Food Resources and their Transformation - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 163

only lightly glazed or unglazed, mounted
on a simple stand and placed so as to
catch any breeze).
The mēwa-āna received much atten-
tion from the Mual emperors. Bābur,
in a touching passage in the Tūzuk , recalls
the delights of the grapes and melons of
his homeland and regrets their absence
from India; but such luxuries were later
regularly imported after the conquest
of Kābul, andahār and Kamīr, and
Akbar settled horticulturists from “Īrān
and Tūrān” for the cultivation of fruit
trees in India. Abu 'l-Fal gives a list of
some two dozen imported fruits and nuts,
three dozen native Indian sweet fruits,
and a score of sour and sub-acid fruits. A
special “fruit” described in this section is
the pān , a heart-shaped green leaf smeared
with lime and catechu, to which is added
slices or granules of betel-nut with aro-
matic spices, sometimes camphor, musk,
or costly perfumes, and rolled into a bīŕā ,
which may then be finished with silver or
even gold leaf. A pān was often presented
to a courtier as a mark of royal favour,
and Mual brass pāndān s, with compart-
ments to hold the leaves, nuts and other
requisites, were also presented as gifts.
Abu 'l-Fal's account shows further
what kinds of dishes were prepared for the
Imperial table, and he gives thirty speci-
men receipts—or rather lists of ingredi-
ents, since there is no information about
the cooking processes involved. These
are divided into three categories: bē-gōt
(meatless), “commonly called ūfiyāna ”;
gōt bā-biran , meat with rice; and abāzīr ,
spiced dishes. The categories, however,
do not seem to be mutually exclusive.
There is already ample evidence for the
Indianisation of the Mual fare, in both
the ingredients (including cardamoms,
cinnamon, saffron, ample fresh ginger
root, asafoetida, turmeric and others
among the spices; chillis are conspicu-

ously absent, and summā , a favourite Per-
sian condiment, appears only once) and
the nomenclature ( dāl, lentils; sāg , a spin-
ach dish; čapātī among the breads; khičrī
among the rice dishes). Abu 'l-Fal's list
of current market prices for common
commodities refers to many by Indian
names (e.g. mūng and mōh among the len-
tils) and includes such Indian favourites as
mangoes-in-oil and lemons-in-oil, among
the pickles. The large number of meatless
dishes calls for comment. Akbar declared
a number of ūfiyāna days in which he
ate no meat, including Fridays, Sundays
(because, according to ahāngīr, it was
the day of his birth), the first day of each
solar month, and throughout the month
of Ābān and at least part of Farwārdīn,
and on many other days detailed by
Abu 'l-Fal; he increased the number of
ūfiyāna days each year, and on these days
no animals were permitted to be slaugh-
tered. ahāngīr, whose Tūzuk shows
him to have been a connoisseur of good
food, ate ūfiyāna meals on Sundays in his
father's memory, and on Thursdays to
commemorate his own accession.
The kitchen department had also obvi-
ously to provide for the wine and other
intoxicants used in the court, for although
the official chroniclers are understandably
reticent on the subject it is inconceivable
that similar precautions to those taken for
foodstuffs and water should not be applied
also to wine. w āndamīr records that a
sūčī āna issuing wines existed apart from
the ābdār-āna . Besides wine from the
grape, ara , such drugs as opium, bhāng
(hemp, Cannabis sativa ) and the electuary
maūn , of variable components, were
freely used by many of the Mual rulers
and the nobles (too freely, to judge by the
fate of Akbar's sons Murād and Dāniyāl,
and many others!).
A subordinate kitchen department, not
part of the household, existed to provide