggs or preparing the eggs in such a manner that the yolk and white did not mix.Footnote ⁸⁹ Consequently, the cooked eggs looked like narcissi with a yellow centre surrounded by white petals. This attention to visual detail was not an isolated case. Colours were introduced into food dishes, as evidenced by recipes for pulāv muza‘far that involved cooking rice with almonds, raisins, and saffron, and garnishing it with butter fried dried fruits to give the prepared food dish a glistening bejewelled illusion.Footnote ⁹⁰ Zard pulāv was a saffron-based yellow rice preparation, sabz pulāv was made green by boiling rice with spinach, and cinnabar (shangarf) was used for orange-coloured nārangī pulāv and qalya.Footnote ⁹¹ The adjective būqalamūn, signifying a kaleidoscope of hues that emerge when an iridescent surface is subjected to light, was used in a pulāv recipe featuring betel nut, cinnabar, and saffron to stain the rice grains black, red, and orange-yellow, respectively.Footnote ⁹² The sections on making food colours and coloured clarified butter instruct the readers to use spinach, red sāg (leafy vegetable), pomegranate peels, cinnabar, and saffron to produce green (sabz), red (surkh), violet (binafsha), and yellow (zard) or orange (nārangī) colours, respectively.Footnote ⁹³ The logic for incorporating all of these embellishments, catering to the faculty of sight (quwāt-i bāsira), was located in the knowledge that looking at colours and beautiful forms was an exhilarating exercise for the mind, as it alleviated the emotions of grief and sorrow and functioned as a channel for fuelling the imaginative and cognitive faculties—the domain of intellect.Footnote ⁹⁴

These multi-sensory elite gastronomic creations, geared towards the goals of temperamental perfection and mental vigour, did not exist in a watertight bubble. Culinary links between the courtly world and wider society are made visible by the appropriation of recipes from public spaces into Mughal cookbooks and by the food sold in market stalls. The cookbooks compiled for the kitchens of the Mughal elite record recipes for vegetarian and meat-based khichrīs that were prepared at Sufi shrines in honour of saints like Shaikh Farid al-Din Shakar Ganj of the Chishti order and Shaikh Abdul Qadiri of the Qadiri order.Footnote ⁹⁵ In fact, khichrī and Sufism shared a close association during the Mughal period. In 1643, Shah Jahan provided meat procured from his hunting expedition for the khichrī prepared at the Chishti shrine in Ajmer.Footnote ⁹⁶ Akbar and Jahangir preferred vegetarian khichrī on sūfiyānā on meat abstention days (selective vegetarianism was an important aspect of Sufi and Hindu soul purification rituals).Footnote ⁹⁷ Moving from the spiritual to the unruly world of bazars, the elite culinary manuals take note of recipes for qīma kabāb tarah bāzār, i.e. minced meat kabāb as prepared in the market stalls.Footnote ⁹⁸ Similarities can also be noted in the food dishes recorded in the elite culinary manuals and those sold in the markets. For instance, food stalls in the markets of Lahore and Delhi offered multi-hued pulāvs and leaf-thin breads made with flour and clarified butter.Footnote ⁹⁹ These inclusions and parallels between the elite and popular cuisines, however, did not blur the difference between the two. The vendors operating in public places could not have competed with elite cuisine in terms of the quality of ingredients, number of recipe variations, and the finesse achieved by a large team of specialised cooks labouring under the supervision of the physician kitchen superintendent. Furthermore, the demands of ethical self-fashioning translated into an obsession with hygiene for the Mughal aristocracy. The importance of sanitation is constantly underscored in the elite culinary texts as they instruct vigorous cleaning of ingredients before cooking with them. The cooks employed in the kitchen were required to cover their mouths with a cloth sash while preparing food.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Compared to these standards, the food prepared at market stalls was considered unwholesome and unfit for elite consumers.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Catering to the desire to taste popular culinary concoctions while avoiding the contingent risk of contamination resulted in the inclusion of market and public-kitchen recipes in the elite culinary manuals, kitchens, and meals—the ingredients of aristocratic self-refinement.

Final course: conclusion

This article has considered the questions of what the Mughal elite expected from their food and how this shaped the cuisine that graced their khwāns. In doing so, I have drawn attention to and taken seriously the oft-forgotten or even unrecognised science and art patronised by the Mughal elite: cooking and food, and their contribution to the making of a civilised court society. Unlike the scope of tactile and direct engagement involved in the study of tangible Mughal material artefacts, the ephemeral history of food preparation and cuisine can only be grasped by turning to the codes of practice that were recorded as recipes in the culinary manuals. These manuals, some extant only in a fragmented form, are marred by complexities arising from texts bearing similar or the same titles and missing details about the identities of their patrons and dates of composition. I have assembled this scattered archive in a coherent manner by comparing manuscript copies, mapping internal evidences, and subjecting them to external corroboration. By focusing on a close reading of this corpus, the article makes several important interventions that I will broadly outline here. The existence of the same recipes across these cookbooks highlights the practice of the recycling of culinary information within the elite network. Simultaneously, the addition of new recipes in each subsequent cookbook signifies consistent engagement with this form of knowledge production. The latter, specifically the patron-specific variants associated with the kitchen establishments of Mughal elites, also prove helpful in identifying the provenance and period of the compilation of different cookbooks. A thorough analysis of different types of recipes contained in these texts also reveals a systematic pattern of food dishes with balanced flavour profiles, fragrant smells, a non-corrosive feel in the mouth, and delightful visual appeal. These features elevated food from merely being a hunger satiating commodity to a nutritious as well as sensorially pleasing agent that preserved bodily health. Doing so, it bequeathed the ideal state of temperamental equilibrium to its consumers. Designing such recipes required knowledge about the humoral properties of various ingredients and the ability to compound them in a manner that benefitted the partaker. The task of curating these perfect recipes, along with ensuring their proper execution, was accomplished by physicians, who brought the expertise of yūnānī tibb to their job as the superintendents of elite kitchen establishments. The Mughal elite, by making these appointments, ensured that medical science was not cloistered in libraries, apothecaries, and hospitals, only to be executed on specific occasions to treat disorders. Rather it was practised daily in the elite kitchens to fashion healthy bodies that hosted temperamentally balanced selves. The endeavour for explicitly making scientific knowledge about the human body and cooking a part of regular life was bolstered by commissioning treatises that distilled key principles of yūnānī and advanced basic knowledge of food preparation, among other household skills, for the perusal of the elite. These intellectual and action-oriented approaches were adopted by the Mughal elite to facilitate the embodiment of temperamental balance and experience of sensory pleasures, which nourished and did not harm the body, aligned with the akhlāqī requirements for cultivating a civilised, rational, and ethical self. This pursuit of self-refinement was considered necessary for the successful dispensation of imperial and domestic duties as well as the attainment of spiritual awakening. Here, work and pleasure did not represent opposing ends of a fruitful and frivolous spectrum. The Mughal men of sword and pen were also discerning gourmands who sought culinary finesse. A far cry from the proverbial Orientalist cliches of decadence, the Mughal elite were educated patrons or connoisseurs of food, invested in pursuing an ethical life adorned with niʻmat.