Food historian Salma Yusuf Husain brings back recipes from Shah Jahan’s dastarkhwan

“One day, I was wondering about the legacy and heritage that the Mughals have left us with, but not much was written about their food, though Mughlai cuisine is popular even today. When there are so many books on Akbar, Jehangir and Shah Jahan, why hasn’t anyone written about their manuscripts on food?” she says. Sometime later, she found Alwan-e-Nemat, a collection of recipes written during Emperor Jehangir’s time, which made her award-winning book The Emperor’s Table (2008).

She found Nuskhe-e-Shahjahani in London’s British Library in early 2000s and translated only recipes for pulao for a book that was published by Rupa in 2004. Recently, when founder-publisher of Roli Books, Pramod Kapoor, went to London, he got a copy of the full manuscript. “Even in Ain-i-Akbari, there is a chapter dedicated to kitchen management, through which we get to know how important food was. The emperor had nobody less than the prime minister look after it. The Mir Bakawal consulted the hakims, who decided the menu according to the king’s temperament, sleeping pattern and what is good for the intellect,” she says.

The Mughals had a sweet tooth. “In Alwan-e-Nemat, it is written that they used to dip even the shami kababs in sugar syrup,” says Husain. On the spices they used, she adds, “There were no chillies, no garlic and no turmeric in their food, they had saffron, which was used not only for colouring but also as an integral ingredient, along with ginger, coriander seeds and cumin seeds. From ghee, they started cooking in olive oil and when they became Indianised, they started using mustard oil,” she says.

The Mughals also adapted the Indian dish of bharta — where vegetables are mashed after roasting over an open fire. “With each emperor, a new type of cooking was introduced. With Akbar came a lot of Indian dishes, Jehangir lived mostly in Kashmir, so cooking of the birds was introduced as he would hunt a lot near the Dal Lake,” she says, adding that the Portuguese got with them chillies, potatoes and tomatoes.

During her research, Husain also travelled across central Asia, including Tashkent, Bukhara and Samarkand, and discovered how noodles and pastas were also present in the Mughal kitchen. “We were staying in a homestay in Samarkand with an Afghani family, where we saw children rolling and cutting noodles and pasta. The lady of the house told us that these came to them through the silk route, before going to Italy,” says Husain, who has worked with ITC for over 20 years as a food consultant. She notes how the Mughlai cuisine served now is far from authentic. “Now if you ask for Mughlai food, they will give you a plate full of spices, sauces and oil, but that was only used to enhance the base flavours. I just don’t want to write the recipes, I want to know the history, how are we using the recipes and have we done justice to them or or ruined them,” says the author.