The Ain-i-Akbari and the Imperial Kitchen

The Ain-i-Akbari was compiled by Abul Fazl around 1590 as the administrative companion to the Akbarnama, the chronicle of the emperor Akbar's reign. It is a survey of the empire's institutions, revenues, crafts and household, and its early pages describe the imperial kitchen, the abkhana for water and the bawarchikhana for food, as departments of state, each with its own officers and accounts.

The text matters to a cook because it treats the kitchen as an institution. Abul Fazl describes a kitchen under the supervision of trusted officers, with cooks drawn from several lands, and with rules for how supplies were drawn, how food was tasted and how dishes were sealed and carried to the emperor. The discipline of the Mughal table is set out there as administration, and it is this orderly character that distinguishes the account from a book of recipes. The Ain-i-Akbari also lists dishes by kind and grades them: grain dishes without meat, dishes cooked with meat, and sweet dishes. Among the preparations named are sufiyana, the plain dishes eaten on days when the emperor abstained from meat, and the meat dishes that include the ancestors of what the subcontinent now calls the biryani family and the qaliya and do-piyaza of the court. Each is accompanied by quantities of rice, ghee, meat, spice and salt, which gives the historian a measure of the richness of the royal table. The text records the ingredients of a dish rather than its method, and a reader should not take it for a recipe collection in the modern sense. Kalra, in Prashad, writes as a practitioner who inherits this lineage. His book gathers the cooking of the masters of the Indian kitchen, and its pages on the Mughal tradition take the imperial table as a starting point for the slow, enclosed cooking of the dum and the careful layering of spice, ghee and aromatics that the court established. His account of the kitchen as a craft handed from master to apprentice complements Abul Fazl's account of it as an office of state. The two together explain how a court cuisine could be both recorded and carried on: the text fixed the scale and order, and the cooks, the khansama and the bawarchi, carried the method. The influence runs outward from Agra and Fatehpur Sikri into the kitchens of the nobility at Lucknow and Hyderabad, where the court dishes were refined further.

The table that Abul Fazl describes is built on rice, wheat bread, ghee, meat, and the aromatics of the court, among them saffron, cardamom, cloves, black pepper and rose water. Sufiyana dishes show the court's plain side, with grain and vegetables cooked gently, while the meat dishes carry the weight of ghee and spice that later generations came to call Mughlai. Kalra's pages show how the cook still reads that tradition today: in the slow dum, the measured spice and the finish of ghee and aromatics, where the dish lives or dies.