It was no cakewalk to be a cook in the Mughal court: to produce a royal meal for the pickiest of palates from a crude kitchen with little more than the staple rice and wheat, a few vegetables and spices. The game the royal masters were fond of hunting demanded endless ingenuity and inventiveness. But the royal chefs were more than equal to the task, borrowing liberally from Irani, Afghani and Indian cuisine to produce an impressive array of kababs, do piazas, qalyas, dum pukhts, pulaos, rogan josh, saag, bhartas, salans, khichdis, samosas, kheers, halwa, laddoos and barfis, as a recently discovered 16th century manuscript of over 374 recipes shows.
This Persian cookbook, meticulously calligraphed on 155 pages of cream-coloured paper with a painted blue margin, is one of three copies of the original manuscript said to be written during Jehangir's rule. One copy of the original, taken down by a calligrapher called Abdul Rahim in 1235 AH (AD 1818), has been lying for several decades at Delhi's National Museum. The Alwan-e-Nemat (Colours of the Riches) is possibly the first book...
