Curry

by Lizzie Collingham

  It was under Akbar’s successors, Jahangir (1605–27) and Shahjahan (1627–58), that Mughal power and wealth reached its zenith. Shahjahan was the wealthiest of all the emperors, with an annual revenue in 1647 of 220 million rupees, 30 million of which was spent on his private household. Painting, poetry and architecture (most famously Shahjahan built the Taj Mahal as his wife’s tomb) all prospered. In this atmosphere of opulence and conspicuous consumption, huge sums were spent on the imperial kitchens. Jahangir’s Persian wife, Nur Jahan, is credited with having invented some very fine dishes and Jahangir himself introduced Gujarati khichari into the Mughal repertoire.56 While travelling through the province of Gujarat, he sampled a local version of this dish which used millet instead of rice. He pronounced that it ‘suited me well’ and ordered that on his vegetarian days ‘they should frequently bring me this khichari’.57 No doubt a Gujarati cook was immediately recruited to work in the imperial kitchen. In this way a simple regional peasant dish was integrated into the courtly cuisine. Other more elaborate versions of khichari were incorporated in to the Mughlai repertoire. During the reign of Shahjahan, Sebastien Manrique was served a ‘far more costly’ khichari which he was told the Bengalis ate at their feasts. It was flavoured with expensive ingredients such as ‘almonds, raisins, cloves, mace, nutmeg, cardamom, cinnamon and pepper’.58

  Jahangir discovered Gujarati khichari while travelling around his empire, something the Mughals did a great deal to remind their subjects of their power and authority. When they travelled, the imperial kitchen travelled with them. ‘It is the custom of the court when the king is to march the next day, that at ten o’clock of the night the royal kitchen should start.’ This ensured that the kitchen was set up, and breakfast already prepared, by the time the emperor arrived the next morning. Fifty camels were needed to carry the supplies and two hundred coolies, each with a basket on his head, to carry the china and the cookware. Fifty well-fed milch cows made up part of the procession, to provide sufficient milk, cream, butter and curds.59 One of the Mughals’ favourite destinations during the hot weather was the mountainous province of Kashmir. There they escaped from the unrelenting heat of the plains in enchanting lakeside gardens. The presence of the Mughals encouraged a blossoming of Kashmiri cuisine and it was here that rogan josh, familiar to all customers of Indian restaurants, was perfected.

  Rogan josh originated in Persia. In Persian the name implies a stew of meat cooked in butter (rogan means clarified butter in Persian) at an intense heat (josh means hot). In Kashmir the dish is flavoured with regional spices. These vary according to the religion of the cook. Kashmiri Brahmans are unusual in that they eat meat without any qualms but they do avoid onions and garlic, so their version of rogan josh uses fennel seeds (commonly used in Kashmir) and asafoetida to flavour the lamb. The Muslim version uses lots of garlic and onion and the dried flower of the cockscomb plant (maval). This is a plant indigenous to Kashmir which produces a furry red flower shaped like a cockscomb. Kashmiri Muslims have a particular liking for this herb and it imparts a bright red colour to the food. Some food historians claim that this redness is the source of the dish’s name as rogan in Kashmiri means red.60

  One of Babur’s main disappointments with India was that there was no decent fruit. Towards the end of his life he discovered that it was possible to cultivate sweet grapes and melons in India but the taste of a melon made him feel so homesick that it reduced him to tears.61 Akbar set up an imperial fruitery, staffed with horticulturists from Persia and central Asia.62 Jahangir wrote at tedious length on the merits of apples from Samarkand and Kabul; exactly how many cherries it was possible to eat at one sitting; his uncle’s apricot trees; and the astonishment of the sheikhs of Ahmadabad at the superiority of Persian melons over those grown in their native Gujarat.63 Both Jahangir and Shahjahan took particular delight in having fruit weighed in front of them.64 This obsession was more than mere gluttony. These fruits invoked the Mughals’ lost homeland in central Asia. Their discussions were a coded expression of their homesickness. The delicate flavour of a Persian melon, the sweetness of a Samarkand apple symbolised the sophisticated culture which was their birthright and which they could no longer enjoy in its rightful setting. Their introduction of these fruits into India were exquisite reminders of the central Asian civilisation they had bequeathed to barbarous India.

