Mughlai Khana (मुगलई खाना)

Mughal court cooking (1526–1857) is the most elaborate and technically sophisticated culinary tradition in Indian history — the synthesis of Persian, Central Asian, and indigenous Indian cooking traditions that produced biryani, korma, nihari, haleem, and the full vocabulary of rich, nut-enriched, slow-cooked preparations that define "Indian restaurant food" globally. The Mughal court employed hundreds of specialist cooks, and the techniques documented in court records represent a peak of culinary sophistication.

Mughlai cooking is the cooking of the Mughal court between 1526 and 1857, a tradition formed where Persian and Central Asian practice met the kitchens of northern India. Babur, who founded the dynasty, wrote of the fruits and foods of Hindustan in the Baburnama with the eye of a man longing for the melons of Central Asia, and the court that followed him carried Persian taste to Delhi and Agra. Its cooks were many and specialised, and the dishes that came of their work, among them biryani, korma, nihari and haleem, still supply much of what the world takes for Indian restaurant food. The first principle is the slow, enclosed cooking of meat. Meat is browned in ghee with onion, then braised in its own juices and yoghurt over low heat, often in a sealed pot, so that the sauce is reduced to a thick coat rather than left as a broth. The sealed pot, dum, is where a biryani lives or dies: the vessel is closed with dough, set over the lowest heat, and the rice finishes in the steam of the meat beneath it. The second principle is richness by grinding. Almonds, cashews, poppy seeds and melon seeds are ground and stirred into a sauce to thicken and smooth it, and cream or yoghurt is used where the later and plainer cooking of the north would use tomato. Onions are fried to a deep gold and ground or kept whole as a garnish, and the result is a sauce of body rather than sharpness. The third is the restrained, fragrant spicing. Green cardamom Elettaria cardamomum, cloves, mace, true cinnamon Cinnamomum verum and black pepper Piper nigrum are used in a balanced warmth, and are perfumed at the close with rose water, kewra and saffron. Chilli is present but does not lead. Abul Fazl, in the Ain-i-Akbari (c. 1590), set down the kitchen of Akbar with its accounts of dishes, grades of rice and the keeping of the royal stores, and shows an establishment ordered with great care. The tradition did not end with the court. As Delhi declined, cooks went to the courts of Awadh and Hyderabad, where Wajid Ali Shah and the Nizams kept tables of their own, and each court gave the Mughal inheritance its own character. The cooking of Lucknow and of Hyderabad is therefore best read as a continuation of the Mughal kitchen in new hands, and the cooking of the Punjab and the Muslim households of the north kept much of it alive in the home.

The Mughlai table is one of richness held in balance: a sauce of ground nuts, yoghurt or cream and deeply fried onion, with the warmth of green cardamom, cloves, mace and true cinnamon rather than the heat of chilli. Rose water, kewra and saffron are added at the close, so that perfume is the last thing the diner meets and the first thing remembered. A Mughlai meal is built around a meat course, a korma, a nihari or a biryani sealed in its pot, and is eaten with breads such as naan and sheermal, or with rice, and with a raita, a thin onion salad and a pickle to set against the richness. Sweetness comes at the end in dishes such as shahi tukda and firni, and the meal is a slow one, in which the gentle spicing and the soft texture of long-cooked meat are the point.