At first look, The Mughal Feast: Recipes From The Kitchen Of Emperor Shah Jahan seems like a visible treat. The pages are adorned with Mughal miniatures from the British Library, London collections, and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC, even as the
hashiyas, or the margins, are splattered with gold and decorated with floral motifs. These images contain pointers to the content material within, about the golden duration of the Mughal reign. At the same time, cooking became considered an artwork, on par with architecture, painting, and literature. The book is a “transcript” of the “Kha-e-Shahjahani, an original handwritten Persian recipe ebook dating back to Shah Jahan’s the aid of food historian and writer Salma Yusuf Husain. She has authored numerous books on diverse Mughal food factors, including The Emperor’s 008.
The roots of The Mughal Feast go back to the Nineteen Sixties-70s, while Husain used to paint at the National Archives of India, Delhi. “Got the ame across many books on the Mughals, but not much turned into writing about their food. And yet, nowadays, Mughal meals are savored by all and sundry. So I felt that there must be something obtainable,” she says, ” as we sit down for a tête-à-tête at her domestic in Gurugram. This quest, which took her to the British Library, London, and the Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad, bore fruit when she determined the Alwan-i-Nemat, a collection of recipes written during Emperor Jehangir’s got here across the Nuskha-e-Shahjahani inside the British Library in the early 2000s. However, it was only recently that she was granted the right of entry to the whole manuscript when the founder-writer of Roli Books, Pramod Kapoor, went to London and managed to get a copy. “Unfortunately, bankruptcy 10, on pickles and murabba, is missing from the manuscript,” says Hu “ain. Even though bearing no trace of the writer or date of compilation, the authenticity is thought to have been written during the early years of Shah Jahan when he shifted the capital from Agra to Delhi and named it Shahjahanabad.
The Mughal Feast is divided into seven sections—Naan, Cash, Qaliya And Do-ijazah, Bharta, Zeer Biryani, Pulao, Kabab, and Shiriniha. It offers reachable suggestions as soon as observed via mir breakaways (heads of the kitchen) and royal cooks, together with approaches to clean fish, put off the scent with the aid of rubbing it with mustard oil, chickpea flour, and turmeric, melt its bones, and smoke a filled fowl by way of gradual-cooking it on a cinnamon bed. It even tells you how to prepare dinner with a goose flawlessly.
The book takes you by surprise. The fundamental revelation is just how different the original royal repast is from the “Mughlai “ood” that we “eat nowadays, with its rich, thick, greasy gravies. Moreover, the recipes comprise minimal use of spices—with the simplest garam masala and ginger getting used as aromatics.
Even though the royal feast featured vibrant colors, those came from natural assets, including saffron, spinach, beetroot, and sparkling fruit juices.”Today, you may discover that magazines speak to me about gradual cooking. But lower back then, that was the norm, with the meals being gradually cooked on a Sangeetha or wooden fireplace, and the meat and fish were cooked in their juices. I wanted to bring these insights about how healthy Mughal meals can be to the prevailing technology,” says you.
