The Nimmatnama of the Sultans of Mandu

The Nimmatnama, the book of delicacies, was compiled at the court of the Sultans of Mandu in Malwa, and is dated to about 1500. Mandu is a fortified plateau city above the Narmada valley, and its sultans ruled from it as an independent kingdom before Malwa passed under Mughal authority.

The Nimmatnama is a Persian-language manuscript of recipes, written for the sultan's own table and illustrated in the manner of the Malwa court. It belongs to the small company of surviving texts that record the cooking of the subcontinent before the Mughal kitchen was fully formed, and it is usually read beside the Manasollasa of Someshvara III (1130), which came from the Deccan four centuries earlier. Where the Manasollasa describes a Hindu royal household and its ordering of dishes, the Nimmatnama shows a Persianate Muslim court at the same business, with the Indian kitchen already working inside it. Its interest to a cook lies in what it combines. The recipes set the meats, rice dishes and sweet preparations that a Persian court would expect beside the spices, souring agents and methods of the country in which that court now lived. The meeting of Persian and Indian cooking was thus under way in the sultanates well before Babur crossed the Khyber and before Abul Fazl set down the imperial kitchen in the Ain-i-Akbari (c. 1590). The Mughal table inherited a cuisine that regional courts such as Mandu had already begun to make. The manuscript is also a witness to the kitchen as an object of royal attention. A sultan who commissions a book of delicacies treats cooking as a matter of state and of pleasure alike, and the later habit of the Mughal, Awadhi and Hyderabadi courts of keeping their recipes and their cooks' reputations follows the same principle. J. Inder Singh Kalra, in Prashad: Cooking with Indian Masters, writes of the great court and hereditary kitchens as the line through which such knowledge passed, and the Nimmatnama stands near the head of that line. The slow-cooked meats, the fragrant rice and the dishes finished with ghee and aromatics of the later courts may be set against it to show how old their lineage is. By 1500 the cooking of the Malwa plateau already had a written court tradition, kept in a book made for a sultan's pleasure and illustrated by the painters of his court.

The table the Nimmatnama points to is one of meat and rice cooked with care, perfumed with aromatics and finished with ghee, set beside sweet dishes and the souring and spicing of the Indian kitchen. It is the ancestor in taste of the richly fragrant, slowly cooked dishes later associated with Mughal and Awadhi service, though the manuscript itself should be read as the beginning of that tradition and not its fullest form.