The Nuskha-e-Shahjahani

The Nuskha-e-Shahjahani belongs to the reign of Shah Jahan, who ruled the Mughal empire from 1628 to 1658 from Agra and from the new city of Shahjahanabad at Delhi. A nuskha is a written recipe or formulary, and the title places the collection in the Persian-reading world of the Mughal court, where the kitchen answered to the imperial household.

The Mughal kitchen has three earlier witnesses. The Baburnama records the first emperor's eye for the foods and fruits of Hindustan against those of Central Asia. The Nimmatnama of the Sultans of Mandu, written about 1500, sets down the recipes of a Malwa court. The Ain-i-Akbari of Abul Fazl, compiled about 1590, lists the imperial kitchen's staff, its stores and its dishes, among them the rice and meat preparations of the emperor's table. The Nuskha-e-Shahjahani is read in that line, as the cooking of the next generation of the dynasty at the height of its building and its ceremony. The cooking it stands for is that of a court with a Persian and Central Asian inheritance placed on Indian ground. Rice cooked with meat and sealed in its pot, meat braised in yoghurt, onion and ghee, and meat on the skewer and in the tandoor are the dishes that run from Babur's circle through Akbar's kitchen into the Delhi of Shah Jahan. Saffron, rosewater, nuts and dried fruit mark the dishes of the court, and the spice of the Indian kitchen is set beside them. The cook who works from such a text is directed by proportion and sequence, and the page leaves heat, timing and the final judgement to the hand. For the reader of this book the Nuskha-e-Shahjahani is a source to be handled with the same care as the others in this chapter. It is a court document, and it speaks for the palace and the nobility, not for the street or the village. Its worth lies in showing that the Mughal table of the mid-seventeenth century had its own written practice, and that the dishes later carried by the khansama and the bawarchi into the houses of Lucknow, Hyderabad and Delhi rest on a body of recorded craft.

The flavour of the Shah Jahan table is that of rich, slow-cooked dishes: meat braised in yoghurt, onion and ghee, pulao scented with saffron, green cardamom and rosewater, and kebabs finished over coals. Nuts, dried fruit and cream give the dishes of the court their softness, and the spice is used to perfume more than to burn. The qorma and the pulao of the Mughal dinner still serve as the formal dishes of a North Indian feast.