Food, Drink and Meals in Mughal South Asia

Under the Mughal emperors, food passed from fields, herds and markets through household kitchens to diners. Abu’l Fazl’s late-sixteenth-century Ain-i Akbari describes Akbar’s imperial kitchen, including its staff, recipe lists and serving checks. The account also records a specific meal share for religious mendicants, while rural labor and a traveling camp show other settings in which food was produced and prepared.

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From crop and camp to cooking fire

Rice, wheat, millets and pulses supported meals in different regions. Grain had to be cleaned, husked, ground or pounded before it could be cooked. Shireen Moosvi’s study of Mughal labor describes women’s work in cultivation, livestock care and food processing, connecting field production to household preparation.

Cooking arrangements changed with movement. Writing about the Mughal camp in the 1660s, Francois Bernier describes fires made with wood and animal dung among the tents. Fuel and portable cooking equipment had to move with the traveling household, while settled homes drew on local hearths, water and markets.

Akbar’s kitchen and meal service

Abu’l Fazl describes a kitchen department directed by the mir bakawal, the master of the kitchen, with clerks and subordinate bakawals. Staff kept daybooks, estimates, receipts and wage lists, and the kitchen master and clerk set prices for provisions. Meat arrived in sealed sacks from a slaughterhouse near water; a garden supplied greens. Water carriers kept drinking water in covered, sealed earthen jars and allowed it to settle.

The account describes both security and a precise serving sequence. During cooking an awning covered the work and spectators were kept away. As food was taken out, cooks tucked up their sleeves and garment hems and held their hands before their mouths and noses. The cook and a subordinate bakawal tasted it first, followed by the mir bakawal before dishes went to the emperor.

Recipes, preservation and drink

The Ain lists khichri made from rice, split dal (pulses), ghee (clarified butter), five seers each, plus one-third seer of salt; a seer was a unit of weight, and the recipe yields seven dishes. It also gives a preparation for wheat paste: flour was mixed into a paste and washed until only fine paste remained, then cooked with meat, onions, ginger and spices. These recipes show both measured ingredients and work before a dish reached the fire.

Akbar’s drinking-water department, the abdar khana, transported Ganges water in sealed vessels. Abu’l Fazl describes cooling a metal jar by stirring it in water mixed with saltpetre, a mineral salt used here to lower the cooling bath’s temperature; ice also reached court by relay transport. The Ain’s price list for pickles records mangoes in oil or vinegar, lemons in salt, and pickled turnips, carrots and quinces. The entries document preservation through oil, vinegar and salt.

Access and observance

Akbar observed meat-free days that included Sundays, eclipses and the first day of each solar month. Abu’l Fazl says that after an extended abstention, the first meat dishes came from the apartments of Akbar’s mother, followed by offerings from other royal women, princes and nobles. Before Akbar began eating, servants set aside a share for religious people who lived on alms. This specific act shows one route by which food from the imperial household reached people beyond the emperor’s table.