There was always plenty of arrack punch to drink. This was the Indian schnapps or fire water which befuddled the Emperor Jahangir and left him incapable of feeding himself. It was otherwise known as ‘Fool Rack’ and was viewed with disapproval by some as it fell ‘upon the nerves . . . causeth shaking of the hands in those that drink a little too much of it, and . . . casts them into incurable maladies’. Despite its dangers, it was ‘drunk in drams by the Europeans’. At an entertainment to ‘commemorate the day they left England and their wives’, Mandelslo noticed that in drinking their wives’ healths several of the merchants ‘made their advantage of this meeting, to get more than they could well carry away’. They got drunk on ‘Palepuntz, which is a kind of drink consisting of Aqua vitae [arrack], Rose-water, juice of Citrons and Sugar [and spices]’.10 Punch, the English name for this cocktail is said to be derived from the Hindi word panch, meaning five, because the drink usually combined five ingredients. But the Hindi pronunciation of panch does not correspond with the seventeenth-century pronunciation of the word as ‘poonch’. It is more likely that East Indian merchants picked up their taste for hard liquor mixed with milk, sugar, lime juice and spices, as well as its name, on the voyage out to India when sailors were handed out a daily allowance of liquor from a cask known as the puncheon.11
Recipe for Milk Punch from the papers of Matthew Campbell, Lieutenant in the Indian Army in the 1820s
Soak the rinds of thirty Limes in two Bottles of arrack for twelve hours – drain off this liquor, add ten bottles of arrack and six of Brandy or Rum, to this add two and half bottles of lime juice, eight nutmegs grated – twelve lbs. of moist sugar – eight quarts of new milk boiling and 14 quarts of boiling [water] . . . The whole to be mixed in some large vessel and stirred about for half an hour and when perfectly cool, to be strained thro’ flannel and bottled off.12
One habit which they did acquire from the Indians was chewing paan. Newcomers to India were often horrified to observe that ‘almost everybody was spitting something red as blood’. This was the juice of paan which ‘the Indians champ[ed] and chaw[ed] on all day long’. A little lime and some spices were added to a small areca nut, which was then wrapped up in a betel leaf, and popped into the mouth and chewed. The Mughals picked up this habit from their Hindustani subjects and the company merchants also became addicted to the grainy and astringent bite of paan. Moreover, it was said to preserve the teeth, strengthen the stomach, comfort the brain and cure tainted breath.13 It was also supposed to increase sexual pleasure, and a Persian ambassador suggested that betel chewing accounted for the ‘numerous harem’ of seven hundred princesses and concubines belonging to the southern King of Vijayanagara.14
The mixture of Mughal and British habits which characterised the East India merchants’ lives was evident at their dining tables. According to Ovington, ‘that nothing may be wanting to please the Curiosity of every Palate at the times of Eating, an English, Portuguese and an Indian Cook, are all entertain’d to dress the Meat in different ways for the gratification of every Stomach’.15 The British in India consumed stupendous amounts of meat. A surgeon who visited Surat in the 1670s, calculated that in one month more animals were killed to supply the British table than were generally slaughtered for the entire year to feed the Muslims.16 Seventeenth-century India abounded with game and British visitors were delighted by the diverse kinds of meat, which were plentiful and ‘because many of the Natives eat no kind of flesh at all . . . bought there at such easy [cheap] rates, as if they were not worth the valuing’.17
Just as the English cook produced the kind of fare which was commonplace in wealthy seventeenth-century English households – roasting saddles of venison and preparing game pies – the Indian cook prepared the staple dishes eaten by wealthy Indian Muslims. In fact, during this period the Islamic and Christian worlds shared a similar culinary repertoire of ‘thick purées, lots of spices, sweet and sour sauces, cooked vegetables . . . warmed wines’ and sugar as a flavouring in savoury as well as sweet dishes.18 At the Mughal banquet attended by the English chaplain Edward Terry in 1616, he praised most highly a dish which ‘the Portugals call Mangee Real, Food for a King’. This was a concoction of breast of chicken stewed in a mixture of ground rice and almonds, sweetened with ‘Rose-water and Sugar-Candy, and scented with Amber-Greece’. In fact, it closely resembled the European invalid’s dish blancmange, made from chicken, rice flour, sugar and almond milk.19 It is possible that Mangee Real was the product of an exchange of recipes between Portuguese and Mughal cooks.
