Unlike France, where culinary maps, strictly-followed recipes and clearly etched-out techniques define the practice of cuisine, and even Thailand, where funeral books are strangely popular partly because they carry prized family recipes, India has never had a tradition of codifying recipes. Recipes have always been passed, word-of-mouth, from one cook to his descendants, mother to daughter and so forth. And the only community I can think of where these have traditionally been written, and passed on as legacies is perhaps the Chettiyars. But even those accounts are tough to come by and remain zealously guarded in the familial domain.
All this means that traditional recipes in India typically die out with the passing of an older generation and our cuisines, so diverse and varied, eventually languish. The past one-two years have seen some change in that, with several publishers coming out with a bevy of cookbooks on elusive community cuisines. But apart from family lore and recipes from mothers and grandmothers, what is really the kind of material available to any researcher into the evolution of Indian cuisines? More often than not, the handful of early accounts that we have are courtly tomes, dealing with elite food concocted for kings and princes and not really the cuisine of the common tables.
However, it is not to say that these accounts are not fascinating and invaluable. Ain-i-Akbari, for instance, talks in detail about the Mughal kitchen, about Akbar?s great belief in water from the Ganga (in which all food was cooked), in a separate category of vegetarian food that the emperor had on certain days?all giving us a picture of a Mughal India where cultural amalgamation had perhaps taken place and become a way of life. The Mansollasa, a Sanskrit text, purportedly dating back to the 11th century and written by Chalukya king Somesvara, has chapters on cooking and lists several varieties of fish. Lesser known works include the Sarbendra Pakashastra from Tanjuvar, written by a 19th century ruler, complete with recipes, including for south Indian kebabs!
Undoubtedly, as patrons of the arts (including the culinary art), the erstwhile royal families are custodians of a huge slice of culture. Amongst those who have managed to hold on to some of that is the Sailana family.
The Cooking Delights of Maharaja Digvijay Singh, or the Sailana cookbook, as it is known to its fans, was first published almost 30 years ago. It is by far one of the best cookbooks ever to have come out in India ?and not because of any glamorous pictures or marketing pitch. Instead, the recipes collected and perfected by the former ruler of Sailana, a small princely state in Madhya Pradesh bordering Rajasthan, speak for themselves. Each of the 164 recipes are precise, flavourful and guaranteed to give perfect results (I have tried them). Which is why, perhaps, the tome, now out of print, is rated so highly and there are enough women who will tell you how it formed a part of their wedding trousseaux (it did of mine).
The Sailana recipes are unique because they represent a personal passion rather than just another regional repertoire. The process of collecting the recipes started almost a century ago when Sir Dilip Singh of Sailana was stranded on a hunt without the services of a cook. The game was ready to be cooked but no one quite knew how to. This made the ruler wake up to the importance of preserving and documenting recipes and he started the process in his kitchen. His son, Digvijay Singh, turned out to be even more passionate about food. As a princely ruler, he would cook one dish a day and when he travelled to other parts of the country, he went along with a small jeweller?s scale and a small box of masalas! When he liked a particular dish, he would ask the cook to make it, watching, taking notes and noting down precise measurements for spices with the aid of the scales (a practice as unusual today in the Indian kitchen, where everything works on andaz, as it must have been then.)
The result is a collection that not only has family and regional recipes from the princely state but the best recipes the widely-travelled family ever encountered. In Kashmir (the Sailanas are related to the former royal family there), Digvijay Singh tried the rogan josh at three-four homes but liked one version best and recorded it; in Lucknow, a cook called Salim, made him a special raan that he tried out later in his own kitchen and so on.
A meal that I tried at a food festival, cooked by Vikram Singhji, Digvijay Singh?s son, a passionate cook as the late ruler, was unusual in the kind of disparate flavours it presented on the same thali. And in the uniqueness of the preparations: the Shikampuri kebab were different from the usual Hyderabadi ones in that the recipe uses a filling of cream instead of yoghurt within the mince. There were the totally fabulous goolar kebabs made with figs, murgh Irani, a dum recipe from Iran, with rich almonds, a Bengali-influenced dahi machi, whole moong dal with a dash of mustard, a totally unique kaleji (liver) ka raita not to mention a hare channe ka halwa that you may never have even heard of.
The Sailana cuisine exemplifies not merely recipes that are no longer part of our kitchenlore, but the mindboggling scope of Indian cuisine that has lost out to global marketing forces.
The writer is a food critic