Akbar's Court Wrote Down Thirty Recipes in 1598. Half Call for Pepper. None Calls for Chilli, Tomato or Potato.

By 1598 Abu’l Fazl, the minister and chronicler of the emperor Akbar, had finished the Ain-i-Akbari, a handbook to the running of the Mughal empire. Its chapter 24 is about food and gives thirty recipes from the royal kitchen. The sixth recipe in the third group is dupiyaza, a meat dish. In H. Blochmann’s English translation the quantities are 10 sers of “meat that is middling fat,” 2 of ghee, 2 of onions, a quarter ser of salt and an eighth of a ser of “fresh pepper,” then 1 dam each of cumin seed, coriander seed, cardamoms and cloves, and 2 dams of “pepper.” The result, the Ain says, “will give five dishes.” A ser and a dam are the Ain’s own units of weight.

There is no chilli in the recipe. There is none in the other twenty-nine, and no tomato and no potato either. All three are plants from the Americas, and how the chilli sailed east is told in an earlier piece. This one rebuilds the kitchen they arrived in, using the cookbooks themselves: the Ain-i-Akbari, a Sanskrit encyclopaedia compiled for a twelfth-century Chalukya king, a recipe book made for a sultan of Malwa in the late fifteenth century, and a Jain cookbook in Kannada dated 1508.

These are court books. What they show with confidence is what kings and sultans ate, and a section near the end looks at how far that stretches.

Thirty recipes, fifteen with pepper

Abu’l Fazl opens the chapter with a warning. “There are many dishes, but the description is difficult,” he writes. “I shall give some particulars.” He sorts the dishes under “three heads, first, such in which no meat is used, called nowadays sufiyana; secondly, such in which meat and rice, etc., are used; thirdly, meats with spices.” He gives ten recipes of each kind.

Counting through Blochmann’s text as Frances Pritchett reproduces it, pepper is named in 15 of the 30 recipes. Ginger and cloves each turn up in 16, cardamom in 13, cumin in 9 and cinnamon in 8. Onions are in 16. Garlic is in one, the shulla, at 2 dams.

The rice-and-meat dish qabuli takes 10 sers of rice and 7 of meat, with 3½ of ghee, a ser of skinned gram, 2 of onions and a quarter ser of fresh ginger. The spice is a dam each of cinnamon, “round pepper” and cumin, and half a dam each of cardamoms and cloves. Some cooks, the Ain adds, put in almonds and raisins.

The vegetable dishes are seasoned the same way. Of the spinach dish sag, Abu’l Fazl says it is “one of the most pleasant dishes,” and it gets ginger, pepper, cardamoms and cloves. The split-pulse dish pahit takes ginger, cumin and asafoetida, a pungent resin, and it is “mostly eaten with” khushka, the Ain’s plain rice.

The fat is ghee. It is named in 26 of the 30 recipes, and the four without it are plain rice, rice cooked in milk, and two meat dishes, yakhni and yulma. Even the sweet rice zard birinj, made with sugarcandy, raisins, almonds and saffron, takes ginger and cinnamon.

Souring is rarer. Lime juice appears in two recipes, vinegar in one, sumac in one and curds in one, the malghuba, which pairs 10 sers of meat with 10 of curds. Tamarind does not appear anywhere in the chapter.

The last recipe in the second group is the qutab, “which the people of Hind call sanbusa,” the samosa. It takes 10 sers of meat, 4 of fine flour and 2 of ghee, with onion, ginger, pepper, coriander, cardamom, cumin, cloves and a quarter ser of sumac. “This can be cooked in twenty different ways,” the Ain says. No recipe in the chapter includes a potato.

A Chalukya king writes down his menu

Nearly five centuries before the Ain, Someshvara III ruled the Kalyani Chalukya kingdom in what is now Karnataka. K. L. Kamat gives his reign as 1126 to 1138. Someshvara compiled the Manasollasa, a Sanskrit encyclopaedia that runs from statecraft to painting, and Kamat counts 268 verses on food alone.

M. N. Joshi’s 1984 study of the book sets out the recipes. Dosaka is a paste of gram flour with powdered asafoetida (hingu), cumin and salt, poured onto a hot oiled pan. Iddarika is a paste of rice and black gram with asafoetida and cumin, left for “a day or two so that it would be sour to taste” and then steamed. Vataka, a fried dumpling, is gram paste with sugar, cardamom and pepper. Temana mixes curds with salt, ginger, coriander, cumin, pepper and asafoetida.