The power of the Mughal emperors, and the spread of their empire, ensured that Mughlai cuisine dominated in northern India. The Mughlai repertoire remained virtually untouched, however, by the distinctive techniques and recipes of southern India.20 In the south during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were a number of alternative centres of Indian culinary development. Among them were the Vaisnavite Hindu temples.
Vaisnavite Hindu temples acted as ‘landholder, employer . . . bank, school, museum . . . hospital, [and] theatre’ to their surrounding areas. Towns sprung up next to the temples, populated by priests, donors and temple servants. The shrines were often set upon hilltops with long stairways leading to them, up which the pilgrims filed.21 These pathways, as well as the walls of the buildings on either side of them, acted, among other things, as stony recipe books. Men of influence and wealth would donate money, land, cowsheds and food to the temples. The details of the donation were then inscribed on the stone tablets which paved and lined the way to the shrines. The tablets preserved not only the generosity of the donor but also the culinary arts of the temple cooks. Reading them today, it is possible to trace the development of a sophisticated vegetarian cuisine in the temple kitchens.22 Alongside the name of the donor and the amounts of food he had presented, the details of its preparation were sometimes given. At the temple at Little Conjeeveram, one of the many stone tablets records that a private individual made an offering of rice and vegetables. It details that he also donated large quantities of salt, pepper, mustard, cumin and sugar to add flavour. These were accompanied by plantains and curds, as well as enormous quantities of sugar candy and cardamoms with which to make rice cakes. Everything was provided for, right down to the firewood to light the cooking fires, and areca nuts and betel leaves to make paan to chew after the meal.23
Although they worked with a limited list of ingredients, the temple cooks produced dishes of variety and imagination, including numerous types of rice dishes, sauces, sweets, savouries and drinks. The food was first placed before the gods and then, once they had metaphorically eaten their fill, it was distributed throughout the community. The sauces and milky drinks, which would have been messy to divide and subdivide, were used to feed the priests and their assistants, as well as vast numbers of pilgrims who flocked to the temples each day. Today, the kitchens which serve the temple dining halls preserve these ancient vegetarian culinary traditions. Many cooks working in restaurants in south India learn their trade in the vast kitchens of the temples. At the Udipi temple, pilgrims enjoy meals of thick lentil soup mixed with white pumpkin pieces poached in tamarind water. The dhals are flavoured with red chillies, ground chickpeas, coriander, fenugreek, mustard seeds and curry leaves fried in hot oil. The food is prepared in huge pots and served on banana leaves on the floor of the long dining hall. After each shift of hungry pilgrims has been served and vacated the hall, the sacred temple cows are let into the room to eat up the banana leaves. Once the cows have finished, the dining hall is given a quick washdown and the next shift of pilgrims is ushered in.24
Another temple speciality was sweets. The Mughal revenue system had stimulated the cultivation of cash crops like sugar cane, and now that this highly valued product was more readily available it was donated to the temples in large quantities.25 Sweets were much easier to subdivide and transport than sloppy dhals. Thus the food donor was often given his share in the form of sweets. He then distributed these among his followers, d