  The entire Mughal court was conversant with the political language of fruit. Foreigners were astonished to discover the proportion of their income that the Mughal noblemen and administrators spent on fruit.65 Thomas Roe, always prickly about his dignity, failed to recognise the compliment he was paid when Asaf Khan sent him a basket of twenty musk melons. Instead, he complained that the Indians must ‘suppose our felicity lyes in the palate, for all I have ever received was eatable and drinkable’.66 In fact, so important and powerful a metaphor of power and prestige was fruit within the Mughal world, that it was one of the best gifts one could send or receive. When the King of Balkh sent ambassadors to Shahjahan’s son, the Emperor Aurangzeb, they brought with them one hundred camels loaded with fresh and dried fruit and nuts. (They also, intriguingly, gave him a seventeenth-century form of Viagra: boxes of rancid fish which were said to increase desire.)67

  All the Mughal emperors were misty-eyed about central Asian fruit. But Jahangir and Shahjahan both demonstrated a love of Indian fruit which suggested that, while their homeland had not lost its romantic image, their hearts now lay with their empire in Hindustan. After all, neither man had ever set foot in central Asia. Their favourite fruit was the Indian mango. Babur had been willing to admit that mangoes were the best fruit in Hindustan but he did not think they warranted much praise. Jahangir, eighty years later, declared that ‘notwithstanding the sweetness of the Kabul fruits, not one of them has, to my taste, the flavour of the mango’.68 On one occasion, when Shahjahan was angry with his son, he accused him of eating the best mangoes from Shahjahan’s favourite tree in the Deccan, rather than sending the fruit to him.69 The conversion to mangoes is a telling sign that the Mughals were now Indians at heart. This became clear during the wars Shahjahan waged on the Uzbeks, the same people who had driven Babur out of Samarkand and deprived him of what he saw as his birthright. In contrast to Babur and his men who had felt unhappy and homesick in Hindustan, Shahjahan’s soldiers, about a hundred years later, felt completely out of their element in central Asia. A contemporary chronicler of the Mughal regime described, in language reminiscent of Babur’s first reaction to Hindustan, how ‘“the natural love of home, a preference for the ways and customs of Hindustan, a dislike of the people and manners of Balkh, and the rigours of the climate, all conduced to” a desperate desire among the Mughal nobles to return to India’.70

  Shahjahan’s campaign in central Asia was spectacularly unsuccessful. According to European observers this was due to the Mughals’ decline into a luxurious and corrupt despotism which had thoroughly undermined their authority and military might. They argued that the rot had begun with Shahjahan’s debauched father, Jahangir. Thomas Roe had never ‘seen a man so enamord of drincke’. On the rare occasions when he was able to gain an audience with the emperor, the British ambassador was frustrated by the fact that Jahangir was often so far gone in his cups that he was incoherent, and would fall into a befuddled sleep half way through the conversation.71 In his memoirs Jahangir frankly admitted to his debauchery and cheerfully detailed his destructive and uncontrollable addiction to alcohol. After his first taste of wine on a hunting trip he progressed to arrack, Indian schnapps distilled from toddy, the sap of the palm tree. He was soon greedily imbibing twenty cups a day of this distilled spirit, and became so permanently inebriated that his hands shook uncontrollably. William Hawkins, an Englishman who was a favourite with Jahangir for a short while, described how by the end of the day the emperor was so drugged with liquor and opium that his supper had to be ‘thrust into his mouthe by others’.72 It was only after the strongest of warnings from his physician that Jahangir
found the will-power to wean himself down to a relatively healthy six cups a day of arrack diluted with wine, supplemented by generous doses of opium.73 His jade drinking cup can now be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  Jahangir frequently indulged in drinking parties with his courtiers, and throughout the reign of the next emperor, Shahjahan, the vice of drinking continued unabated. Little is known about the character of Shahjahan. He checked everything the chroniclers of his reign wrote about him, thus ensuring that few indiscretions were recorded for posterity. Niccolao Manucci, who was an artilleryman in the army of Shahjahan’s son, commented that although he did not drink he ‘left everyone to live as he pleased, contenting himself with passing his days among women’.74 The French doctor François Bernier claimed that his ‘antics and follies’ with his troupe of dancing girls transgressed the bounds of decency. He was even said to have had an incestuous affair with his daughter, Jahanara. Bernier claimed that she loved her father passionately and took great care of him, even personally supervising the preparation of all his food.75

