A cookbook from Jahangir’s royal kitchen
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In 2002, eminent Persian scholar Salma Yusuf Husain was going through a catalogue of books from the Mughal period at the National Archives of India in New Delhi. She was working there, and had earned herself a name for translating rare Persian texts into English.
While she loved the language, she was equally fond of Mughal history, especially their food. She was going through the catalogue with a single-minded focus—to find if the Mughals left any account of their cuisine. As luck would have it, she chanced upon a seventeenth century manuscript, Alwan-E-Nemat, a cookbook from Mughal emperor Jahangir’s imperial kitchen.
It was a treasure trove of 374 unique recipes. Husain began translating it by trying a few recipes, experimenting with cooking methods, while simultaneously working on multiple food books highlighting Mughal cuisine. “It’s a topic that fascinates me, because one finds variations of Mughal-influenced dishes across restaurants, but no one truly knows the intricacies of the cuisine.
Mughal dishes are not supposed to be dunked in oil and spices. You are meant to taste the meats and ingredients," she explains. During the Mughal period in India, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, there was minimal uses of spices and the flavour of each ingredient was sacrosanct.
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