Almost everything written about Mughal food online is a retelling of a retelling. The useful thing is that we do not have to guess: the Mughals documented themselves obsessively, and one of the books they left — Abu'l-Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari, compiled in the 1590s as part of the Akbarnama — describes the imperial household department by department, kitchen included. What it records is less exotic and more interesting than the legend.
In this article
Where the Cooking Came From
The dynasty arrived from Central Asia. Babur, who founded it, came from Ferghana in what is now Uzbekistan, and his own memoirs are famously unimpressed by the food he found in Hindustan. That distance matters: the cooking the Mughals brought with them was Timurid and Central Asian, built on meat, rice, wheat and dried fruit.
The Persian layer arrived shortly afterwards, and largely by accident. Babur's son Humayun lost the empire, spent years in exile at the Safavid court in Persia, and came back with Persian craftsmen, painters and tastes in his retinue. The cuisine that we now call Mughlai is what happened when that Persian-Central Asian repertoire met Indian ingredients, Indian spicing and Indian cooks over several generations. It is a hybrid, and it was a hybrid from the beginning.
What the Ain-i-Akbari Records
Abu'l-Fazl was Akbar's courtier and chronicler, and the Ain is essentially an administrative survey of the empire. Its account of the kitchen is written the way you would write up any other department: what it bought, who ran it, how it was controlled.
The detail most worth knowing is how the cooked dishes are grouped. The Ain sorts them into classes — and one of those classes is made with no meat at all. Another is built on meat and rice together, the ancestor of what we would now recognise as biryani and pulao; another on meat cooked with spices. That a court famous for its meat cooking kept a formal, named category of meatless dishes is the single most useful fact in the book, and we have written about what it implies separately.
The recipes themselves are recorded the way a quartermaster would record them: by weight of ingredients for a given quantity of finished dish. Rice, ghee, lentils, wheat flour, salt, ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, pepper, saffron. It reads like a provisioning schedule, because that is what it is.
The Kitchen as an Institution
The imperial kitchen was not a room. It was a department with a superintendent, the mir bakawal, a treasurer, clerks, storekeepers, tasters and a large staff of cooks, and it kept written accounts.
Security ran through all of it. Dishes were tasted before they travelled, then covered and tied shut, and the seal was checked again before the food reached the emperor. Provisioning was seasonal and planned in advance rather than bought daily. None of this is romantic, and all of it tells you something true: at this scale, cooking was logistics.
Rice, Bread and the Sweet Course
Rice dishes sit at the centre of the record — layered, spiced, enriched with ghee and dried fruit. Breads were baked in the tandoor and on the griddle, and the enriched, slightly sweet breads of the tradition, sheermal among them, belong to this family. Lentils appear constantly, in a range from plain to heavily enriched.
Sweets were milk-led rather than sugar-led: milk reduced slowly, thickened, set, or soaked into bread and fried. Saffron, rose, cardamom and nuts do the aromatic work. Most of the desserts that survive on a Mughlai menu today were vegetarian to begin with, for the straightforward reason that they were always built on milk, sugar, flour and nuts.
What the Emperors Themselves Ate
The kitchen's range and any one emperor's appetite are different questions. Akbar, by his own chronicler's account, ate once a day, without a fixed hour, and ate meat sparingly — abstaining from it entirely on a growing number of days, and describing the habit of eating it as one he wished to be rid of.
His successors were less austere. Jahangir's memoirs record his own tastes in some detail, including his fondness for particular fruit and his enthusiasm for wine. The point is that "Mughal food" was never one fixed menu: it was an institution that could cook across a very wide range, serving men with quite different habits.
What Survives on a Menu Today
Four centuries of change sit between the Ain and any restaurant kitchen, including the arrival of ingredients the Mughals never had. What survives is not a set of recipes but a grammar: whole spices used for aroma rather than heat, nuts and dairy used to build body, slow cooking under a seal, rice layered rather than stirred, and a sweet course built on reduced milk.
That grammar is what our own kitchen works in. If you want the dishes rather than the history, the twelve worth ordering is the more practical read, and the full menu lists the rest.
