The Manasollasa (मानसोल्लास)

The Manasollasa, also called the Abhilashitartha Chintamani, is a Sanskrit encyclopaedia composed in 1130 under Someshvara III, a Chalukya king whose court lay in the Karnataka Deccan. Its culinary matter belongs to the section on the pleasures of the palace, the annabhoga, and it is among the earliest sustained accounts of cooking in the Indian languages of learning. K. T. Achaya drew on it in tracing the history of Indian food, and Monisha Bharadwaj cites it for its references to curdled milk preparations.

The Manasollasa, also called the Abhilashitartha Chintamani, is a Sanskrit encyclopaedia composed in 1130 under Someshvara III, a Chalukya king whose court lay in the Karnataka Deccan. It treats kingship and its duties in five books of twenty chapters each, and among its subjects are architecture, painting, music, dance, sport and the table. The culinary matter belongs to the section on the pleasures of the palace, the annabhoga, and it is one of the earliest sustained accounts of cooking in the Indian languages of learning. The annabhoga is arranged as a court manual. It sets out how rice is to be boiled and how it is to be served, how pulses are cooked, how meat, fish and vegetables are prepared, and how savouries, sweets and drinks are made. Its dishes include forms that a modern cook recognises: rice cooked soft and eaten with ghee, fritters of pulse batter, steamed and fried cakes, and sweetened milk preparations. The text names the souring of dishes with fruit and buttermilk, the use of asafoetida Ferula assa-foetida, cumin, black pepper Piper nigrum and mustard Brassica juncea as seasonings, and the fragrancing of food and water with camphor and flowers. The text also speaks of method. Vessels, fuels, the smoking of food and the tempering of spices in hot fat are described, so that the technique of finishing a dish with seasoned ghee, the ancestor of the tadka or popu of the south, can be read in a work of the twelfth century. Meals are ordered by course, and the sequence of tastes within a feast is part of the instruction. The tradition behind the book is that of the Sanskrit encyclopaedia, in which food is classed by taste, by the season and by what Ayurvedic custom counts as heating, cooling or light. Where the Manasollasa touches these matters it writes as the learning of its time, and the court served food accordingly. It should be read as a record of what a Deccan royal household ate and how its cooks were taught to proceed, and as a source for historians such as K. T. Achaya, who drew on it in tracing the history of Indian food.

The table of the Manasollasa is built on taste and sequence. Dishes are soured with fruit and buttermilk and seasoned with asafoetida Ferula assa-foetida, cumin, black pepper Piper nigrum and mustard Brassica juncea, while food and water are fragrant with camphor and flowers. The order of tastes within a feast is part of the instruction, so that a meal is read as a progression of courses and not as a single service. The cooking it describes is recognisable to a cook today: rice boiled soft and eaten with ghee, fritters of pulse batter, steamed and fried cakes, and sweetened milk preparations. Food seasoned in hot fat, the forerunner of the tadka or popu of the south, finishes a dish with its sharpest aroma. Where Ayurvedic custom counts a food heating, cooling or light, the court served it on the occasion the tradition assigned, and the text writes as the learning of its time.