ependants and kinsmen, as well as various monasteries and sects. In this way he affirmed his power, formed links with important social groups and demonstrated his charity to the poor. The distribution of the donor’s food has remained an important expression of social status in south Indian society. In the 1950s an irate donor complained to the authorities at the Sri Partasarati Svami temple in Madras that two dosas (rice-flour pancakes), two vadais (savoury wheat-flour doughnuts) and two laddus (chickpea flour, ghee and sugar sweets) had been ‘stolen openly and kept separately by the Temple Staff’ instead of being distributed to the public.26
Temple sweets also became an important devotional food in northern India. The English ship’s captain Alexander Hamilton noted that at the temple of ‘Jaggerynatt’ (in Orissa): ‘There are in all, about 500 [priests] that belong to the Pagod, who daily boyl Rice and Pulse for the Use of the God. There are five Candies daily drest, each candy containing 1600 lb. weight. When some part has been carried before the Idol, and the smoke has saluted his Mouth and Nose, then the Remainder is sold out, in small Parcels, to those who will buy it, at very reasonable rates, and the surplus is served out to the Poor, who are ever attending the pagod out of a pretended devotion.’27
For pilgrims, the production of temple sweets meant that they were able to carry the religious power embodied in the food home with them. The large quantities of sugar and tamarind used in the sweets acted as preservatives, ensuring that they kept for a long time before going rancid. This tradition of distributing temple sweets to pilgrims is still alive. At the Tirupati temple in Andhra Pradesh, for example, the cooks use three tonnes of urad dhal, six tonnes of sugar and two and a half tonnes of ghee, besides large amounts of raisins, cashew nuts and cardamom, to make 70,000 hard, sweet and powdery laddus which are given away to pilgrims every day.28
Southern India has a long history of outsiders bringing in culinary influences. Syrian Christians, who settled at St Thomé near Madras in the first century AD, are said to have brought the recipe for stew with them, which they had been taught how to make by Irish monks. Along the west coast the Arab traders intermarried with the Indian population and showed their wives how to make seafood pilaus. Jewish settlers brought Middle Eastern tastes to Cochin and combined a liking for rice and nuts with pickled mangoes and smoked tamarind.29 Further inland, in the area of India known as the Deccan, Persian Shi’ites found employment with the Bahmanid sultan during the fourteenth century. The Bahmanid kingdom eventually broke up into a number of satellite states, one of which was Golconda, which later became known as Hyderabad. Here, the pilaus of the Persians combined with Hindu Deccani cookery, in which shredded coconut and coconut milk are vital ingredients and the tang of curry leaves, the astringent bite of fresh fenugreek leaves and the sharp sour note of tamarind impart flavour. The meeting of the two styles gave rise to an elegant cuisine with unusual combinations, such as lamb cooked with beans and tamarind.
Eventually, Mughlai cuisine spread south. Shahjahan conquered Hyderabad in the 1630s and installed a Mughal governor. But Mughal power was short-lived in the south, and a century later the Mughal Empire began to break up into satellite states. Governor Nizam-ul-Mulk re-established Hyderabad’s independence and founded a new dynasty of rulers. By this time, however, the strong central Asian flavour of Mughlai cuisine had been imparted to the Hyderabadi blend, and kebabs coated in spicy yogurt had been incorporated into the repertoire, alongside sharper versions of Mughlai biryanis, flavoured with the southern taste of curry leaves and chillies, tamarind and coconut.30
Some people would argue that it was in fact at Hyderabad that Mughlai cuisine reached its zenith. During the eighteenth century, as the Mughal emperors gradually lost their grip on their empire, the imperial kitchens ceased to act as engines of culinary change. They were surpassed by various successor states which became the new centres of innovation. Hyderabad was one such state, while another was Oudh in northern India.
