Mughlai cuisine

• 1. Introduction

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  Mughlai cuisine begins with a paradox: a dish now sold as a British curry started life in the royal kitchens of an empire that ruled northern India for three centuries. Fifty silver bowls of food, rice dyed purple and green, and stewed meats flavoured with ginger, pepper, and butter were the table of Mughal emperor Jahangir, as recorded by Edward Terry, the British ambassador to his court between 1615 and 1619. Terry called the meat "a food that is exceedingly pleasing to all Palates." What he was describing, the food writer Lizzie Collingham writes, was a curry.

  The cuisine that produced that dinner was not simply Indian food. It was a fusion born of empire, blending the cooking traditions of Central Asia and Persia with the spices and vegetables of the Indian subcontinent. The Mughals brought the tandoor clay oven, the technique of marinating meat in yoghurt, and a taste for dried fruits and leavened bread. They found cardamom, cloves, and pepper waiting for them. Out of that encounter grew biryanis, kormas, kebabs, and a library of sweetmeats that still stock restaurant menus today.

  How exactly did an imperial court cuisine travel from royal banquets to roadside food stalls? And what do the cookery books written for Mughal emperors actually tell us about the food they ate? Those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. Fusion at the Court

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  Biryani developed in the royal Mughal kitchens in India, combining South Asian spicy rice dishes with the Persian pilau style of aromatic garnished rice and the Persian method of marinating meat in yoghurt. That single dish is a compressed history of Mughlai cooking itself: Central Asian ingredients and methods meeting local ones on unfamiliar ground.

  The Mughal Empire in northern Hindustan was Indo-Persian in character, with a hybridized Persianate culture that reached across food as much as art and language. Among the foods the Mughals introduced to the region were stuffed meat and poultry, leavened bread, pilau, and dried fruits. Aubergine came to the table from Hindustan; carrot arrived from Afghanistan. Cardamom, cloves, and pepper were local contributions that the cooks wove into Central Asian recipes.

  Kebabs have a slightly longer history on the subcontinent, having first appeared during the Delhi Sultanate that preceded the Mughals. At the Mughal court they were transformed from simple grilled pieces of meat into a delicate preparation flavoured with aromatic spices and dried fruits. That progression from rough to refined is a consistent pattern across Mughlai cooking: techniques arriving from elsewhere and being made more elaborate in the imperial kitchen.

• 3. The Cookery Books

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  The Nuskha-i-Shahjahani, meaning "Shah Jahan's Recipes," was said to record dishes prepared for the court of emperor Shah Jahan, who reigned from 1627 to 1658. This Persian manuscript organized the cuisine into ten chapters, ranging from breads and pottages through to stews, mashed vegetables, layered rice dishes, kebabs, savoury porridge, and omelettes. Its final chapter covered jams, pickles, fried bread, sweets, warm pudding, and instructions for making yoghurt and panir, the Indian curd cheese.

  A second major work, the Khulasati Makulat u Mashrubat, meaning "Compendium of Things Eaten and Drunk," was connected to the reign of emperor Aurangzeb, who ruled from 1658 to 1707, or perhaps a few years after. Its forty chapters each addressed a single type of dish, opening with breads such as naan and kulcha before moving through savoury categories. One chapter was set aside for salhanha-i hindi, dishes built around Hindustani sauces, marking a deliberate acknowledgment of the local food tradition within an otherwise Persianate framework.

  The Alwan-E-Nimat, meaning "Colours of the Table," was dedicated entirely to sweetmeats and dates from the reign of Jahangir, who ruled from 1605 to 1627. It describes nan khatai, a biscuit-like bread sometimes made with almond; sweetened puri breads; fried sweet samosas; spherical laddu sweets; and halva. Notably, both samosas and puris in this book could be prepared using dam cooking, a technique of slow-cooking in a sealed pot that appears again in Mughlai kitchen practice more broadly.

• 4. What Travellers Recorded

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  Francisco Pelsaert, a merchant of the Dutch East India Company, recorded a wealthy Indian feast during Jahangir's reign. The table held spiced meat dishes called aeshelia, along with dupiyaza cooked with onion, and roasts. Garnished rice appeared in two forms: pollaeb, which was pilau, and brinj, which was biryani. Wheat cakes called zueyla provided one of the accompaniments.

  Pilau drew mixed reactions from Western visitors in the nineteenth century. The Hungarian linguist Armin Vambery found it excellent. The American diplomat Eugene Schuyler called it "pleasant but... too greasy and insipid." Lizzie Collingham noted that pilau was one of the two standard dishes of Central Asian fare, the other being kebabs, suggesting it was an anchor of the cuisine long before it reached the Mughal table.

  Edward Terry's account of a Mughlai dinner stands as the most detailed firsthand Western description of the court's food. His fifty silver bowls, each containing a separate dish, indicate the scale at which Mughal hospitality operated. His observation that the rice was far better cooked than anything he had encountered in Britain, and flavoured to great effect with ginger, pepper, and butter, points to how profoundly different the court kitchen was from what European visitors knew at home. The detail of rice dyed in colours including purple and green adds a visual dimension to the record that no recipe book preserves.

• 5. Sweetmeats and Drinks

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  Halva, rice desserts, and falooda made with vermicelli in syrup were among the Mughlai sweetmeats most enjoyed by the Mughals themselves, according to the cuisine's early records. The royal appetite for sweets was substantial enough to generate a standalone manuscript, the Alwan-E-Nimat, devoted to them alone.

  The Khulasati Makulat u Mashrubat expands the dessert inventory further. Phirni and shir berenj were rice and milk puddings. Falooda was a cold vermicelli dessert. Panbhatta was a sherbet made with fried soaked rice. Malida was a sweet dough preparation. Sweet dumplings appeared in at least four forms: sambosa, puri, gulgula, and khajur.

  Fruits occupied a separate but important place in the Mughal sweet table. The Mughals prized several varieties of indigenous Indian mangoes as desserts. Lizzie Collingham notes that they also found mangoes suitable for sherbet, and preserves a recipe for green mango sherbet. Sherbet itself is described as a characteristic Mughal drink. The use of rose-water in seviyan, a vermicelli dish prepared with milk, clarified butter, and almonds, points to a Persian aesthetic sensibility that ran through the dessert repertoire as much as through the savoury kitchen.

• 6. The Cuisine Today

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  In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mughlai cuisine has been reshaped for a mass market. Restaurants and roadside food stalls reduced its elaborate variety to a simpler format: a single dish of marinated chicken or meat, cooked in a thick sauce based on tomato or cream, and paired with flatbreads or garnished rice.

  The most documented example of this adaptation is chicken tikka masala. Chicken tikka, tandoor-grilled yoghurt-marinated chicken associated with the Mughal emperor Babur, who reigned from 1526 to 1530, was transformed in late-twentieth-century Britain by the addition of tomato, cream, and spices. The result became known as a British curry.

  The broader Mughlai canon remains extensive. Main courses include biryani, keema matar with minced lamb and peas, kofta chorba as a meatball soup, murgh kali mirch with black pepper, mutton rogan josh from Kashmir, and the vegetarian shahi kaju aloo made with cashews and curd. Korma is a mild curry using the braising technique the Mughals brought from Central Asia. Mughlai paratha, a Bengali flatbread stuffed with minced meat or egg, stands as one of the cuisine's distinctive accompaniments, a reminder that the fusion process did not stop at the Mughal court but continued wherever the cooking tradition travelled.