The Baburnama and the Foods of the First Mughal

The Baburnama is the memoir of Babur, born in Ferghana in 1483, who took Kabul, then defeated the Sultan of Delhi at Panipat in 1526 and founded the Mughal line in Hindustan. Written in Chagatai Turkic, it is the earliest first-hand account of the subcontinent's land, fruit and plants by a ruler who had come to it from the mountains and steppe of Central Asia.

Raghavan Iyer, in On the Curry Trail, follows the dishes of India back along the routes by which people and ingredients travelled, and the Mughal conquest stands on that road as one of its great crossings. Babur is its first witness. He came from a table of roasted meat, bread, yoghurt, dried fruit and the melons and grapes of Ferghana and Kabul, and the Baburnama is the record of a man measuring Hindustan against that table. He judged the new country by what it lacked as much as by what it held: he found little good fruit, no ice, no cold water, and no good bread or cooked food in its bazaars, and he said so plainly. Of its fruits he gave the mango a fair hearing, setting down that the best were very good and that many were eaten unripe, preserved in the form of pickle or sweetmeat, and he wrote on the plantain, the jackfruit and other plants of the plains with a naturalist's care. That habit of description, of naming a plant, its season and its use, is what makes the memoir a source and not merely a curiosity. The cooking of the Mughal court that followed, the kind that pairs meat with yoghurt, dried fruit, nuts, saffron and fragrant rice, grew from the habits Babur and his people carried in, meeting the spices, grains and vegetables of the Indian kitchen. The Baburnama does not give recipes, and the finished court cuisine belongs to the generations after him, to be read in the Ain-i-Akbari of Abul Fazl, compiled around 1590 under his grandson Akbar. What Babur supplies is the beginning of the story: the palate of the incoming ruler, his homesickness for melons and cold water, and his gardens, which he laid out in the Persian manner at Agra with running water and ordered beds. Iyer's reading is that the great dishes of the north, the biryani, the korma, the pulao and the kebab, are descendants of a meeting of kitchens, and that the first page of that meeting is found in this memoir. A cook reading it learns how the cuisine began as an exchange between a Central Asian taste and an Indian larder, and why the two have never since been separated.

The table behind the Baburnama is one of roast and grilled meat, flatbread, yoghurt, melons, grapes and dried fruit, with the sweetness of fruit set against meat. In Hindustan these met ghee, spices, pulses and the mango, and the dishes of the Mughal kitchen, rice fragrant with saffron and meat tenderised in yoghurt, are what that meeting produced.