Joshi observes that the Manasollasa does not use asafoetida in the small pinches cooks use now. It calls for asafoetida water. Kamat adds that for meat dishes Someshvara recommends asafoetida in place of onion and garlic, and that minced pork was spiced with ginger, asafoetida, coriander and black cumin before it was fried like meatballs.

For fat, Kamat writes, clarified butter was the most popular cooking medium in medieval Karnataka, followed by sesame and mustard oil, with coconut oil on the coast, as the traveller Ibn Battuta observed. The Manasollasa’s own recipes fry in oil.

The king was also given a calendar of tastes. Joshi reports that the text tells him to eat pungent things in spring, sweet and cold things in summer, salted things in the rainy season, and “hot and sour things in winter.” A cold drink in the book calls for ripe tamarind juice mixed into strained whey, Kamat writes. On chilli, Kamat is direct: chillis “do not seem to have made their appearance in the South Indian cuisine at the time.”

That silence is no surprise, since the book is older than Columbus by more than three centuries. The texts that carry weight on the question are the ones written after Portuguese ships had begun calling at India.

A Jain cookbook from 1508

In 1508 a Jain author named Mangarasa III wrote the Soopa Shastra in Kannada, in six chapters and 358 verses. Because he followed Jainism, the whole book is vegetarian. The INTACH archive, which catalogues the book, dates the text to the fifteenth or sixteenth century and calls it a treatise on food and drink from medieval Karnataka.

The Pepper Trail summary of the book singles out “the definite absence of chili pepper.” The text dates from ten years after Vasco da Gama’s fleet anchored off Calicut on 20 May 1498, and Portuguese ships had been calling on the coast ever since.

A summary is not the book. We have not seen the Kannada verses, and the claim rests on the people who have read them.

Samosas without potato

The Ni’matnama is a recipe book made for Sultan Ghiyath al-Din Khalji, who ruled Malwa from 1469 to 1500. The British Library in London holds the only known copy. Aparna Kapadia, writing in Scroll in 2019, found eight different samosa recipes in it, and “not even one of the variants mentions potato.”

The fillings she lists are dried whole milk flavoured with spices and rose water, ground wheat cooked in ghee, the meat of deer and mountain sheep, and sweet versions filled with spiced cream and coconut. Kapadia says the samosa itself is believed to have come from Central Asia along the Silk Route.

The potato came late. By Kapadia’s account it had been in the subcontinent from the seventeenth century, and it took roughly a hundred years more for most Indians to know it. A reader’s summary of K. T. Achaya’s Indian Food: A Historical Companion credits the Portuguese with a long list of newcomers, among them potato, tomato, groundnut, corn, papaya, pineapple, guava, cashew, rajma and chilli. How the potato and tomato actually arrived is the next piece in this series.

Three kinds of pepper, and no chilli, in Goa

In 1563 the Portuguese physician Garcia da Orta published his Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India in Goa. It is a book of dialogues between Orta and a visiting colleague, Ruano, about the drugs, spices and plants of India. The forty-sixth colloquy is about pepper.

Orta begins by correcting the authorities. Pepper does not grow on Mount Caucasus, he says, as Pliny claimed. In Malabar, “the plant is of two kinds, one being the black pepper and the other white; and besides these there is another in Bengal called the long pepper.” He thought white pepper came from a tree of its own, and Clements Markham’s footnote in the 1913 translation corrects him: it is black pepper with the outer skin removed. Orta also reports how it was served. “They put this pepper on the tables of the lords as we put salt.”

He also records what the spice was called. “In Guzerat and the Deccan pepper is called Meriche,” he writes, which looks like the same word as the Manasollasa’s marica. Indians, he says, called pepper cold, which struck him as absurd. “I know not how to prove that fire is hot,” he says. “The proof is that it burns.”

The book also leaves something out. Michael Krondl, a food historian writing for the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, points out that neither Orta nor Cristóbal Acosta, who wrote in the 1560s and 1570s, mentions chilli. Jan Huygen van Linschoten described every kind of pepper sold on the Malabar coast and left chilli out as well. Krondl puts the first clear description of chilli in an Indian setting in the 1670s, in Hendrik van Rheede’s Hortus Malabaricus, and finds no proof that it was grown in India before the seventeenth century. Two earlier candidates, a verse attributed to the poet Purandaradasa and a friar’s account of a pickle in 1649, he finds ambiguous, since both could describe green peppercorns.