  Shahjahan’s love of luxury ensured that Mughlai culture flourished. Artisans were busily employed constructing the jewel-encrusted peacock throne which he commissioned on his accession; builders and architects created the beautiful city of Shahjahanabad (now known as Old Delhi) as well as the Taj Mahal at Agra; in Shahjahan’s ateliers Mughal artists painted the exquisite series of miniatures known as the Padshahnama. His chefs concocted banquets consisting only of dishes with white sauces. For these they used white cumin which cooks in Delhi refer to nowadays as shahi jeera (royal cumin).76 The culinary culture of the court filtered down to ordinary people, and in all the major towns there were bazaars filled with cookshops. When Manrique visited Lahore in 1641 he found that the court had spread out into the countryside: ‘more than half a league of the adjoining country was covered by a handsome, well laid out, moving town, composed of a variety of tents and pavilions of many colours’. This city of tents contained Shahjahan’s beautiful buildings, his peacock throne, his glorious banquets, were all paid for by an increasingly hard-pressed Indian peasantry.78 In 1630, a terrible famine struck the inhabitants of Gujarat. European merchants from Surat observed with horror Indians scrabbling for food in dunghills. The villages were desolate and corpses piled up on the outskirts of the towns.79 In response, public kitchens were opened, and revenue collection from the peasants was suspended.

  market-places, filled with delicious and appetising eatables . . . Among these dishes the principal and most substantial were the rich and aromatic Mogol Bringes [biryanis] and Persian pilaos of different hues . . . Nor did these bazaars lack the simple foods of the native and superstitious pagan; as to meet their taste many tents held different dishes of rice, herbs and vegetables, among which the chief place was taken by the Gujerat or dry bringe . . . Bread was not lacking . . . of the ordinary and poor people . . . entirely of flour, baked on iron plates or clay dishes which are put upon live embers; [and] a very fine bread, delicate in flavour and made from wheat flour and the purest ghi so as to come out in thin leaves . . . Of these and other kinds of food there was such abundance in this moveable suburb that the curious Reader can imagine what would be met with in the bazaar and markets within the City itself. What struck me most were the low prices at which these things were sold, for any man could fare fully and sumptuously all day for two silver reals.77

  Shahjahan was a poor administrator. Rather than consolidating his power at home he waged unnecessary wars in central Asia. The empire began to fray at the edges. His ruthless and excessively pious son, Aurangzeb, took drastic steps to remedy his father’s mistakes. In an attempt to restore Islam to the court of the Mughals, Aurangzeb forbade the distillation of spirits within the city walls of Delhi, and any Muslim or Hindu found to be selling alcohol lost a hand and a foot.80 He discontinued many of the Indian practices which had crept into the Mughal emperor’s way of life and, in a characteristic spirit of self-sacrifice, he banned music, which he loved, from the court. Aurangzeb’s one indulgence appears to have been food. He spent a lavish one thousand rupees a day on the imperial kitchens and he sought out good cooks. When his son refused to send ‘Sulaiman, who cooks biryani’ to work in the imperial kitchens, Aurangzeb was frustrated and asked him to look out for a pupil of this skilful cook as ‘the desire [for eating] has not entirely left me’.81

  Under Aurangzeb the Mughal Empire reached its furthest extent. But when he died in 1707, his successors were unable to prevent provincial governors from breaking away and establishing themselves as virtually independent rulers of new satellite states. It was at these regional courts that Mughlai cuisine continued to flourish in the eighteenth century.