In Lucknow, a story is told of how the last Nawab of Oudh, Waji Ali Shah (1847–56), invited Mirza Asman Qadar, a prince from Delhi, to dine with him. The prince, a noted gourmet, chose a spicy conserve of vegetables called murrabba from the array of dishes set down before him. As he began to chew he discovered to his surprise that he was in fact eating a qaurama of meat. Waji Ali Shah’s chef had taken great pains to disguise the qaurama, and the nawab was delighted that he had succeeded in tricking one of the great food connoisseurs of Delhi. Mirza Qadar went home feeling very embarrassed to have been caught out. He soon took his revenge. Waji Ali Shah duly received a return invitation. As he tasted each dish in turn he was stunned to discover that all the food – the pilau, the biryani, the meat curries, the kebabs, the chutneys and pickles, and even the breads – were all made of caramelised sugar. The nawab was defeated.31
The food trickery played out between the nawab and the prince was part of a political power game. The nawab wished to demonstrate to his guest the existence of an autonomous courtly culture at Lucknow which was sufficiently elaborate to outdo even the sophistication of the Mughal court at Delhi. In this case, Delhi, represented by the prince, won the battle. But by the time the two men were sparring over dishes made of sugar, the nawabs of Oudh had in fact already won the war. As the Mughal Empire began to break up during the eighteenth century, the nawabs of Oudh set about establishing Lucknow as a centre for high culture to rival the old Mughal capital. At first there was scepticism. The Delhi poet Meer Taqi Meer declared: ‘The ruins of Delhi were ten times better than Lucknow / I wish I were dead before I came to Lucknow’.32 But the stupendous salaries the Lucknavis were prepared to pay eventually proved too great a temptation. Artists, poets, musicians were all attracted to the Oudh court, which grew into something more than a replica of Mughal Delhi, developing its own distinctive style of architecture and its own schools of poetry and music.33 Cooks also flocked to Lucknow and were rewarded handsomely. One nobleman was rumoured to pay his cook as much as 1,200 rupees a month, ‘an amount greater than the salary of any cook in the highest courts in the history of India’.34 In the 1770s, the nawab spent four times more on his cook room than on his poor house.35 Even the disgruntled Meer Taqi Meer had to change his mind, eventually admitting, ‘Lucknow is better than Delhi even / So my heart has wandered hither’.36
In Lucknow, Mughlai cuisine was transformed by the incorporation of the products of the lush agricultural region of Oudh. The Lucknavis loved cream, and in the eighteenth century used it to perfect the Mughal dish qaurama or what we would call korma. Qaurama was made with only the tenderest pieces of lamb or chicken and the name referred to the cooking technique of gently braising the meat in oil. Under the Mughals the Persian method was applied, first marinating the meat in yogurt mixed with ginger, garlic, onions and spices before simmering it gently in the yogurt sauce. The mixture was thickened with ground almonds, another Persian trick. In Lucknow, they added large dollops of cream to the sauce to create a dish that was voluptuously rich.37 Even the simple lentil dish of dhal was transformed in Lucknow in to a rich, thick velvety mixture of milk, yogurt and cream, flavoured with saffron.38
Aside from dairy products, Oudh was famous for the ‘whiteness, delicacy, fragrance and wholesomeness’ of its rice. It is unsurprising that the dish which the Lucknavis most prided themselves on was pilau. In Delhi, biryani (the much spicier Mughal version of a pilau) was the most admired dish. In Lucknow, they were willing to concede that ‘a good biryani is better than an indifferent pilau’, but biryanis were considered to taste too strongly of spices which overwhelmed the delicate floral flavour of the rice. Lucknavi gourmets considered a biryani a ‘clumsy and ill-conceived meal in comparison with a really good pulao’.39 Bishop Reginald Heber who travelled through India in the 1820s could not help but agree. While breakfasting with the Nawab of Oudh, Heber was invited to taste a ‘pillaw’ which he did with much ‘secret reluctance’ as vivid memories of the greasy offerings of the Nawab of Dacca were still in his mind. He was ‘surprised, however, to
find that this was really an excellent thing, with neither ghee nor garlic, and with no fault, except, perhaps, that it was too dry and exclusively fowl, rice and spices’. Heber noted that ‘the high-bred Mussulmans of this part of India affect to dislike exceedingly, as vulgar, the greasy and fragrant dishes of the Bengalees and Hindoos, and that the aim of their cookery is to be dry, stimulant, and aromatic’.40
In pursuit of the stimulant and the aromatic, the Lucknavi chefs sometimes cooked the rice for their pilaus in a broth made from chickens fed on musk and saffron. The scent of this absurdly expensive concoction was said to permeate every corner of the room. The rulers of Lucknow displayed their wealth and luxury at their tables, and encouraged their cooks to invent ever more artful dishes. They produced pilaus which were supposed to look as if a plate of jewels had been placed on the table rather than a plate of rice. Using a technique developed in the kitchens of the caliphs of Baghdad, they soaked some of the rice in salt water before cooking it, to make it sparkle like crystals. Other rice was dyed fiery red or bright green to give it the look of rubies and emeralds. Never content with simplicity, the cooks transformed the plain peasant dish of khichari into an elaborate joke. Almonds were painstakingly cut to resemble grains of rice, and pistachios were shaped to look like lentils. It was said that ‘once savoured [this dish] . . . could never be forgotten’.41
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