The earlier piece in this series gave the date usually cited, from the Dumbarton Oaks Plant Humanities Initiative: Portuguese ships carrying chillies to India around 1542. Krondl writes that a date cannot be pinned down. “The sixteenth century is a cipher,” he says. He is also unconvinced by the claim, made by some Western scholars, that Indians changed their cooking the moment the chilli arrived.

Souring without tomatoes

The Ain sours with lime juice, vinegar, sumac and curds. The Manasollasa sours with curds, with tamarind in a drink, and with a rice batter left to ferment. Orta’s fifty-third colloquy, on tamarind, gives the fruit’s names as Pali in Malabar and Ambili in Gujarat. He had also adopted it. “We also use it in our food in place of vinegar,” he writes, “because it is a more agreeable acid when it is ripe.”

Orta saw pickling too. Green fruit called carandas was salted and eaten “to excite the appetite,” he says, or served with vinegar and oil, “when it is called Achah.” That reads as the word achar, pickle, in a book printed in 1563.

The tomato took the tamarind’s place slowly. In 1951 the Tamil cookbook Samaithu Paar by S. Meenakshi Ammal gave cooks a choice, according to the food site GOYA: tamarind in the sambar, or tomato with less tamarind. The same GOYA piece has date errors elsewhere, so it is cited here for the cookbook alone.

The grain beside the curry

The cookbooks say little about everyday grain, and the figures that exist come from the twentieth century. Jowar is sorghum, bajra is pearl millet and ragi is finger millet.

Lipsa Moharana and Alli Pandiyathuray, in a paper published in July 2026, report that on 1 July 1951 coarse cereals covered 36 million hectares of Indian farmland, against 34 million for rice and 12 million for wheat. That is land area, not weight of grain. The Press Information Bureau says millets made up around 40 percent of all cultivated grains before the Green Revolution and have since fallen to around 20 percent.

On consumption, Moharana and Pandiyathuray give per-person millet availability as 32 kilograms a year in 1960-61 and 9 kilograms in 2020-21. The second figure is an all-India average that includes regions with little millet eating, and they note that availability in the dryland states is much higher. In the early 1960s, they write, jowar, bajra and ragi made up nearly 36 percent of the cereals rural households ate and 23 percent for urban households. By 2011-12 the shares were 6.9 percent and 3.0 percent.

The paper ties the shift to public policy, including a procurement system for rice and wheat that began in the 1960s. Procurement of the two crops was below 5 percent of their production in 1960 and between 35 and 40 percent by 2020. For millets it fell below 1 percent.

Millet eating was regional. Kamat writes that rice formed the staple food of the masses in medieval Karnataka, with wheat, barley and millets also used.

What a court cookbook leaves out

The silence of these royal texts is strong evidence for the courts and weaker evidence for the villages. Krondl makes the point about chilli itself: it entered cuisines “under the radar of elite cookbooks.” Given van Rheede’s reporting, he judges it almost certain that chilli was present in South Asia by the 1670s, though whether the Mughal elite cooked with it is a separate question.

Even pepper was not eaten by everyone. Krondl reports that visitors to the Malabar coast found the poor there eating an inferior kind called canarins instead of black pepper, and he quotes Linschoten on it: “used onely by the poore people.”

The cookbooks do not say how many people ate this way, or how well. How the farm economy and the famines of the nineteenth century changed what ordinary Indians could afford to eat is a separate story, told in the Lord Lytton piece and in the grain that left while India starved.

A word that changed its meaning

The Manasollasa’s pepper is marica, which Joshi spells “Maraca.” Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages list marica as the Sanskrit name for black pepper and note that Indonesian merica and Khmer marich, borrowed from it, still mean pepper.

In most of India the word moved. Katzer reports that its descendants, such as Punjabi mirch and Malayalam mulaku, “have taken on the meaning chile almost throughout.” Nepali and Kashmiri still use their forms for black pepper.

Blochmann’s translation of the Ain writes “round pepper” in six recipes. Hindi and Urdu speakers today call black pepper kali mirch and gol mirch, which Katzer translates literally as “black chile” and “round chile.”