This is a coffee-table book about how the Indian royalty showed off when it came to cooking and eating. They may or may not have eaten a lot, but they sure cooked a lot. Nearly 40 or 50 dishes were par for the course for a formal occasion and about half of that for a normal family dinner. Well, you might mutter, even if you are not a vulgar Marxist, what’s new?

For one thing, this book is. It tells us in fascinating, if occasionally revolting, detail just what those guys thought was a nourishing meal. One Nawab of Awadh had his daily meal cooked in six different kitchens.

It turns out, though, that quantity was probably no more than a gigantic Keynesian wheeze. The real trick lay in the quality. For instance, the story goes that Jahangir used to have a dish made of no less than a few hundred chicken fed on saffron for a year.

The authors say that real skill consisted in not just how the dish tasted but also how the chef was able to fool the diners. To make a vegetarian and a non-vegetarian dish indistinguishable was considered the height of culinary skill.

There was a guy during the reign of Nawab Nasir ud din Haidar in Lucknow who could make khichdi made out of almonds appear as if it came from rice. Another wizard disguised kormas to look like murabbas (sweetish chutney). And so on.

The book is replete not just with recipes but also anecdotes from descendents of the ‘royal’ families. There was, for example, the Raja of Sailana in Central Madhya Pradesh who collected recipes from other ‘royals’ on the solemn undertaking that they would remain secret — even from his daughters who, he said, would get married and take them to their husbands’ families.

Or there is the Nawab of Rampur who hoisted a cow up several floors so that his guest, the Raja of Benares, could see it first thing in the morning, as he was used to, and mehman nawazi (hospitality) required the cow to be winched up.

After reading this book, it is impossible not to wonder about the role the ranis and begums played in the whole process, and how the kitchen bosses managed the supply chain. I mean, who decided what they would eat that day and when; and how did they go about doing it?

And, altogether more prosaically, after eating all that fat, meat, carbs and masalas , how did they digest it all?

A chapter on churan would have been instructive!

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