The Soopa Shastra of Mangarasa

The Soopa Shastra is a Kannada work on cookery composed in 1508 by Mangarasa, a Jain author of the Karnataka country, in the years when the Vijayanagara kingdom held the south. It stands in the line of the Manasollasa of Someshvara III (1130), also from the Kannada-speaking Deccan, as one of the few early texts in which the kitchen is treated as a subject in its own right.

Mangarasa wrote in verse, as was the custom of learned Kannada composition, and his subject is the vegetarian table. That choice follows his Jain faith, which forbids the taking of animal life, and it makes the book a rare early record of a cuisine built entirely on grains, pulses, vegetables, fruit, milk and its products. The work is counted among the oldest surviving Kannada texts devoted to food, and K. T. Achaya, whose histories of Indian food are the settled guide to such sources, gives it its place among the medieval writings of the south. Its interest to the cook lies in its range rather than in any single dish. The book sets out rice preparations, pulse and vegetable dishes, savoury fried and steamed things, sweets, and drinks, and it treats them as a body of craft to be taught. Verse is an economical vehicle for this: the lists of ingredients and the order of work are fixed in the memory of a reader who had learned them aloud. The text matters to anyone who reads the regional cooking of Karnataka and the wider south backwards from the present. Bisi bele bath, the dal and rice preparations of the Kannada table, the steamed rice-flour cakes and the milk sweets all belong to a kitchen whose written ancestry begins in works of this kind. Raghavan Iyer, in The Turmeric Trail, writes of the vegetarian cooking of southern India as a tradition of long standing, built on spice and technique rather than on meat, and the Soopa Shastra is a written witness to that tradition from the early sixteenth century. The cook should read it as a document of its place and time and not as a recipe collection in the modern sense. It gives no oven temperatures and no weights; its measures are those of a household in which the cook already knew the work. What it records is the vocabulary of a vegetarian kitchen and the standing that a Jain scholar was prepared to give it.

The table the Soopa Shastra describes is the Jain vegetarian table, in which meat is excluded and, in strict observance, roots such as onion and garlic are avoided as well. Cooks of that custom build savour from souring agents, fresh and dried spices, pulses, coconut and ghee. The result is a cuisine in which a plain rice and dal meal carries its whole interest in the tempering and the balance of its seasoning.