  Kebabs

  These very simple kebabs are the sort Babur might have eaten in camp or that the Afridis would have served at the tea party they held for the British. Serves 3–4.

  500–800g tender beef or lamb steak

  3 cloves of garlic, crushed

  1 teaspoon fresh ginger, finely grated

  1–3 green chillies, finely chopped

  ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  3–4 tablespoons oil (olive or vegetable)

  Spices (choose according to the flavours you prefer)

  1 teaspoon ground cumin

  1 teaspoon ground coriander

  ½ teaspoon garam masala

  If you prefer a creamy marinade, add

  2 tablespoons yogurt

  1 tablespoon lemon juice

  And if you like a granular texture, add

  1–2 tablespoons ground almonds

  Cut the meat into small chunks. Combine the garlic, ginger, chillies, pepper, salt. Add the spices of your choice. Add the oil (use less if you want a yogurt marinade). Add the yogurt, lemon juice and (optional) the ground almonds. Mix well. Combine with the meat. Cover and leave in the fridge overnight. Thread on to skewers and roast under a grill, or on a barbecue.

  Khichari

  Khichari is the simple peasant dish eaten all over India. The key to getting it right is to add just enough water so that the rice and lentils are well cooked without being sticky. Serves 4.

  100g red split lentils

  500ml water

  ½ teaspoon turmeric

  225g basmati rice

  salt to taste

  25g butter

  1 small onion, finely chopped

  Put the red split lentils in a pan with 250ml of water and the turmeric. Bring to the boil. Skim off the scum which rises to the surface. Turn the heat very low and cook gently for about 10 minutes. Add the rice, another 250ml of water, salt to taste and bring to the boil. Then reduce the heat, cover the pan and cook over a very low flame. Once all the water has been absorbed, take the pan off the heat and wrap in a towel. Leave in a warm place for 10–20 minutes to allow the rice to expand fully.

  Meanwhile, fry the onions in the butter until browned and sprinkle over the rice and lentils when it is served.

  Chicken biryani

  Biryani is a celebratory dish, eaten at weddings. It is the Mughal version of pilau. A pilau was supposed to be aromatic rather than spicy, allowing the sweet or nutty flavour of the rice to dominate. Mughal biryanis were extremely spicy, much spicier than biryanis tend to be nowadays. Serves 5–6.

  1 whole chicken, about 1½kg, washed and jointed into 8–10 pieces

  Marinade

  2cm piece of fresh ginger, finely grated

  6 cloves garlic, crushed

  2–3 fresh green chillies, pounded in a pestle and mortar

  ½ teaspoon cardamom powder

  1 teaspoon cumin powder

  1 teaspoon coriander powder

  4 whole green chillies, slit down the side

  2cm cinnamon stick

  2 whole cloves

  salt to taste

  1 tablespoon lemon juice

  2 tomatoes, puréed

  6–8 prunes

  Mix all the ingredients t
ogether in a bowl, add the chicken and mix again. Make sure all the pieces of chicken are coated in the marinade. Cover and leave in the fridge overnight.

  350g red split lentils, pre-soaked in water for 15 minutes

  500ml water

  4–6 tablespoons vegetable oil

  2 large onions; ¼ of one onion should be sliced, the rest should be chopped

  400ml yogurt

  ¼ teaspoon saffron, crushed and steeped in 2 teaspoons hot milk

  500g basmati rice, pre-soaked in water for 20 minutes

  salt to taste

  2cm cinnamon stick

  3 cardamom pods

  3 cloves

  1½ litres water

  6 small new potatoes, boiled until just cooked

  3 hard-boiled eggs, shelled and cut in half

  a few sprigs of mint

  100g blanched slivered almonds

  Put the lentils and water in a large pan. Bring to the boil. Turn down the heat and then simmer for 10 minutes. Drain and set aside.

  Heat the oil in a pan and fry the chopped onions until golden brown.

  Take the meat in its marinade out of the fridge, and add the onions with their cooking oil to the mixture.

  Add the yogurt and mix well. Now pour in the saffron soaked in milk.